Introductory Comment
Brian Giesbrecht, Retired Judge, Frontier Centre Senior Fellow:
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is honoured to present Mr. Manning’s latest offering, in what he calls a fictionalized story. It is about everything that has happened to this country since the virus from Wuhan, China, first made it to Canadian shores. We have experienced it all – the panic, fear and misinformation – all followed by a disastrously exaggerated – and highly political – government response. That exaggerated response – the so-called “lockdown” – might well go down in history as the single biggest mistake in public policy in human history.
We are only now beginning to understand how big that mistake was….
Report of the COVID Commission
The public unrest which led to the establishment of what came to be known as the COVID Commission began prior to 2022. But it did not become a formidable political force until late in the spring of 2022 when it triggered the creation of the Commission.
By that spring, the physical manifestations of the pandemic and its mutations were finally abating. But public anger grew in inverse proportion as the multiple, long range impacts of the federal government’s management of the COVID crisis began to manifest themselves economically, socially, legally, and politically in every part of the country and among every segment of the population.
Canadians who had been told for decades that Canadian Medicare was one of the best health care systems in the world learned the hard way that this claim was false—that the system was incapable of handling the demand created by the pandemic and that thousands of citizens with non-COVID related illnesses were left to languish on ever-lengthening healthcare waiting lines, over ten thousand of them dying.
Millions of Canadians who had been told that their fundamental rights and freedoms were constitutionally guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms learned to their dismay that those rights and freedoms could be easily violated by health protection measures implemented by well-meaning but unelected bureaucrats and suspended at will by the federal government through a presumptive and unnecessary invoking of the Emergencies Act.
And millions of Canadians also suffered job and income losses, some of them permanent, as thousands of businesses were crippled or destroyed by governmental decisions to “lock down” the economy—decisions taken without any advance assessment of the breadth and depth of their negative economic impacts.
Download Report of Covid Commission 2023 (46 pages)
Listen to the audiobook version – Coming Soon
Leaders on the Frontier interview with Preston Manning, May 11th, 2020 discussing the Covid Commission Story (80 minutes)
Selected COVID Links
Longer Papers
Canada’s Deadly Response to COVID-19 by David Redman July 19, 2021
It All Began in China by Marco Navarro-Genie & Barry Cooper July 15, 2021
The Great Myth of Lockdowns by David Redman December 25, 2020
Commentaries
Canada’s Political Pandemic Prison by Brian Giesbrecht May 11, 2022
Forget About COVID, They Say by Jeffrey A. Tucker March 22, 2022
Emergency Management and the Vaccines by David Redman January 18, 2022
Could Omicron Break the Pandemic Mindset? by Brian Giesbrecht November 30, 2021
Past Pandemics Handled With Common Sense by Brian Giesbrecht June 12, 2021
Frontier Videos
Leaders on the Frontier interview with Preston Manning, May 11th, 2020 discussing the Covid Commission Story (80 minutes)
Brownstone Institute interviews Winnipeg-based Students Against Mandates with Jeffrey A. Tucker April 1, 2022
Leaders on the Frontier: Brian Peckford on Saving Canada’s Democracy January 27, 2022
Thinker’s Corner Video – A Conversation About Canada’s deadly response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
with Brian Giesbrecht & David Redman August 2, 2021
Books
COVID-19 The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Génie, 140pp
ISBN: 09780987895462 (softcover) Frontier Centre for Public Policy November 2020
