We’ve filed a constitutional challenge to Saskatchewan’s lockdown laws

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OPEN SASKATCHEWAN

Help us lift the lockdown in Saskatchewan! We’ve filed a constitutional challenge to Saskatchewan’s lockdown law and we're suing for a breach of Charter rights

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Goal: $150,000.00

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There are 76 hospitals in Saskatchewan. And according to the latest statistics, there are a grant total of 33 people in the entire province — out of a population of nearly 1.2 million — who are in intensive care from the virus. So one person for every two hospitals. In a province larger than France.

I’m not trivializing even a single death. But I’m pointing out that it is not a crisis by any normal measure.

Now, as you know, we have helped lots of people with outrageous tickets and fines they have received, in the name of this pandemic. Like in the Saskatchewan city of Prince Albert, where the local mayor has had a hate-on for a particular church in town for years. And he used the pandemic as an excuse to give the church the largest fine in Canada — $14,000 dollars. He hates that church, and he’s using the pandemic as an excuse to smash it.

So we’ve helped people in Saskatchewan and around Canada with our Fight the Fines project. We crowdfund lawyers to defend them. But that’s reactive. It’s defensive. It doesn’t solve the problem — it’s like whack-a-mole. The government will just fine more people, just bring in more lockdown rules. It won’t end, will it? They love it too much.

Well, I want to tell you about something we’re doing to change things.

See, we booked a town hall meeting in Regina, Saskatchewan, for last May. It was our friend Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace. He had been invited by the city of Regina to give a speech at a conference. And then the deplatformers and cancel culture types jumped in and got him banned.

That’s outrageous and unfair, so I called up Dr. Moore and said: don’t cancel your trip to Regina. I’ll rent a big hall, and we’ll hold your speech that same night, as planned! And we’ll keep the ticket prices cheap, and we’ll make it a great night! And it worked. More than a 1,000 people signed up — far more than the original conference had! We were making lemons into lemonade — it was going to be great!

And of course, the pandemic came in March, and no-one knew how bad it would be. So when the giant auditorium, called the Conexus Arts Centre, told us we had to postpone it, we agreed, and most of our ticket-buying would-be audience agreed too. That was in the early days when we didn’t know if we’d survive the calamity. Was this the new Ebola? No-one knew.

Well within a few months we pretty much knew. You’re going to be fine, statistically speaking.

So we asked the event to reschedule for us. And they did. But the province hadn’t changed their rules against indoor gatherings — they only allowed a tiny number of people, even though the arts centre’s main auditorium could hold over 2,200 people!

So we rescheduled it again. And each time, some people asked for refunds of their tickets, which is fair.

And as our audience got smaller, well — we could actually “socially distance” in the giant theatre! Individual families could sit far apart from each other in that main room. Certainly farther apart than in a Walmart! Or on a plane!

But the province just wouldn’t update its original ban on indoor events at theatres. Even though this wasn’t a rock concert or something like that — it was a political town hall, one that had already been banned by the city. This was important — and I’m not saying music concerts aren’t important.

But legally speaking, political meetings — the freedom to assemble and speak — is given a very high protection. It’s called a fundamental freedom in our Charter of Rights.

So we wrote to the health minister and the justice minister. And we said, look — we understand the need for public health. But we can do this.

You can read the letter we sent them in full on our website, OpenSaskatchewan.com.

And we pointed out: it’s frankly illegal for a government to ban a political gathering. There is no pandemic exception in the Charter of Rights.

Well, the government wrote back and basically said, “no”.

No compromise. No timeline for opening up. No recognition that we know more about the virus now than a year ago. No understanding that there must be a balance between their public health goals and other societal goals, including our fundamental freedoms.

So we decided to challenge this ban on gatherings with a constitutional challenge. We’re suing the government of Saskatchewan.

We have standing as Rebel News — we have the right to organize, the right to assemble and associate. Dr. Moore has the right to speak; he has agreed to join the lawsuit. And our paying customers have the right to listen — one of our ticket-buying guests, Leo Gaumont, has agreed to be a plaintiff too.

And last week, we filed the lawsuit in Saskatchewan. You can see that on OpenSaskatchewan.com.

It’s only ten pages long. We’ve also filed affidavits from me, Dr. Moore and Leo, explaining how our rights have been violated. I’d encourage you to go to OpenSaskatchewan.com to read it in full. There is some legalese in it, of course — it’s a serious lawsuit filed by serious lawyers, who know their constitutional law. But I believe it’s accessible to anyone who thinks about freedom.

Unjustifiable; unreasonable; not rationally connected; not proportionate; that’s how a government has to be when infringing on a freedom. They have to be the gentlest they can be.

They can’t simply say: even a huge auditorium like the Conexus Arts Centre can’t have more than a handful of people in it for a political gathering. That’s not how our freedoms work.

I’m confident with our lawyers. They are experienced, they support freedom and they are excellent on constitutional matters. You tell me — go to OpenSaskatchewan.com yourself and read the lawsuit and the affidavits.

And if you can help us, please do — I don’t want to tell you exactly how much we have spent on this lawsuit so far, but it’s safe to say it will cost us $100,000 or more by the time we’re done.

Obviously we’re not doing this for the money — our Patrick Moore event wasn’t about making money in the first place, it was about stopping the censorship of an intellectual and scholar and author, at the hand of a cancel culture mob.

Well, we beat the cancel culture mob; but now we can’t beat the public health lockdown. So we have to go to court. Not just for ourselves, but for all Saskatchewan people. It’s just that we have standing there, because we were personally affected — it was our event!

If you are from Saskatchewan, or if you are from anywhere else that wants to see these limits on our freedoms lifted, please read the lawsuit and if you can, please consider contributing to our crowdfunding campaign. I know I ask for that a lot, but there is a lot to do. We defend individual Saskatchewanians. But it’s time to free everyone in the province, not just a handful.

And hopefully if we are successful, it will inspire people across Canada to take their freedoms back.

Thanks for your support — now let’s go open Saskatchewan!

NEXT: Dr. Patrick Moore.

FINALLY: Your messages to me!