“My partner's going to look it up”: COVID cops flop trying to enforce gathering rules

Fight The Fines

Reporting on and fighting the pandemic fines.

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As other provinces like Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan remove all COVID-related restrictions, here in Ontario, our science is different. Which means that our rules and regulations are, too.

Ontario’s health mandates — which are a revolving door of full lockdowns, partial reopenings and have shifted from a regional to colour-coded and now a phased approach — don’t actually have an end in sight. There has been no announcement of what comes after the province’s current stage three of reopening. The restrictions in Ontario fall under the Reopening Ontario Act, which is ironic because the legislation itself is the red tape standing in the way of a full reopening.

It seems like this is intentionally confusing. The laws change so much that no one can keep track, including those meant to enforce them.

In this story I bring you a prime example of this. Kyle Anthony and his group of friends felt targeted by local police for exceeding the outdoor gathering limits when they went to a local beach in Port Stanley, Ontario, to enjoy some good old-fashioned fun in the sun.

Armed with a No More Lockdowns sign, Kyle claims that he was politically profiled and that police assumed he didn’t respect authority because of this sign, which voices opposition towards sweeping lockdowns and indiscriminate health mandates. But it turns out, the police didn’t know that gathering limits had changed, and were attempting to enforce a moot law against Kyle and his friends!

This type of subjective rule enforcement, with no real justification as to how capacity limits or gathering restrictions are established, is exactly what you get when you have health officials morphing themselves into lawmakers. It’s discombobulated, unconstitutional, and arbitrary.

Kyle’s message is that law enforcement should all be trained and briefed when the laws magically change to reflect the doc-tators’ flavour of the day, so that they don’t embarrass themselves further.