[Sundaycommunity] Fwd: [Ruah] Please share this widely

Thu Sep 9 15:44:45 PDT 2021

This is very interesting. Private rights and freedoms are great as long as
they don’t infringe on another’s rights.
Catherine
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From
Date: Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 11:05 AM
Subject: [Ruah] Please share this widely
To:

OPINION
Gathering in large groups, unvaccinated and unmasked in a time of pandemic,
is a criminal act against the community
By Reid Rusonik
Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer.
Contributor
Toronto Star
Wed., Sept. 8, 2021

Imagine that Canada has been invaded by a foreign army, which over the last
18 months has rounded-up and killed more than 27,000 of us, wounded tens of
thousands more and forced us to take shelter from its attacks, thus
crippling our economy.

Now imagine it threatened to kill thousands more of us because not enough
of us are resisting its renewed and possibly most deadly assault yet.

How would our governments respond? How would we expect them to respond to
not having enough of us volunteering to fight the invader? We would expect
there to be a draft? Of course we would.

A military draft and military service violates a host of our rights
enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but every violation would
either standup to constitutional challenge in the courts or we would expect
the federal government to rely upon the “notwithstanding clause” or
“override power” in the Charter to uphold its draft and military service
legislation.

In times of invasion, the needs of the community as a whole come before the
desires and imagined entitlements of the individual or there will not be a
community for those individual rights to thrive in again.

Even a brief study of human history reveals plague invasions are a certain
part of human existence. We were due for a deadly one. We are apparently,
as likely as not, due for another, even deadlier one soon. It is
frightening and depressing, yes, but it is part of the reality of being
human.

It is, however, also part of the reality of being human that we do not have
to helplessly succumb to any disease. We can fight them all. We have
survived terrible ones by taking learned, appropriate precautions. We have
altogether conquered many with vaccinations and actual cures. We will
almost certainly conquer more.

The Charter does not stand in the way of us organizing the community to
accomplish this and prevent individuals from sabotaging the effort any more
than it would protect individuals who refuse to be drafted into military
service to fight an invading army.

The Charter is not cheapened or endangered by protecting the very lives of
the members of the community from either immediate death or injury from an
invader of any kind or from the slow death and deprivation caused by a
strangled economy.

Since the vaccinations became widely available, the people refusing to take
them while complaining about the effect of lockdowns to the economy have
been the very cause of those lockdowns or other lesser restrictions on
normal economic activity.

The demonstrators this past week at the doors of hospitals, which impeded
ambulances, terrorized patients and psychologically devastated the truest
heroes in the fight against the pandemic invader have, at long last, I
hope, finally gone too far.

This was the equivalent of storming our own military installations while we
are in a war for survival. Such acts are criminal acts against the
community and should be defined and legislated as such — and not merely as
quasi-criminal ticketable provincial offences.

Gathering in large groups, unvaccinated and unmasked in a time of pandemic,
is a criminal act against the community and should be defined as such. Let
people charged with such offences try to argue in a court of law they are
unconstitutional because their individual rights that are infringed are
greater than those of the community.

I am a defence lawyer. Some will question why a defence lawyer would argue
for such limits on individual rights, imagining being a defence lawyer to
be some kind of law-hating anarchist. I suspect very few defence lawyers
hate laws.

What we hate are unfair laws, laws without rational and scientific
justification, and the unequal and prejudicial enforcement of laws that
make a mockery of individual rights and, in so doing, endanger the whole
community.

I believe there would be nothing contrary for most of us in the
criminalization of unmasked, unvaccinated groups terrorizing and
interfering with the operation of hospitals or gathering as such anywhere,
even if simply for being part of such groups.

We who fight for unpopular causes everyday in court do not understand the
political cowardice that allows for a small minority of the population to
thwart community efforts to fight and survive this pandemic and revive the
economy.

Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer.

Jean Ann
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*May you walk in joy as love calls us on.*
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