Canada

John Carpay is a rugged veteran of the beleaguered Canadian civil rights movement as founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. Over the years he’s been the target of frequent unjust harassment, but is now in the throes of a particularly odious and hypocritical persecution, which should concern all Canadians. At the worst of the Covid pandemic, with oppressive lockdowns and requirements of vaccine passports, mask-wearing, distancing, and belligerent and unctuous enforcement of all these rules, most of which we now know to have been medically superfluous if not counterproductive, with disastrous results in all other respects, John Carpay was one of the great many Canadians who was disgusted by the hypocrisy of politicians and public officials rigorously imposing Covid rules while ignoring them themselves. Unlike most of the vast number of people who objected to these practices, he determined to do something about them. In 2021, he engaged a private investigator to see if the widespread rumours about the premier of Manitoba, its chief health officer, and its chief justice were in fact breaking Covid rules, were true. The investigator followed these men around but did not otherwise bother them, but in consequence of this activity, which was designed as a legitimate pursuit of the public’s right to know, John Carpay was briefly prosecuted in a spurious and politically motivated criminal action in the course of which he was briefly incarcerated, and the Manitoba Law Society inflicted upon him more than two years of disciplinary proceedings. Carpay agreed to a lifetime ban on practicing law in Manitoba and payment to the Manitoba Law Society of $5,000.