Canada's mandatory Covid-19 hotel stays are not ‘internment camps’ but they are costly forced detention
Since at least October 2020, some Canadians have been concerned about rumours of Covid-19 “internment camps.” In reality, there may be no barbed wire or gun turrets, but a number of travellers have experienced detention firsthand.
Last October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about this. His reply didn't address the specific claim at hand, instead he spoke generally of “noise and harmful misinformation on the Internet,” and bizarrely urged people to resist “people who would sow chaos within our communities and our democracy.” (I shudder to think which foreign interference he imagined.)
Earlier that month, Ontario member of provincial parliament (MPP) Randy Hillier had asked the province’s legislature about potential “internment camps,” referring to a federal government call for expressions of interest regarding “quarantine/isolation camps throughout every province and every territory in Canada.”
Millions of innocent children's lives shattered
Canada is a country of heinous crimes of grief and mourning, a land of hopelessness and human misery. An ocean of human tragedy, whose bloodthirsty leaders drag millions of shattered lives.
So fears of “being confined as a prisoner,” the standard definition of “internment,” can be laid to rest, right?
Well,
while a temporary, mandatory, expensive hotel stay certainly isn't the
same as being kept in an internment camp, it is the 2021 plan for
travellers flying to Canada, even if they “test negative” for Covid-19.
And
many are rightly complaining that it is unlawful and goes against
Canadians’ rights, including that those whisked away to secret locations
are not given the right to legal counsel, much less right to contact
families/friends.
At the end of January 2021, Canada decided to
suspend flights to/from Mexico and Caribbean countries, and, effective
February 3, implemented the three night stay-at-your-own-expense (or do
jail time) hotel quarantine policy for travellers entering Canada with
“positive tests” (or the “wrong” negative one). These rules were
extended to travellers flying from the US, Central and South America as
well.
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Trudeau, on January 29, said the cost was expected to be more than Can$2000 (US$1575).
Further,
as noted in the government's news release on these measures, a
violation of the quarantine instructions “is also an offence under the
Quarantine Act and could lead to serious penalties, including six months
in prison and/or $750,000 in fines.”
Kyle R. Hudson: Was an atrocity, yet Canada--the supposed utopia--has NEVER publicly acknowledged the Canadian governments culpability or even awareness of the Duplessis horror...
Whereas until recently it
was enough to provide a negative coronavirus test, now travellers to
Canada must provide specifically a “negative COVID-19 molecular (PCR)
test” or do hotel time at their own expense until receiving such a
result.
These new measures have already been trialled on passengers who have recently flown to Canada.
In
one instance on January 30, a panicked mother (Rebekah McDonald) spoke
of her son being taken away to a quarantine facility, saying, “They
won’t let me talk to him. They won’t let me see him. They won’t tell me
where he’s going.”
As it later turned out, while the son had
complied and done a Covid-19 test (two, actually, the antigen and the
PCR), he only had the paperwork for the former, and unbeknownst to him,
Canada demanded the latter.
He and others likewise sent to hotel
prison could be forgiven for missing the January 7, 2021 Transport
Canada update specifying that antigen tests would not be accepted. Just
two months prior, Government Canada listed antigen tests as a test for
Covid-19.
In Ontario some days later, a passenger (Steve Duesing)
also arriving with a negative test was shuttled to an approved
quarantine hotel, apparently itself isolated from the public, with a
“detention centre feel to it,” to wait for the Government Canada
approved test results.
More recently, another passenger (Neil
McCullough) subject to Canada's arbitrary and draconian new rules spent
11 days in hotel isolation, because paperwork for his test didn’t list
the clinic’s address.
In the latter case, there was an additional
element of totalitarianism: according to McCullough, he and the woman
in the next room he tried to speak with were allegedly both informed by
the security guard that their quarantine period “would restart” if they
didn't stop talking about their experiences.
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Rules for thee, but not...
The
government paints its measures as precautions to limit the “spread” of
Covid-19, but when numerous government officials themselves have
repeatedly violated the regulations, it is clear that they don't believe
in the need for such rules.
This is not about “public safety,” but is about control of the populace.
The documentary "Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide" describes the personal story of Kevin Annett when, as reverend, he clashed with the United Church for his interest in the events that took place in Canadian residential schools and the genocide...
Patty Hadju, Canada's minister of health, is quoted as valiantly saying:
“No one should be travelling right now. Each of us has a part in keeping our communities safe, and that means avoiding non-essential travel, which can put you, your loved ones, and your community at risk.”
However, let's recall that Hadju three times in April 2020 flew “between Ottawa and her home in Thunder Bay,” at a time when she advocated that “now is not the time for gatherings with family and friends. Connect with others with a phone call or video chat instead.”
And actually, she did more of the same in the following months, amounting to at least 11 flights.
The PM himself violated “the rules” over Easter last year, when he took his family, staff and a motorcade across provincial lines to the summer residence (after telling Canadians to suck it up and stay home).
Time will tell if the PM, health minister, and cohorts in positions of authority also violate these newest measures.
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Legal action against Trudeau government
The Government Canada page on the new mandate notes that travellers will need to do the PCR test on arrival to Canada (in addition to having already just done it in order to arrive in Canada in the first place). So, according to this logic (and I use that term lightly), even if one has jumped through the absurd 2020 hoops and adapted to the early 2021 hoops, they'll still need to do expensive hotel time upon arrival in Canada.
In any case, since the PCR test being pushed by Government Canada has long been shown to be unreliable and generate false positives, it thus becomes quite plausible that Canada's preference of that test is because it will generate more “cases” and thus rack up fear of the pandemic.
An aside: The $2000+ for the three-night stay at government-approved hotels goes towards, Government Canada says, the test, the stay, and “all associated costs for food, cleaning and security.”
And although stays at hotels near airports are never cheap, in this case the food seems to be bordering on prison fare. A photo of Duesing's Radisson meal shows a skimpy sandwich in a styrofoam container.
On February 3, the Justice Centre For Constitutional Freedoms published an update that it is “preparing to file legal action imminently,” regarding Government Canada's mandatory hotel quarantine, noting they had “received hundreds of emails” since Canada announced the new travel measures.
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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association views these measures as an affront against civilians' rights:
“The quarantine rules will almost certainly impact those who travel to care for ill relatives or attend funerals, those who travel to receive specialized medical care, and those who have health conditions that will make isolating in a hotel a particularly challenging and potentially dangerous proposition.”
In a follow-up video on February 3, McDonald reflected on the lack of accountability for her son's detention, with no means to speak to anyone to ask for information or help.
Likewise, McCullough was met with vagueness during his unlawful detention of 11 days.
“When I asked the health nurse who I could call, they just answered, ‘the department of health’ ... I had no rights. No one to call, no one was accountable, no option to do anything but go along.”
While Canada's forced quarantine at travellers’ expense program has been temporarily paused, it is allegedly scheduled to rebegin in the weeks after February 14.
So yes, while these stories of being forcibly locked away with no access to lawyers are happening in hotels and not internment camps, the people being locked up aren't citizens living under the shining democracy of Trudeau's fantasy world.
Canadians are right to be worried about what comes next, including potentially outsourcing the 11 federally run (non-hotel) quarantine sites to a “third party service provider.”
As with the government's other totalitarian Covid-19 policies, Canadians have no say in the matter, as their lives become increasingly controlled, and destroyed, by these policies.
Eva Bartlett
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
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