Supreme Court Won’t Hear Travel Vaccine Mandate Appeal

Canada’s top court will not hear appeals from challengers of Ottawa’s COVID-era travel vaccine mandate.
The rejected cases involved People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier, former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford and his co-applicants, and Quebec lawyer Nabil Ben Naoum.
The three parties had filed an appeal with the top court after the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision of a lower court.
Bernier, Peckford, and Ben Naoum, along with businessmen Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard, had each filed applications for judicial review of the travel vaccine mandate when it was in place, seeking a ruling on its constitutionality.
The measure prevented millions of Canadians unvaccinated against COVID-19 from boarding a plane, a train, and some marine vessels. It was implemented in October 2021 and suspended in June 2022.
“There is no important public interest or inconsistency in the law that would justify allocating significant judicial resources to hear these moot Applications,” she said.
The four different parties appealed Gagné’s ruling and pleaded before the Federal Court of Appeal a year later in October 2023.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which supported the applications of Bernier and Peckford, said in a statement the Supreme Court should have accepted the appeals to determine whether it’s appropriate to “allow governments to evade judicial scrutiny of their decisions made through emergency orders.”
This allows the government to make decisions protected by cabinet confidences where the reasoning is shielded from public view, said JCCF.
“This case was of paramount importance to all Canadians, and they have been denied the right to know whether the federal government acted lawfully in preventing them from travelling and leaving the country based on their refusal to take a novel medication that failed to prevent transmission of Covid, and that has caused death and serious harm to many people worldwide,” said JCCF lawyer Allison Pejovic.
Transport Canada said in a statement to The Epoch Times that it welcomes the Supreme Court’s decision.