News
Featured Image
 screenshot/YouTube

TORONTO (LifeSiteNews) — After heralding COVID restrictions as lifesaving for two years, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford has now stated both that vaccination is a “choice” and that everyone is “done” with the measures. 

Despite doubling down on his province’s vaccine passport as recently as last week, Ford has not just announced an end to the discriminatory measure, he has denied the COVID vaccines stop the virus. Yesterday he told a reporter that it “doesn’t matter” if someone has “one shot or ten shots” and insists his government is about “freedoms” and “liberties.” 

“You can go to Costco, you can go to Walmart, you can go shopping… You don’t know if the person beside you has a shot or not, but we also know that it doesn’t matter if you have one shot or ten shots, you can catch COVID,” Ford told reporters yesterday. 

The premier made the remark in response to a question about the end of Ontario’s vaccine passport system for bars, restaurants, and other venues.  

“See the prime minister, he has triple shots, and I know hundreds of people with three shots [who] caught COVID,” Ford continued.   

“…[We need to] move forward… We can’t stay in this position forever. We got to learn to live with this and get on with our lives,” the premier added, directly contradicting two years of his own policies.  

“I bet if I asked every single person in this room, ‘Do you want these damn masks, or do you want them off?’ They want them off, they want to get back to normal… Every single person including myself knows people [who] are unvaccinated… Sure, there’s rabblerousers, and then there’s just hardworking people that just don’t believe in it, and that’s their choice. This is about, again, a democracy and freedoms and liberties… Everyone’s done with this. We are done with it.” 

Doug Ford’s strong statements follow his decision to axe the provincial vaccine passport system he installed in Ontario in September 2021. However, unlike the other provinces that have promised to abolish their passports, Ford has yet to set a date for the end of his mandatory masking policy.  

Despite claiming that he supports “freedoms and liberties,” Ford is also one of the few premiers to support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented move of enacting the Emergencies Act to deal with the demonstrators protesting in the nation’s capital of Ottawa against dictatorial COVID measures.  

Included in Trudeau’s decision, which Ford said he supports, is a dictate that allows banks to freeze private and corporate bank accounts without a court order if they suspect the holders of the accounts are helping the peaceful Freedom Convoy 2022 protests.  

While Ford’s words indicate that he has changed his tune overnight, the province of Ontario still plans to install a “Digital ID” system which would include individual vaccination records in the same digital identity as the government suggests could be used for “opening a bank account” or businesses in their process of hiring employees.

Despite the government insisting the move to the digital world will be voluntary and convenient, constitutional lawyers have warned of the devastating effects a change like this can have on privacy and individual autonomy.

“While the proposed digital ID is allegedly voluntary, it is unlikely to stay that way. First, it will become normalized, then it will become necessary,” Lisa Bildy, a lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), told LifeSiteNews last year when asked about the possibility of a digital ID system in Ontario.

“The privacy implications of this technology are concerning, particularly if it stores data and connects the details of our many personal activities that the ID is allegedly designed for, such as booking medical appointments, banking, applying for jobs, or showing our vaccine status at places of business. Anonymity would no longer be permitted.”

16 Comments

    Loading...