1/ THREAD
Normally, with #NCI witnesses, I take 10-20 segments and generalize them, but Mr. Pardy packs so much wisdom into his segment that I am pretty sure I recreated his entire testimony here.
Full Testimony: rumble.com/v2gpz3s-legal-…
@PardyBruce
@Inquiry_Canada
2/
First, before you watch this presentation, I recommend you watch Timothy Sandefur's talk on property rights. I have put a snippet of the relevant portion here in case you don't have the time to do so.
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Mr. Pardy being sworn in
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Mr. Pardy's bonafides.
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Mr. Pardy lays out the premise of his entire presentation, which is that Canadians do not understand what the real problem is (Spoiler Alert: our government has adopted the Progressive idea that government exists to 'decide the public good').
6/
Mr. Pardy stresses the things that Canadians were told to do and not to do during Covid. People witnessed society unravelling and thought it was insane, but thought that the law would save them. He goes on to point out how the law did not.
7/
Mr. Pardy suggest two reasons why the law did not save Canadians. First, and foremost, he blames the rise of the 'administrative state'. Second, he blames both the weakness and the manner of the interpretation of the Charter to enable the first reason.
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Mr. Pardy then explains how there are 3 branches of government, and one of the ways that we the citizens are protected from our own government is through a separation of powers of these 3 branches so as to prevent the centralization of those powers in the hands of a few.
9/
Mr. Pardy has a very effective way of describing the 'administrative state'. We all know what a court is - it has a judge. And we all know what a legislature is - it has elected people. Everything else is the administrative state.
10/
Mr. Pardy has a masterful way with words.
Pardy: "The administrative state is authorized to do nothing! Unless the legislature has passed a statute saying that it can."
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Mr. Pardy is describing how, more and more everyday, the legislature is transferring its law making responsibility to the administrative state.
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Mr. Pardy then says why we can't rely on the courts to do their job and prohibit the legislature from transferring this power, namely that the courts have long since shown deference to the legislature and administrative state (ie. exercise judicial restraint).
13/
Now we get to Mr. Pardy's 'holy trinity of the administrative state'.
Delegation + Deference = Discretion.
This triumphed during covid, on steroids.
14/
We finally get to the point where Mr. Pardy points out why we keep losing in the courts: because we are not addressing the underlying premise which is that the administrative state has the discretion to decide the public good.
15/
Using deductive reasoning, Mr. Pardy illustrates how citizens need to attack the premise that officials have discretion to decide public good instead of simply attacking the conclusion that vaccine mandates are good.
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Mr. Pardy then says that the administrative state has been around for decades and people think the 'premise' is a natural role of the administrative state. He then pushes back and disagrees with that view, and believes the covid fiasco was because of this belief.
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Mr. Pardy says when we attack the 'insanity' of the last 3 years, we are attacking the 'conclusion' (whether something is in the interests of the public good), but we do nothing about the 'premise' (whether it's the government's job to decide the public good).
18/
Again, Mr. Pardy stresses that the problem is not that the policies were bad, but that they had the right to override individual autonomy and pass those bad policies. He stresses that Covid was the pinnacle of this administrative state.
19/
Going back to the Charter, Mr. Pardy hints that the Charter is poorly, or ambiguously written, and further that the judges are misinterpreting it to the point that it is being used to advance the interests of the administrative state.
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Once again, Mr. Pardy describes the administrative state in an interesting way.
Pardy: "This administrative state is provided for in the constitution, nowhere. It has just grown up over time."
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Mr. Pardy points out something that many of us would generally not think of: the Charter is NOT the foundation of our legal system. He goes on to say that it used to be a combination of Common Law & the separation of powers, but today it's just the 'administrative state'.
Mr. Pardy, in explaining the first of the two ways the Charter was violated, describes a clear, black and white violation of section 7 by mandating vaccination, with the risk of being thrown in jail. That, he would say, would be a CLEAR violation of security of the person.
23/
Mr. Pardy, essentially, says that the administrative state did not strictly speaking force a vaccine, but made life hell for people that chose not to get one. In the strict legal sense, they are were not violating section 7. He calls this 'going around the back door'
24/
Mr. Pardy gives an analogy of a 'no shirt, no shoes, no service' policy, province wide. If one were to claim that that would be unconstitutional, the province would most likely turn around and say 'well, no one's forcing you to go to the restaurant'.
25/
Mr. Pardy says that section 1 of the Charter is wide enough to drive a truck through: in the rare cases where judges were forced to admit that the administrative state's actions violated the Charter, they simply invoked section 1 to still side with the state.
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Mr. Pardy draws the distinction of how restricting church gatherings violated the Charter, whereas restricting those while allowing gatherings at Walmart not only violated the Charter but showed their selective bias. So the courts just invoked section 1.
27/
Mr. Pardy walks through one case where the court basically abdicates its responsibility by showing deference to the administrative case by arguing that they just don't understand the science.
28/
Mr. Pardy describes a court case which compares pandemics to war. He interprets this as the courts saying 'you will do as you're told, because we're in a crisis and we won't restrain the government', and he traces that back to the premise of the administrative state.
29/
Mr. Pardy says, essentially, that states always find some reason to justify their actions.
Pardy: "You can find necessity pretty much anywhere you like, if you want to find it."
30/
Mr. Pardy finally returns to his initial reference of the 'big idea that we don't know that we have'. He is pushing back against a court that is saying it is government's role to protect citizens from risk.
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The next case described involves judges calling protestors 'uninformed' and 'willfully blind'. Mr. Pardy points out that, given what we know now, it is the courts that were probably wrong. But the courts always side with the administrative state.
32/
Mr. Pardy describes how the courts simply agreed with whatever the administrative state said about Covid (judicial notice). Basically, when the state said 'safe & effective', it's as if they said 'water is wet'.
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Mr. Pardy then describes a particularly sinister trick employed by the court whereby they take the Charter provisions, which are meant to protect INDIVIDUAL rights, and use them instead to erode individual rights in support of collective rights.
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Mr. Pardy then describes how mootness prevents wasting time on things that no longer matter (ie. the law is repealed). But courts are supposed to ignore mootness when the state is abusing it (ie. intentionally repealing the law right before trial).
35/
Mr. Pardy criticizes opponents of the covid policies that thought that the courts would intervene and stop the deterioration of society because that is technically politics and the courts don't like to get political.
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Mr. Pardy reveals his grand suggestion: Canada needs a non-delegation standard to ensure the legislature can't just delegate its responsibilities to the executive.
Supplemental reading: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
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Mr. Pardy says the Charter has proven to be inadequate but that amending it may end up making things worse if it gets amended based on progressive principles.
38/
The commissioner asks Mr. Pardy how the absence of a critical, independent press, along with an immensely centralized party structure interacts with the prospects of a healthy democracy.
39/
Mr. Pardy goes back to the notion of ideas, and how people have preconceived notions. In the context of the press, Mr. Pardy believes there is this false notion that the press must tell the truth. The consequence of this is that the state gets to define what is truth.
40/
The commissioner asks Mr. Pardy if what happened in the last 3 years was a breach of Canadian's perception of their freedoms. Mr. Pardy says yes, stressing the 'perception' part. Canadians discovered that their perceptions were wrong. The curtain has been pulled back.
41/
The commissioner ends by asking why no one besides Mr. Palmer has come forward. Not a prime minister, or a supreme court justice. Mr. Palmer's response is that those justice's also believe in the 'premise'.
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