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OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – The Canadian Parliament voted 202 to 117 on Monday to uphold Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s COVID vaccine mandate for air, train, and sea travelers across the country.
The now-defeated motion “to immediately revert to pre-pandemic rules and service levels for travel” was introduced by Conservative Member of Parliament Melissa Lantsman. Besides one independent MP voting alongside Lantsman, all the other 115 “Yea” votes came from her fellow Conservative Party members.
All 202 “Nay” votes came from the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Quebecois, indicating that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is fulfilling his promise to Trudeau that his party will back the Liberals until the next election in 2025.
At the time of publication, the “unofficial” voting record shows that Conservative Party of Canada leadership frontrunner candidate Pierre Poilievre did not cast a vote; however, pro-life leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis did vote alongside her party in support of ending the measure, which effectively makes it impossible for unvaccinated Canadians to leave the country. The measure also makes it extremely burdensome for them to travel long distances domestically, since the only way they can do so is by driving.
While the vote does mean that the ban, which requires all Canadians wishing to travel by plane or train to be “fully vaccinated” against the highly survivable coronavirus – which can also be contracted and spread by “vaccinated” individuals – will still be in effect for the time being, Trudeau’s government is still set to have to defend the mandate in federal court this fall.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, on September 17 Trudeau’s federal government will have to defend the constitutionality of his government’s vaccine mandate against Brian A. Peckford, the last living drafter and signatory of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms found in the nation’s 1982 Constitution.
According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the legal group on the case, “The court’s Order also consolidates four separate cases, and ordered them to be heard on an expedited basis, given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility rights and other Charter rights.”
“We are eager to have this matter heard in court. Similar Covid-19 mandate cases have been adjudicated in the United States, India, and New Zealand,” JCCF lawyer Eva Chipiuk said about the upcoming case against Trudeau.
“Courts around the world have found that governments must respect fundamental human rights, including the right to bodily autonomy, which means individuals have the right to decide freely on what medical treatment they wish to receive,” the lawyer added.
Despite the Trudeau government’s insistence that the mandate is necessary, many Canadians remain concerned that the vaccines have not been sufficiently studied for negative effects given their accelerated clinical trials, and some harbor ethical reservations about the use of cells from aborted babies in their development. Still others simply consider them unnecessary given COVID-19’s high survivability among most groups, its low risk of asymptomatic spread, research indicating that post-infection natural immunity is equally protective against reinfection, and the fact that the vaccine trials have never produced evidence that the shots stop transmission or infection.