December 22, 2021
A city police officer who has compared COVID-19 vaccination rules to Nazi genocide says he’s resigned from the Calgary Police Service. 
Former constable Brian Denison, who was once a member of the service’s hate crimes unit, said he quit the force after being suspended without pay last month and told he couldn’t speak publicly about a city policy that states officers who aren’t fully vaccinated must submit to regular testing. https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
“I’ve been muzzled by the police service,” Denison told a downtown anti-vax rally on Saturday.
“I turned in my resignation because I could not abide by what they were doing . . . their orders are wrong, do not listen to them.”
CPS on Monday confirmed Denison is no longer employed by the police service.
Denison, who was with CPS for 22 years, called for other officers to follow his example.
“Let me be clear about the CPS — they don’t own you . . . the government doesn’t own you and can’t tell you what you put in your body,” he told the cheering crowd.
In a video he recorded while in uniform in late September, he said society’s widening exclusions of the unvaccinated was headed down a similar path taken by Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
“ Those who are vaccinated, a lot of them, look down on us that are unvaccinated . . . it’s very reminiscent of the world war Hitler was persecuting against the Jews, ” he said.
- The 1933 to 1945 Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and millions of others, including homosexuals, Roma, leftist political opponents and Soviet POWs.
On Saturday, Denison said Canadian governments’ COVID-19 vaccination policies show “the correlations are there — what happened in history — and they’re happening again.”
Last month, a leader of the city’s Jewish community said that comparison is grossly inaccurate and offensive, but said he was willing to discuss the issue with Denison.
The ex-police officer said he’ll never accept a COVID-19 vaccine he calls experimental.
But infectious disease experts say the vaccines have been strenuously tested and been proven highly effective in preventing deaths and severe illnesses, pointing out the vast majority of fatal infections and ICU admissions are among the non-immunized.
The CPS says 93 per cent of its employees are now fully vaccinated.
Earlier this month, CPS Chief Mark Neufeld insisted there are no hard exclusions for its officers and that if the service didn’t offer free COVID-19 testing for its members, there would be staffing challenges.
He said the decision to apply for more at-home test kits from the province came from a need to safeguard front-line service levels, even though the city policy covering the Calgary Police Service required employees who weren’t fully immunized by Dec. 1 to pay for their own COVID tests.
That move angered Mayor Jyoti Gondek, who said other city workers will seek the same treatment.
The City of Calgary’s vaccination mandate required employees to declare their vaccination status by Nov. 1. If they hadn’t received two shots to protect against COVID-19 by then, they’d have to submit to regular testing with take-home kits provided by the city while going through mandatory education about the vaccines.
Dec. 1 had been the deadline for workers to prove they were fully vaccinated or start getting regular COVID tests from “ authorized vendors ” at their own expense.
— With files from Meghan Potkins and Madeline Smith
Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn
