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

[Mary Brown]

Thank you.

Mary
mbrown7069 at gmail.com



On Thu, 9 Sept 2021 at 18:45, Catherine Walther via Sundaycommunity <
sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:

> This is very interesting. Private rights and freedoms are great as long as
> they don’t infringe on another’s rights.
> Catherine
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> 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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