Opening Statement

“I would like to say that this hearing, even though I understand my employer wants to treat it as just about those incidents that happened in 2022, involves many things that happened before 2022 that are very much related to this hearing.

This is exactly about the fear of reprisal for expressing concerns or important information.

As you mentioned, Your Honour, at the end of the hearing in February, no one at that point questioned the quality and validity of my data. It is all about why I did what I did with this data and information. That is where the focus of my presentation will be.

As I stated before, there were two problems that existed before the pandemic: political pressures and fear of reprisal.

These later became the pillars of my advocacy for public service professionals when I was running for the position of Vice-President of PIPSC, exactly on these issues.

Even before COVID, I was already using Public Service Employee Survey data to monitor some of those problems.

They directly relate to legal principles recognized in Fraser and Haydon, which we will reference here. These recognize that the duty of loyalty in the public service is not absolute and that public-interest considerations, particularly those involving the life, health and safety of the population, need to be assessed.

I believe these principles are directly related to my grievance.

However, I must also emphasize that I never criticized the government. On the contrary, I repeatedly praised it in many ways. [ Referring to great people who work there and also to the development of the Open Canada policy, which made all government data open by default and the Scientific Integrity policy.]

Everything I have done was intended to help my colleagues and Canadians by developing tools to make official data easier to understand.

What I also want to mention here is that what I saw in the data was very important for the well-being of Canadians.

We just recently had the Allison Inquiry, which recorded testimony from people who were injured by the vaccines. We had other evidence from Order Paper Questions and ATIPs about the same information, which was not available at that time.

But a very important statement that I want to make is this:

I believe that the outcome of this hearing will signal what kind of public service and what kind of Canada we are moving toward.

A country where the evidence is driven by political narratives, or a country where political narratives are driven by the evidence.

A country where professionals who raise concerns about political pressures affecting public safety are punished, or a country where these professionals are protected from punishment for communicating data and evidence that are important to the health and safety of Canadians.

The last thing I would like to say is that today is a very important day for me personally.

On this day, October 20, my mother died of myeloma, which was caused by radiation from Chernobyl. She died at the young age of 61 because of the effects of radiation from the Chernobyl explosion.

I dedicate this hearing to my mother and also to my father, who was a physicist at that time.

Even though all the narratives and television channels were saying that it was safe to go to the parades, and everyone was being encouraged to go into the streets, he knew that we should not just blindly listen to the narratives on the screen.

He used his own Geiger counter and measured the radiation. And the radiation was extremely high.

He saved hundreds of children, including me, from radiation exposure exactly 40 years ago because he did not comply at that time with the policies of the government, which instructed everyone to keep quiet and go to the parades on May 1.

Indeed, he did exactly the opposite. He sent me, my brother and many other children away and advised us to leave as soon as possible after April 26, even though the narratives were saying exactly the opposite.

This brings another parallel with my case because I felt a very similar sentiment when I started seeing, with my own device—with my data tools, which only I had at that time—that there were many red flags that led to my own decision not to take the second dose.

I thought these were very important for all Canadians to know, so that they could also make informed decisions based on the measurements I had made with my device—the data visualization tools I had developed.

So again, I dedicate this hearing to my mother and my father.”