I'm stressed as fuck. Dealing with long term unemployment, isolation, a family member who had a mental health breakdown and posted a suicide note 7 days ago, and I thought he was dead for 3 hours (thank God he's safe now!) witnessing illogical Nazi-like restrictions and now curfew laws being enforced,, friends having to close or barely operate their businesses for months, maybe lose their house next. My own income cut by 2/3 this year. Not because I'm lazy or got fired, because my job is connected to restaurants, and selling art at events, and every 2-4 weeks the goalposts on when the rules might allow me to earn an income again move further and further away, and more and more logical fallacies behind the pandemic response become more and more glaringly apparent. With all these thoughts in my head not stopping the repetitive negative parade, I decided a walk without my phone, away from the internet, and that some fresh air was more important to my mental health than the risk of getting a ticket. It was more worth it than getting the ticket. 2 cops had to listen to my story. Had to listen to me tell them "Rules are rules" is how Jewish people ended up in German boxcars. Rules are rules is how slavery was legal. "I don't make the decisions I just obey them" is probably what the guys who dropped the nukes on Japan said to themselves too. Had to listen to me explain the Oakes Test and why these curfews in Quebec are demonstrably illegal, largely thanks to our own health minister admitting plainly that there was no logical reason they could point to to prove they work, while they clearly take away basic rights of millions. Dogs have more rights than humans in Quebec right now. My mental health, needed fresh air and a walk. They didn't care. I better calm down or they'll have to take me to jail because rules are rules.... For taking a walk, alone, on my own dead end street, at 1:45am in a free country my Dad's uncle, my Grandmothers brother, died defending, they're gonna take me to jail if I don't calm down.... But if I had a dog, it would have been OK. This makes me sick to my stomach. During flu season 2018, over 45 hospitals in Quebec were operating well over 100% capacity for months. Several were well over 200% capacity. One report said in some, they were at 300% capacity. People were dying because they had to triage, and put off some procedures. And, healthcare workers were overwhelmed. The government knew all this TWO YEARS before COVID. They did not increase capacity. Again, all those over capacity hospitals were due to systemic failures. Not COVID. COVID didn't exist. And certainly not because a psychologically suffering, lonely person completely by himself outdoors at 1:45am on a dead end street is a real threat to anyone. This isn't about healthcare. It's about causing so much fear in people that they don't even question the rules, and furthermore, accuse anyone who even talks about how they don't make sense - let alone anyone like me who actually dared to BREAK one of them - of being the cause of the problem. If I feel I need to take a mental health walk again, no matter what time of day it is, I will. It's time for the government to be honest, to admit their mistakes in managing this pandemic from the start, and stop the divide and conquer rhetoric in the media that makes an already very difficult situation even more difficult when friends and family who need to be there to support each other, even if only online, are instead arguing about who's been going on vacation, and who has or hasn't been having friends over. Who is "lucky" to be unemployed because the person who still has to work feels they are "expendable", not "essential", that it doesn't matter if curfews are irrational and demonstrably illegal, it's my own stupid fault for breaking the rules and getting a ticket that's a lot more expensive than my rent. It's time to demand honest reporting in the media. Context. Facebook fact checkers love their "missing context". But when the public has spent 10 months getting daily death and case totals that ignore every single other aspect of the data - age, comorbidities, overdoses, suicides, unemployment, mental health services being completely overwhelmed, economic consequences for the entire country and indeed the entire world, individuals financial futures thrown into chaos, domestic abuse, children watching their parents argue about how to spend unemployment cheques that don't even cover their expenses , people dealing with working from home, and home schooling, politicians and "health experts" who constantly change the rules, etc etc etc.... the general public's entire opinion is largely out of context. This HAS to stop. Yes - I broke a law. Is that law itself legal? No. For SEVERAL reasons. The Court in R v Oakes created a two-step balancing test to determine whether a government can justify a law which limits a Charter right. 1. The government must establish that the law under review has a goal that is both “pressing and substantial.” The law must be both important and necessary. Governments are usually successful in this first step. 2. The court then conducts a proportionality analysis using three sub-tests. a. The government must first establish that the provision of the law which limits a Charter right is rationally connected to the law’s purpose. If it is arbitrary or serves no logical purpose, then it will not meet this standard. Response to a) By our own health ministers very public admission, it's not demonstrable that curfews work to limit the spread of COVID, even a little bit. Therefore they are arbitrary and illogical. b. Secondly, a provision must minimally impair the violated Charter right. A provision that limits a Charter right will be constitutional only if it impairs the Charter right as little as possible or is “within a range of reasonably supportable alternatives.”[4] Response to b) They don't minimally impair on rights, they completely obliterate the rights to free association and peaceful assembly for over 1/3 of every day, for over 8% of the entire year, under threat of large financial penalties. c. Finally, the court examines the law’s proportionate effects. Even if the government can satisfy the above steps, the effect of the provision on Charter rights may be too high a price to pay for the advantage the provision would provide in advancing the law’s purpose. Response to c) The law HAS NOT examined proportionate effects, on mental health, on the economy, or any criteria other than the possibility that our healthcare system might become overwhelmed. Based on facts that prove our healthcare system has dealt with even more severe overcrowding in the recent past, and lockdowns and curfews were never imposed before, the whole premise of them being reasonable goes out the window. I'm looking forward to my day in court.