Health minister's mandatory vaccination pitch is another conspiracy theory coming true
It was only a few weeks ago I was being called a conspiracy theorist for suggesting Austria’s population-wide vaccine mandate could just as easily become a reality in Canada. I had hoped to be wrong, but here we are.
The Canadian government is now talking about state-mandated vaccination. No, not just to board a plane or go to a restaurant, bad enough as those sorts of targeted mandates are, but to exist as a citizen.
At a press conference earlier today, federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos suggested compulsory COVID-19 vaccination is inevitable.
“I see it coming personally,” Duclos said. “Not now. I don’t think we are there yet. But I think decisions need to be had about mandatory vaccinations because we have to get rid of COVID-19.”
I joked on Twitter that such a proposal makes me wish it were possible to de-vaccinate myself as a matter of principle to protest.
Some countries like Greece, Italy, and the Czech Republic have required their older citizens to get vaccinated. Only Austria and Turkmenistan (with Germany still mulling) have issued the sweeping mandate Duclos says is en route to Canada.
Tyrannical as these measures are, they’re useful in neutralizing the key arguments behind the narrower vaccine mandates in place for travel or certain workplaces.
“Oh, but you still have a choice,” statist sycophants will say in support of these mandates.
Or as Trudeau said during the campaign, “If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice, but don't think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people and put them at risk."
According to the latest from Duclos, that choice actually doesn’t exist after all, at least not for long. He did say it would be up to the provinces, however.
Now, I’m sure several provincial leaders will be quick to denounce the idea, as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney did this afternoon.
“Alberta’s Legislature removed the power of mandatory vaccination from the Public Health Act last year and will not revisit that decision, period,” Kenney tweeted. “While we strongly encourage those who are eligible to get vaccinated, it is ultimately a personal choice that individuals must make.”
This would be comforting if we hadn’t heard full-throated rejections of vaccine passports from premiers like Kenney and Ontario’s Doug Ford before they ultimately buckled and imposed the very regimes they’d been swearing off for months. Incidentally, those ‘temporary’ passport regimes are still in place.
Western governments are on precarious footing, with their credibility in shambles, their fraudulent doomsday projections exposed, and their vaunted reopening plans indefinitely shelved. With dwindling public support, their only remaining tool is coercion.
Despite vaccination rates exceeding the point at which governments have previously said we could safely return to normal, no such return is taking place. The best way to cling to power under the circumstances is to make an enemy of someone else, which is what the Covid Commissars are doing with the unvaccinated.
Berating the vaccine holdouts has become something of a sport for G-7 leaders as of late.
French president Emmanuel Macron not only said he wanted to “piss off” those who refuse to get the jab, but also that “irresponsible people are no longer French citizens.” He’s talking about citizenship in a moral sense, but I’m nonetheless reminded that his predecessor François Hollande had to abandon a plan to strip citizenship from terrorists because of backlash from the Left.
There’s not a peep of the same furor at Macron’s assertion that the unvaccinated aren’t true French citizens (which might be a compliment, come to think of it).
And then there was Justin Trudeau’s denigration of anti-vaccine protesters as “racist” and “misogynistic” – comments he made during a September interview which has been recirculating in the past week.
The old wisdom about being better able to catch flies with honey than vinegar comes to mind. That mandatory vaccination is now being entertained suggests demonization has not managed to convert the unvaccinated. Go figure.
It’s possible to view vaccination as virtuous while rejecting the “mandatory” bit, which is why if you’re among the 76 per cent of Canadians who are fully vaccinated, you should still be outraged at the idea that you shouldn’t have had a choice in the matter.
(That said, Quebec is already talking about requiring third doses to qualify as “fully vaccinated,” so it’s possible for the presently fully vaccinated to be racist, misogynistic, anti-vax, double-dosers soon enough.)
The idea of choice is far more important than the substance of particular choices, including that of whether to get vaccinated.
You needn’t respect or even understand another’s decision-making process to respect that it’s their choice to make, not yours or the state’s.
Justin Trudeau once passionately stood up for the “freedom to do what you want with your body” while defending abortion. However, in endorsing mandatory vaccination, the Liberals believe your body, in fact, belongs to the government.
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