Unvaccinated: How Canada Turned to Hatred & Division

Now #5 on Amazon.ca

We are nearing the 1-year anniversary of the publication my book, Unvaccinated: How Canada Turned to Hatred & Division.

The book had a slow launch in 2022 mostly due to the fact the title and content was censored on most social media platforms.

But I am seeing an uptake in 2023 with more and more people waking up to what transpired in 2021. When for the first time in history we segregated society based on their personal health choices.

This week, the book is #5 in Politics on Amazon.

Anyways, to mark the one year anniversary, I’d like to share some of my favourite chapters in the month ahead. So today, here is Chapter 1 where I summarize how our obsession with mRNA vaccines and division began.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

“Vaccines won't be mandatory. That's not the way we do things in Canada.” – Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada (February 2021, 6 months before promising to make them mandatory…)

Like most people in the world, I was excited when Pfizer announced that they had developed a COVID vaccine in November 2020. I even praised the news on my personal blog. I was genuinely optimistic of what the prospects of a new vaccine could do to our collective effort to end the pandemic. 

As Canada and most countries in the world started receiving their vaccine doses, we rightly prioritized the elderly and immunocompromised. The data on the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine was limited up to that point but we already knew how dangerous COVID was to this demographic. So, we didn’t need to do very much cost-benefit analysis to determine that the shots should be rolled out to those most at risk very quickly. 

That was a great strategy and every expert agreed with it. Once we vaccinated the most at risk, the vaccines were quickly encouraged on the mass population. That again, was not a bad idea. But what followed made me shake my head. Vaccines soon became a status symbol. Many people updated their social media profile photos to reflect that they were “vaccinated” or “fully-vaccinated” (a term that become quite ambiguous later). 

In the early days of the vaccine campaign, vaccines were so sought after that people developed jealousy and resentment to those who were prioritized. The government prioritized certain regions over others. They identified certain higher-risk groups over others. One group that was rightly prioritized were aboriginal communities in Canada. This was because many of them have limited access to health care services, which means that offering them protection against this virus was important. Especially the ones in remote Northern locations.

Vaccines were meant to go to high-risk communities and individuals but many people who were not at risk also wanted the opportunity to be the first to claim a “fully vaccinated” status on Facebook. I personally knew many people who didn’t previously identify as Metis, jump the priority line by identifying as such. Many people who had otherwise virtue-signalled how important it was that we prioritized aboriginal groups utterly disrespected them by stealing their heritage and identity for their personal status gains. Many unions and advocacy group pleaded that their members should be next in line. Some jurisdictions prioritized first responders, others prioritized teachers or nursing home caregivers. 

If you were in Canada in the Spring of 2021, you likely have a story of someone you felt got unfair preferential treatment over another when accessing their vaccine. Some were upset that a young and healthy firefighter would be prioritized over a 60-year-old retiree. Comparable grievances could be found in the media daily. Political leaders pleaded that their regions should be prioritized over others. Many used it as a political wedge issue to blame opposing parties for mishaps related to the acquisition and distribution of vaccines. Suffice to say, our environment of competitiveness and status with respect to mRNA vaccines paved the way for the insanity that followed. 

Contrary to what we were told in 2022, the original aim of the vaccine was not just to protect yourself. The main benefit, we were told, was that it would prevent you from getting and spreading the virus and you would be protecting your community. That was the messaging to younger demographics who were at a relatively low risk of getting a serious case of COVID. In May 2021, the Government of Ontario’s message was clear when it started rolling out the vaccine to younger age groups: “vaccines can help protect you and your family from COVID. They are an important tool to help stop the spread of the virus, build immunity in Ontario, and allow us to safely resume normal life.”

After the world experienced the Omicron variant and we started seeing a disproportionate number of cases in vaccinated people, the messaging around vaccines quickly changed to focus on personal protection and not on community spread. But that’s a topic for another chapter. 

At the beginning, the selling point on vaccines for most people was to protect your community. We were all in this together and everyone was expected to do their part to protect their community. I’ve always understood the value in community protection offered by vaccines; however, I was very concerned with the mania surrounding me during the early days. It was a sign that society was going to have a complicated relationship with this vaccine. 

By late Spring, most prioritized groups along with those who jumped the queues were proudly fully vaccinated. The government was lowering the overall age eligibility for vaccination every month. But even with most people under 40 not even eligible for a vaccine yet, governments started their segregation strategies. In June 2021, the Ontario government announced that they would now allow residents of long-term care homes to give hugs to their visitors if they were fully vaccinated. After being limited to only a few visitors for almost a year, seniors who were anxious to finally hug their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, were out of luck as younger age groups weren’t yet given the green light to offer hugs. 

The same month, the province of Manitoba lifted its ban on out-of-province visitors but only to fully vaccinated travellers. New-Brunswick followed suit.  At the time, a large portion of the Canadian population wasn’t even eligible to be fully vaccinated. Canadians’ constitutional right to unhindered travel across our country was finally given back, but only to a portion of the population. 

As more and more provinces were fully opening, we started seeing glimpses of returning to normal life. August 2021 felt a lot like August 2019. Families got together. My own family hosted a large family reunion with over fifty people converging, hugging, and laughing for the first time in over a year. It seemed normal life was coming back, but then something happened. The science didn’t appear to be changing. There was no big change in the data or forecasts for COVID cases. For the next several months, our country’s COVID strategies were entirely dictated by the political science. Justin Trudeau and his minority government was finding it difficult to govern, and rumours were swirling that the Liberal party would call an election at any time to try and re-secure a majority government. As the current party in power, the Liberals had the advantage to decide in exactly which five-week period they would poll best. With his citizenry finally enjoying one normal month, people’s negative attitudes towards current governments were at an all-time low. So, the writs of election were issued. 

Because this was one of the shortest election campaigns in history (lasting just 36 days), party leaders got to work right away. Justin Trudeau and his campaign advisors had a plan on how to get most of the country on his side. They would divide and conquer. By mid-August 82% of the country’s 12+ population had received at least one dose and 70% were fully vaccinated. Even though this rate was one of the highest in the world, it still created the landscape for a great wedge issue. Leaders all agreed to create division among the country, and they all fought to see who represented the 82% better.  

Just months before, Justin Trudeau had specifically told reporters several times that he did not want to see vaccines be mandatory. His famous line was “that’s not the way we do things in Canada”. He along with many other politicians and health authorities made similar claims at a time when the country was in the middle of devastating COVID waves. So, in Canada forcing vaccines wasn’t something we did as a country during a health crisis, but it became something completely acceptable in the middle of summer when the country was barely registering COVID related hospital overcrowding. It seemed obvious to me that the desire to divide the country on vaccine status only became a reality when it was politically convenient. In the Spring or even early Summer, threatening to take away the job or travel privileges of 60% of the population would not have looked positively on any leader. But once you got 80% exempt from punishment, it was a much easier pill to swallow. 

What many described as the most important federal election of our generation was decided based on vaccination policies. Specifically related to a single vaccine for a disease that had a 99.8% survival rate. Any time Justin Trudeau faced criticism on his foreign policy, or economic policies, he would deflect and just say that vaccines would solve all our problems. The remaining unvaccinated population was to blame for all current problems or future problems that would arise. If the Conservatives attacked him, his rebuttal was that they were pandering to anti-vaxxers for refusing to endorse a plan to fire all federally regulated unvaccinated employees. If the media occasionally found the courage to ask him a serious question, he would accuse all those against vaccine mandates of risking the health of all of Canada’s children. Around this time, many unvaccinated people felt the most afraid of what our society was becoming. The infamous “those people” became a common phrase from our dear leader. At every election stop, he took the chance to denounce “those people”. 

Less than a week before the election, in one his most famous interviews, Justin Trudeau boldly described unvaccinated Canadians as extremists, misogynists and racists. He went on to ask Canadian voters if our country “should tolerate these people?”

The media also jumped on board. With people’s anxieties around COVID fading, media outlets needed another issue to keep people glued to their television screens. The war against the unvaccinated promoted by Justin Trudeau was it. On August 20th, the CBC published an article titled: Conservative opposition to mandatory vaccinations is 'irresponsible' and 'dangerous'

Yes, now being vaccinated was not enough. You were still considered dangerous and irresponsible if you didn’t want to force your fellow Canadians to take this vaccine as well. Most of the country bought in. At this time, my wife and I received our first un-invitations to people’s homes. Most unvaccinated people remember September 2021 as the time the world officially succumbed to hatred. With the media reporting on the forced vaccination debate every day, it went from a fringe idea that was denounced by most politicians’ mere months ago, to a perfectly acceptable position. Every day new organizations were announcing vaccination policies. Eventually every province fell in line with the new preferred narrative. With strong encouragement and financial incentives from the federal government, every one of Canada’s ten provinces rolled out their own vaccine passport system within a month of each other.

News outlets ran surveys every day asking if Canadians supported vaccines mandates. They kept asking these divisive questions until they got the results they were looking for and then publish misleading articles claiming 70% or 80% of Canadians supported vaccine mandates. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with someone at the time who told me: “I don’t think we should have vaccine mandates but that’s what most people want so it will happen…” It was happening. Many rational people who saw the flaws in such policies went along with it because they feared being left out of the majority. That’s when I knew we were in deep trouble. This was just the beginning of my country’s slow, painful descent into the greatest division we ever seen. Families were broken up. Friendships lost forever. Entire communities divided like never before. Many people don’t like the word hatred to describe what transpired. But as I’ll describe in this book, I can’t think of a better term. People had legitimate reasons to disagree with choices of unvaccinated people. But the policies, actions and messaging we saw went beyond simple disagreements. We witnessed pure and undeniable hatred. Hatred for not making the same health choices. 

Check out the rest of the book on Amazon.ca.