OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — Canada’s COVID travel mandates against the un-jabbed may be challenged in the Supreme Court this year.
According to a January 11 press release from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier and former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Brian Peckford are seeking to take the COVID shot travel restrictions to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“The public interest in this case is staggering. Canadians need to know whether it is lawful for the federal government to prevent them from travelling across Canada, or from leaving and re-entering their own country, based upon whether they have taken a novel medication,” Allison Pejovic, the JCCF lawyer representing Peckford and Bernier, said.
The decision to take the case to the Supreme Court comes after the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the case as “moot” in November, since the mandates were no longer in effect.
In November 2021, the Liberal government under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced COVID jab travel mandates, which remained in place until June 2022.
According to the JCCF, taking the case to the Supreme Court will mean a two-step process. First, Bernier and Peckford must ask if the Court is willing to hear their appeal. If the appeal is granted, the hearing will be scheduled for several months later.
The two say that the case is of “national importance” since emergency orders are not approved by Parliament before being imposed.
If the laws cannot be later challenged in court because they are no longer in effect, Canadians can continually have their rights trampled as long as the government rescinds the orders before legal challenges make it into the courts.
Bernier and Peckford’s lawyers argued that their case had merit despite the travel COVID jab mandates being gone because they could be reintroduced at a moment’s notice.
“If courts are going to affirm and uphold emergency orders that violate our Charter rights and freedoms whenever the emergency order is no longer in force, how can the Charter protect Canadians from government abuses?” JCCF President John Carpay questioned.
In February 2022, Bernier, along with Peckford and eight others, filed a court challenge to COVID mandates in place at the time that banned the vaccine-free from air travel. Bernier and Peckford had the help of the JCCF.
The legal challenge made headlines because Peckford is the last living signatory of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which came into force in 1982.
In October 2022, the Canadian federal court deemed Bernier, Peckford, and the others’ court case “moot” in light of the federal government dropping COVID mandates in the same month.
Later, in April 2023, Bernier and Peckford, with the help of the JCCF, along with the others in the case, filed an appeal of the “mootness” ruling.
During the so-called COVID pandemic, Trudeau referred to those who chose not to get the experimental COVID shots as terrible people.
In 2021, Trudeau said Canadians “vehemently opposed to vaccination” do “not believe in science” and are “often misogynists, often racists” and even questioned whether Canada should continue to “tolerate these people.”