I love to write but sometimes I am just too tired. Then I came upon a brilliant and really obvious idea, I could delegate!

As it happens I live with writers so I didn’t have very far to look for my first guest writer, my partner of almost forty years, Joe Behar.

Joe Behar’s report on the National Citizen’s Inquiry will follow this prologue. Joe and our son Bliss gave testimony on the second day of three day conference held in Truro, N.S. and I am so glad that they did.

Members of the public and Government Members of Parliament had been calling for a public inquiry into the government’s policies during the pandemic since 2020. NCI was launched in 2022 by the former Leader of the Official Opposition and Member of Parliament, Preston Manning. Testimony is currently being collected in Toronto (March 30th to April 1st).

Personally, it was beyond satisfying to see my loved ones being acknowledged and their opinions valued. But in the bigger picture, I am most glad that their words, along with all the other testimonies from across Canada, are being recorded and documented for history. If you would like to see their testimony go to 7:50 in this link.

The statement that we are living in unprecedented time has become as common as dirt, but remains true. Some call it the Fifth Industrial Revolution. To be present while the infrastructure of society is shifting on a global stage, while founding notions of our civil society, such as individual rights or freedom of speech, are twisting in the wind, is a remarkable time to be alive.

Who better to comment on the proceedings than a historian? Joe has a PhD in British History and has worked for the Federal government for the last twenty years.

A Report on The National Citizen’s Inquiry

By Joe Behar

I went to Truro recently to testify at the National Citizen’s Inquiry into the pandemic madness that we’re told by our leaders is almost over now. They can’t drop the “almost” quite yet. Now is not the time, our leaders tell us, to relax our vigilance or to ask questions about the harm their pandemic response has caused.

But that’s not what the Canadian citizens who have banded together to convene this Inquiry think. For them the time is long past due to hear from ordinary people who were scarred by hysterical and irrational pandemic policies. Unlike the official commissions and “rapporteurs” and panels of “experts” that tell us how to feel about what we experienced, this Inquiry is meant to give a voice to folk who were silenced, gaslit, marginalized, cancelled.

And what better place to hear from ordinary Canadians than Truro, an unpretentious town in the centre of the maritimes that includes a community college, a flourishing First Nation reserve, and the trans-Canada highway running right through it. Truro is quintessentially Atlantic Canadian.

The setting for the three days of testimonies was suitably unpretentious: a large conference room in the Best Western, where a crowd of about 200 people filled every seat and listened to each witness with rapt attention.

The witnesses were varied: there were doctors who spoke in detail about the mechanisms of mRNA technology, the data from trials, their experience treating COVID patients and staffing COVID wards. There were people who suffered damage from the shots, which they either took willingly or in many cases through coercion.

There were people, such as myself, who lost or were suspended from their jobs for choosing not to take the shots. And there was my son, the only teenager to testify, who spoke about the devastating impact mandate policies had on his educational opportunities and outlook on life.

We heard that medical professionals were disciplined for practicing medicine in the way they had been trained. We heard that people were dismissed and abandoned after suffering debilitating damage from their shots. We heard that communities and families had been divided by cynical propaganda.

At the end of every testimony the audience stood and applauded, and witnesses were thanked and hugged and comforted as they walked back to their seats.

So interesting were the proceedings that my son and I chose to drive back to Truro the next day – a three hour round trip – to listen to more testimonies and to bask in the comradeship of our fellows. To be together with rational, independent minded and informed people is an all too rare experience these days, and the sustenance and hope that we take from this experience is essential for us.

As I looked around the room at these people who the crucible of the pandemic had exposed as clear minded and awake, I mused on the make up of the group. It was a diverse group, politically and economically: there were conservatives and liberals, working and middle class.

They were united not along the usual tribal lines, but by their thoughtfulness and willingness to adjust their opinions to the facts in front of them. They listened attentively to the highly technical presentations by the doctors and scientists who spoke. This was clearly a group that had done their research.

The testimonies were all recorded and can be viewed on the National Citizen’s Inquiry web site. They are such a valuable and important record for those who one day will want to review this mad period in our history.

We won’t see the Citizens’ Inquiry reported in the mainstream media and so to most people it will be as if it never happened. But as with everything over the past few years, there are receipts. And those receipts will show that there are good and kind people in regular, ordinary Canada who have their eyes, and their hearts, wide open.