The Citizens’ Hearing took place from June 22nd to 24th, 2022 in Toronto, Canada, and marked the launch of an historic documentation of Canadians negatively impacted by government responses to COVID-19. Frontier is featuring extracts weekly.
Dr. Julie Ponesse came to speak about how for the last two years Canada has not had a functioning democracy. There has been no interaction, discussion, debate, response, and representation. She sees no engagement with evidence that does not come from the pharmaceutical companies. Rather than reasoned debates, ad hominem attacks reign, where dissenting individuals are stigmatized. This is not how a democracy operates. She then recapitulated the details of her well known firing from Huron College: as a professor of ethics, she was fired for defending the ethics of informed consent, that is, her right to refuse the injection.
We are systematically removing people who question, who do not comply with the narrative, who refuse to follow the ideology. What we are being taught is that to be part of this society, we must follow the dominant ideology. You are not allowed to have any emotions. We thus end up with a society of automatons.
When a mandate is imposed, three groups are created, she explains: those who comply willingly; those who refuse; and those who are coerced. A mandate renders a human being non-rational, and therefore non-human. For a mandate to be ethically justified, it must meet a very high threshold: a seriously virulent disease; no available alternative treatments, or a treatment that is proven beyond doubt to be safe.
In response to questions from the panel, on what could be done to get more people to run for public office in such a toxic environment, she questions the point of recruiting political representatives from universities, for example, which are a very closed and unrepresentative environment. Is the challenge one of recruitment, or of fixing the system into which they are to be recruited. What inhibits open discussion in universities and academia? She admits she did not realize at first how much of a culture of silence prevails on campuses. More and more universities are becoming and acting like corporations, which influences what kind of administrators and academics are hired, and what kinds of courses are developed. She condemns universities for not serving anyone: they train students for a workplace that does not exist; they have banished reason, among other problems. There are many in the university right now who are deeply troubled, but lack the confidence to speak up. What is being done to students is devastating: anxiety is rampant; they are prisoners to reputation on social media. She urges students not to think that post-secondary education is their only option. Our education system is not serving our students. What are students getting out of it? They are sacrificing their lives, maybe their health. There are many other ways to become educated in the world—she emphasizes self-education, and endorses the Canadian Centre for Learning. She predicts the rise of a number of other, alternative post-secondary education avenues opening in the coming years.
