Commentary
The official press corps recently dusted off the narrative that COVID-19 justifies the re-imposition of public control measures like mandatory masking, penalties for refusal of vaccine booster shots, and lockdowns of public assembly, albeit in the face of confused and conflicting evidence of the effectiveness and cost-benefit balance of such measures.
Perhaps its time for Canadians to think about the systemic consequences when officials ignore clear and unequivocal evidence and science to make laws based instead on their personal policy preferences. The tenth anniversary this year of the defeat of Motion 312 offers a stark illustration for such an analysis.
Imagine pretending a living individual isn’t a human being. But it could never happen in 21st-century Canada, right? This year marked the tenth anniversary of Parliament refusing my proposal to study perhaps the only Canadian law still based on 17th-century science. In 1642, Lord Coke wrote that a child should only be considered to be “a reasonable creature, in rerum natura, when it is born alive.” Our existing Canadian law puts it this way: “A child becomes a human being … when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother, whether or not (a) it has breathed, (b) it has an independent circulation, or (c) the navel string is severed.”…