It Is Not Enough To End Vaccine Mandates, They Must Be Banned

Many Canadians are happy to see provincial governments, and now even the federal government ending COVID-19 restrictions, mask mandates, and worst of all, COVID-19 vaccine mandates for certain occupations and activities, but is that really enough? 

The fact that the government had the capability to mandate vaccines that did not stop the spread of the virus they were meant to fight is quite troubling. In some provinces like Ontario, they have still not scrapped the digital infrastructure for the mandates, making it so that businesses can still continue discriminating against customers based on vaccine status.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is tacitly endorsing discrimination, and even if you think businesses should be allowed to deny service to whomever they please (which is a fair argument), it is undeniable that nobody would care about vaccine status if the government did not tell them to care.

Even though it would be foolish for a business, especially a small business, to continue preventing the unvaccinated from entering their facilities, no doubt some will continue to, due in large part to government and media conditioning on the issue of vaccine status.

We have a two-pronged issue here when it comes to the vaccine mandates.

1. The government still has the unconstitutional power to mandate vaccines.

2. Society is now socially conditioned to care about vaccine status due to government policy.

This is exactly why the use of vaccine mandates needs to be banned, the negatives greatly outweigh the positives on this issue. 

Without a government mandate, people already get vaccinated against certain flu strains, or other viruses if they deem them enough of a risk to their health. Vaccine mandates only get more people to comply who likely were not at significant risk of harm, and the mandate itself may make more people suspicious of the effectiveness/safety of the vaccine. 

Government mandates are simply both ineffective as well as against the principles established within the Canadian Charter and Bill of Rights. 

On top of that, vaccine mandates, along with mask mandates and other restrictions, have had a detrimental social effect on Canadian society. They have made people highly antagonistic and paranoid of those who don’t follow the ineffective rules and made others overly suspicious of the government (which is not to say it is totally unjustified).

The double-masker who refuses to talk to their unvaccinated family members, and every crackpot conspiracy theorists are creations of government policy and the overreach of power.

A society where increasingly people are either comfortable with the type of authoritarianism that was unleashed in the Freedom Convoy by the federal government or completely without faith in any institution is a society that cannot function properly in the long run.

To both restrain governmental power and to try and repair our society from what felt like a two-year-long social experiment, it is vital that the use of vaccine mandates be banned in the future. Civil liberties and civil cohesion are more important than medical bureaucrats’ opinions on what people should do with their own bodies.