240508 REPLAY Alberta Prosperity Project Webinar: Canada's Covid: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic

Original broadcast July 2023, join us for a discussion with Marco Navarro-Genie, Dr. Dennis Modry, and Kerry Lambert on Marco's and Barry Cooper's book "Canada's Covid: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic" which deals with the political and social dimensions of the reaction to COVID-19. The moral panic accompanying and compounding the medical and public health responses to COVID remains a prominent feature of Canadian public policy, even after four years. We explore the question of why policy makers persist in promoting fear. This is a political question, not a question of epidemiology. Without disputing the seriousness of COVID-19 for some Canadians, we find the overall national response to COVID has been excessive.

The Truckers’ Convoy in the winter of 2022 raised questions that the government remains unprepared to answer. Those who have embraced what we call the Plague Story—including the subsidized media—see nothing wrong with the state deploying tyrannical measures and undermining citizens’ rights. The result has been an increase in the power of experts (and medical bureaucrats). This bureaucratic tyranny is the worst because its power is impersonal, anonymous, and cannot be easily undone. The ambitions of bureaucrats and politicians in Canada are well served by the introduction of this emergency mode of governance. Hopefully the arguements in this podcast and, especially in the book, will help Canadians to recognize and resist the permanent establishment of bureaucratic tyranny.

May 8, 2024