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CALGARY: The Justice Centre today announces a court application has been filed to compel Dr. Deena Hinshaw to re-attend court for further cross-examination in the constitutional challenge to her lockdown orders. The application alleges that Dr. Hinshaw knowingly withheld evidence from the court regarding her knowledge of the dangers and harms of forced masking on children. The Application is brought jointly by Leighton Grey, Q.C. – on behalf of the Justice Centre for Heights Baptist Church, Northside Baptist Church, Erin Blacklaws, and Tory Tanner – and Jeffrey Rath, counsel for Rebecca Ingram. A court hearing is scheduled for Friday, August 26, 2022, to reopen the case based on new evidence.
The application also requests that the Court require Dr. Hinshaw to produce all of her recommendations to the Kenney government related to her own Covid lockdown orders, as well as to require Dr. Hinshaw to answer all questions which were previously objected to by counsel for the government of Alberta on the basis of Cabinet Confidentiality.
Dr. Hinshaw was cross-examined in the court challenge to her health orders on April 4-7, 2022. Since her cross-examination, in July 2022, documents which Premier Jason Kenney’s cabinet had previously claimed confidentiality over were ordered released to the public by the Honourable Justice Dunlop, on July 13, 2022, in a separate, unrelated court case CM vs. Alberta. The now-public documents contain a memo generated by the Premier’s office, sent to both Premier Kenney and Dr. Hinshaw, regarding lack of evidence to justify forced public masking and the dangers to children from such orders. The Alberta government failed to disclose the existence of these documents in the Ingram case.
According to the Application, the Alberta government-generated memo states that:
- There is insufficient direct evidence of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing transmission of Covid in educational settings;
- That there are harmful effects of mask wearing on children; and
That masks can:
- Disrupt learning;
- Interfere with children’s social development;
- Interfere with children’s emotional development;
- Interfere with children’s speech development;
- Impair verbal and non-verbal communication;
- Impair emotional signalling; and
- Impair facial recognition.
During her cross-examination in April, Dr. Hinshaw was specifically asked whether she was aware of any evidence of harms to elementary school children from being compelled to wear masks. Dr. Hinshaw answered this question before the court in April in the negative. The Application contends Dr. Hinshaw’s answers to this line of questions were false, and that she failed to disclose her knowledge of the harms to children from forced masking.
The application asserts that it is clear that there were a significant number of studies in Dr. Hinshaw’s possession or control which in fact did show evidence of harm to children from forced masking. Dr. Hinshaw’s health orders required forced public masking, including masking of elementary-aged children in all schools.
The government filed a written brief on August 12, 2022, in the CM Case. Contrary to their position and evidence in the Justice Centre case, in that brief, they argue that the CMOH orders were essentially policy decisions and not medical ones. At paragraph 81 they state: “the CMOH, the Public Health Act s. 29 and all resulting orders were cogs in a much larger machine.”
“The Canadian provinces and the country as a whole have been under authoritarian-style rule by health officials for over two years”, states Marty Moore, lawyer at the Justice Centre. “The ongoing scrutiny by the courts of the constitutionality of health official’s unprecedented power remains of the utmost importance to Canadians.”
