Why?

As you are undoubtedly aware, British Columbians were in an unprecedented situation for several years. The COVID-19 measures took their toll on businesses, individuals, and the public treasury.

The measures appeared to be incrementally draconian. An astronomically low infection fatality ratio (IFR); testing kits producing false positives for a goat, papaya and a kiwidubious exercise of executive powers; the mysterious near disappearance of the common seasonal flu; or an overall lack of an adequate evidential foundation is increasingly being questioned by legal scholars, private citizens, small business owners and their patrons, physicians, nurses, the scientists that sold the testsinfectious disease epidemiologists and academics, pharmacists, community leaders, public officials, places of public worship, and civil liberty advocacy groups. Further, the evidence of net harm as a result of these measures in Canada and similarly in the United States is overwhelming.

Our approach

We are unique in at least three important ways:

  1. Non-partisan: Unlike other legal challenges, we are non-partisan. We do not limit our advocacy to evangelical groups, business owners, the left, the right, or any other demographic. We advocate for everyone. We resist all efforts to expand our mandate that would otherwise tether it to irrelevant, divisive, or partisan issues.

  2. No emergency axiom: The architecture of our class proceeding never presupposed the fundamental premise that there was an emergency. We predicted long ago that anyone who brought a legal challenge with a bona fide public emergency as an assumption would achieve little, if anything. This has since been historically validated on numerous occasions.

    Leaving the government with the emergency card only served to strengthen its rationalization for the continued exercise and abuse of extraordinary executive powers. We are asking the Court to critically examine the premise that begot those powers to begin with.

    The need for that assumption was never a strategic necessity, but was born out of the culture within the bar and the comfort it afforded some of its membership.

  3. We drive our own bus: Our class proceeding is crowd funded and client driven by our organization. We are a non-perfunctory representative plaintiff that performs continuous and extensive public consultation. This approach represents a citizen-led and model design for the responsible use of the Class Proceedings Act, RSBC 1996, c 50, without precedent in Canada.

    This approach of directly managing our own litigation is a substantial departure from how class proceedings have, on occasion, been historically conducted as vehicles to advance class counsels’ career ambitions. The latter must remain subordinate to the public interest, as the general public would define it, if Parliament’s objectives behind this legislation are intended to be fully realized.

    The law is a public utility. It is far too important to be exclusively in the hands of a barristocracy. We recognize that lawyers are legal technicians. When used responsibly lawyers advise and assist, but must not act as ghost plaintiffs seeking to meet a billing quota or make partner at the firm through the commercialization of human misery.

    Having said that, practitioners in the field of law can and do play an essential role in seeking to maintain the integrity of our democratic institutions. We believe that the manner in which we perform our work is critical in reversing the dangerous decline in public confidence in the administration of justice.

    The CPA was first introduced in our provincial legislature in 1995 by our government’s then Attorney General. He promised it would offer hope to groups of people who have been overlooked by the justice system. He also cited how the legislation could be used to advance civil rights.

Who are we?

The Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy (CSASPP) is a non-profit, non-partisan, secular, crowd funded, and volunteer driven organization that was created in response to popular community demand for a direct action initiative to counter BC’s COVID-19 related measures.

CSASPP’s approach engaged the very premise of an alleged emergency. Without an emergency, there can be no basis for extraordinary executive powers, including everything that required or benefited from one. We filed our proposed class action on your behalf on 26 January, 2021, and intend to continue aggressively prosecuting it. Under the civil rules, Dr. Bonnie Henry must personally submit to answering our questions while under oath if we obtain class certification.

Our civil proceeding’s objectives are to obtain any available civil remedy for the maximum number of British Columbians that revert in whole or in part any COVID-19 related statute, ministerial order, regulation, or other executive, regulatory, or legislative measure; past, extant, or proposed; that constrain any activity of any person inadequately supported by either science or law; and that may facilitate that person’s subsequent pursuit of a civil remedy brought against, with preference towards the natural over the legal, any other person complicit in the consultation, enactment, or enforcement of said.