(LifeSiteNews) — A former Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner has spoken out against “outrageous … abhorrent” worldwide vaccine passport mandates, warning that the sensitive information gathered in such systems is creating a “global digital infrastructure for surveillance.”
Privacy expert Dr. Ann Cavoukian, now an executive director at Toronto’s Privacy By Design Centre of Excellence, said that individuals using the vaccine passports ought to be concerned about the level of intrusion into the private lives of citizens that is introduced by the system, since alongside health information vaccine passports often include location tracking and personal identification documentation.
The Epoch Times reported Cavoukian as revealing that governments will be able to collect “geolocation data associated with where you were, and at what time” with the vaccine passport system. The data tracking will also give them the ability to monitor “who you were with.”
Cavoukian, a senior fellow at the Ted Rogers Leadership Centre at Ryerson University, argued that worldwide personal information collection through such systems will create a “global digital infrastructure of surveillance.”
Cavoukian explained that private health information should remain “between your doctor and yourself,” according to Ottawa-based newsroom Blacklock’s Reporter. With the requirement to share this data through passport schemes, “all of that has changed,” she said. “That’s what astounds me. I find it abhorrent.”
She urged Canadians to “preserve our personal freedom and liberty and not give into the dictates of governments … privacy is the cornerstone of that. I think vaccine mandates are outrageous.”
Such mandates are especially “unfair,” she argued, “because there are some people who are immunocompromised, they have anaphylaxis, they cannot get vaccinated. So those people are going to be treated terribly.”
“I reject any form of vaccine passports,” she asserted.
In Canada, “[h]ealth information is very strongly protected,” Cavoukian noted, highlighting the existence of the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA). This legislation, she explained, protects an individual’s right to divulge their own healthcare information at their discretion. “It should be only an individual’s choice if they wish to reveal this information,” she said.
However, with the dawn of vaccine passports, “people are being forced, they’re demanded to reveal their vaccine status. And that should be no one’s business except for the individual and their own doctor.”
The veteran privacy commissioner, who served in the distinguished post for seventeen years, insisted that the health status of private citizens “is considered to be the most private, sensitive information they have.”
“When I was privacy commissioner for three terms, we considered this essential.”
It's official: Joe Biden has announced that his Administration will be forcing COVID vaccinations on nearly 1/3rd of American citizens, blatantly disregarding the personal objections of millions of people and moving America ever closer towards a medical dictatorship.
We cannot stand for this unprecedented overreach, and we will not submit to Biden's tyrannical public coercion efforts.
Please SIGN this urgent petition informing the President that you will NOT comply with these unconstitutional vaccine mandate orders issued by the Biden Administration, and that elected officials should act in their capacity to block these intrusive demands.
On Thursday, September 9th, Joe Biden announced the latest round of federal orders meant to further coerce large swaths of the public into getting the COVID vaccine -- many against their will.
While the legal standing of these measures is, at best, dubious, the Biden Administration appears more ready than ever to gut our individual rights and practically erase medical autonomy in our country.
This latest escalation in overreach was announced via a televised speech in which Biden outlined a new "six-point plan" that includes far more than just six avenues to achieve mass medical compliance.
Among the most egregious new federal mandates are the following:
- A requirement that all private businesses employing more than 100 people mandate their workers get the Covid-19 vaccine or submit to weekly testing (to be implemented by way of a new Department of Labor rule)
- A requirement that all federal employees and federal contractors get the COVID vaccine
- A requirement that all healthcare workers in facilities that receive reimbursement from Medicare and/or Medicaid (an estimated 17 million) get the Covid-19 vaccine without an alternative testing option
- A requirement that all Head Start teachers get the COVID vaccine
- A federal effort to lobby states to implement vaccine mandates for all school employees, and require regular testing of all students and school staff
- A federal effort to lobby entertainment venues to require proof of vaccination or testing in order to grant entry to the public
- A continuation of mask mandates on all federal properties and during interstate travel (i.e. planes, trains, buses)
All in all, these new vaccine mandates, which will go into effect within the coming weeks, will affect an estimated 100 million American workers -- 2/3rds of the entire workforce!
And, according to an administration official, violations of these unconstitutional requirements could result in fines of up to $14,000.
While this is clearly a political ploy on the part of the Joe Biden and his team of power-hungry Washington insiders to shift the focus from their disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American public knows better: After nearly a year and a half's worth of arbitrary, ever-changing, and unconstitutional government mandates in response to the COVID outbreak, it was always a given that the Biden Administration would ramp things up even further when it behooved them.
And now, it would seem that time has officially come.
"This is not about freedom or personal choice," Biden uttered in his remarks, confirming his administration's blatant dismissal of all Americans' right(s) to accept or decline the experimental Covid-19 vaccine.
This is a stunning reversal from Biden's declaration last December that "I don’t think [the vaccine] should be mandatory, I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory."
In fact, Biden even confirmed his intention to flout states' rights in the process, warning that "If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way."
These are not the words of an "empathetic" leader; these are the words of an aspiring dictator. And, for the time being, the only way to stop Joe Biden's tyranny is through mass noncompliance.
As we've said from the beginning, science, basic logic, and common sense should dictate policy regarding COVID and the Delta variant.
But Joe Biden and the federal government have long abandoned those principles throughout this crisis, culminating into this disturbing yet inevitable flurry of intrusive vaccine mandates that use people's jobs, individual autonomy, and livelihood as leverage.
This assault on our individual rights, private businesses, and American workers cannot be tolerated, and the easiest way to combat these unlawful orders is to just say NO.
Please SIGN and SHARE this most important petition letting Joe Biden know that you will NOT comply with the unconstitutional medical demands being made by this administration, and that action should be taken to block any intrusive action against working Americans and private employers.
Thank you!
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
'Biden announces vaccine requirements for private businesses, impacting tens of millions of Americans': https://www.
She characterized objections to privacy rights in favor of public safety regarding health mandates as “nonsense,” stating that both privacy and public health should be upheld, rather than pitted against each other.
“It should never be privacy versus public safety. It’s not a zero-sum game, either-or, win-lose.” Cavoukian instead stressed, “It has to [be] privacy and public safety.”
Speaking in May to the Vancouver International Privacy & Security Summit, Cavoukian said that “[y]ou cannot have freedom without privacy.”
“You end up turning your shoulder all the time wondering who’s listening,” she added.
Before introducing the vaccine passport scheme on September 22, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the system would be “a temporary tool that we won’t use any longer than we have to.” Commentators at the time noted that Ford did not supply an end date as part of his announcement, leading to some skepticism that the passports would form only a provisional measure.
“The problem is privacy protection measures, once they are lifted in an emergency, are seldom restored,” Cavoukian said. “What often happens is when there’s an emergency, the privacy laws get lifted because it’s an emergency situation and additional measures are introduced. Then, when the emergency ends, those privacy-invasive measures often continue.”
“That is my fear here. The pandemic is going to end, but my fear is people will get used to the concept of divulging personal information that governments want,” she lamented, adding that the measure is bound to become an “inescapable web of surveillance.”
“That’s what bothers me. It will become the norm, to divulge your personal medical information. That will be the expectation. I fear for our privacy so much. This is appalling to me.”
The Ontario provincial government’s mandate requires Ontarians to show proof of inoculation against the novel coronavirus with one of the state-approved abortion-tainted shots “to access certain businesses and settings.”
Included among the restricted venues are restaurants, bars, nightclubs, gyms, pools, casinos, theatres, cinemas, and sports venues, among other places. Outdoor venues with a capacity of 20,000 people or more have also been restricted to vaccinated individuals only.
Exemptions to the mandate exist for all those aged under 12, and for a limited number of reasons for anyone aged under 18, such as requiring temporary access to a business to use the bathroom. Medical exemptions have also been offered to those who have a signed doctor’s note. No religious exemption was outlined.
At the federal level, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced sweeping travel restrictions Thursday, mandating proof of COVID vaccination for all who wish to travel by air, sea, or rail, both domestically and internationally.
“We are very confident this proof-of-vaccination certificate that will be federally approved, issued by the provinces with the health information for Canadians, is going to be accepted at destinations worldwide,” Trudeau said at a press conference, adding the mandate will come into effect on October 30.
As things stand, some 88.817 percent of eligible Canadians have received at least one dose of a COVID jab, according to COVID-19 Vaccination Tracker Canada.
Coronavirus vaccine trials have never produced evidence that the vaccines stop infection or transmission. They do not even claim to reduce hospitalization, but the measurement of success is in preventing severe symptoms of COVID-19.
Meanwhile the list of FDA-recognized adverse events have grown from severe anaphylactic reactions to include fatal thrombotic events, the inflammatory heart condition myocarditis, and neurologically disabling disease like Guillain Barré Syndrome, as well as thousands of recorded deaths and permanent disabilities.