Our new book Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic is now on sale in electronic form at AMAZON.ca. Print copies may also be purchased on Amazon or through the Haultain Institute (see HERE).
This book deals with the political and social dimensions of the policy reaction to COVID-19.
Nearly four years later, the moral panic that accompanied and compounded the medical and public health responses to COVID remains a lingering feature of Canadian public policy.
Why do medical administrators and policy makers persist in fearmongering? This is a political question, not a question of epidemiology. Without disputing the seriousness of COVID-19 for some Canadians, we find the overall national response to COVID has been excessive.
The Truckers’ Convoy in the winter of 2022 raised questions that governments remain unprepared to answer. Those who have embraced what we call the Plague Story—including the subsidized media—see nothing wrong with the state deploying despotic measures and demolishing citizens’ rights. This Plague Story depends on deference to authoritative experts. Their presumptive correctness and certainty provide an appearance of necessity. Those who claim to govern with the support of medical pronouncements protect themselves from criticism and give themselves license to damage Canadians individually and collectively with impunity. We examine the mechanisms by which this was possible.
Hannah Arendt observed that bureaucratic tyranny is the worst because its power is impersonal, anonymous, and cannot be easily undone. The ambitions of bureaucrats and politicians in Canada are well served by the introduction of this emergency mode of governance. We hope that the arguments of this book will help Canadians to recognize and resist the permanent establishment of bureaucratic tyranny.