[00:00:00]

Shawn Buckley

So our final witness today is Sherry Strong.

Sherry, if you want to come up and take the stand.

Sherry, can you state your full name for the record spelling your first and last name?

Sherry Strong

Sherry Strong, S-H-E-R-R-Y S-T-R-O-N-G.

Shawn Buckley

And Sherry, do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Sherry Strong

I do.

Shawn Buckley

Now, my understanding is that you are currently the Alberta Director for Children’s Health Defence.

Sherry Strong

Canada.

Shawn Buckley

Canada, yeah. Oh, sorry. Can you just very briefly tell us what that is?

Sherry Strong

It was an organization, the Canadian arm of the American organization that was formerly headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., now Mary Holland, and basically it is designed to address anything that is set up to harm our children, and to protect our children from all the different elements, environmentally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, that are set up to harm our children.

Shawn Buckley

Now, before COVID came along, you were a professional author and public speaker.

Sherry Strong

I was.

Shawn Buckley

Oh, no, we’ll actually describe that because some of us don’t actually appreciate that that can be a career, that your primary source of income can be public speaking.

Sherry Strong

Yes, a lot of my family don’t understand that either.

Shawn Buckley

Yes. Do you want to share with us you know what you spoke about and how that came about.

Sherry Strong

Yeah, I lived in Australia for 22 years. I was, what you would call at that time, a celebrity chef nutritionist, and I got involved in nutrition. I became the Victorian Chair of Nutrition Australia, the curator and co-founder of the World Wellness Project, a lot of other things. But one of the things that I did was, I sat on boards that consulted the Australian government on public health policy.

So when all the COVID nonsense began, I recognized right away that it was not what they were saying it was.

Shawn Buckley

Right. Now, where were you when COVID began we back? Were you back in Canada?

Sherry Strong

Yeah, I’d been back in Canada for 11 years and I had a well-established name and reputation in Australia, 22 years. So it was kind of crazy professionally to come back to Canada with none of that, no one knowing me here, apart from my family. So it took me 11 years, and I rebuilt, and I got back on the speaking circuit. So I was represented by bureaus, and I was being hired by clients around North America to speak at conferences on health and well-being, and beating sugar addiction, and a lot of things related to food and nutrition. I branded myself as a food philosopher, which again also confounded my family.

Shawn Buckley

Right. Now obviously being paid as a public speaker as a career depends on there being conferences and events. So tell us what happened to your business when COVID hit and our friendly government decided to lock us down.

Sherry Strong

Yeah, and I can honestly say I was blindsided. I never imagined that happening. And literally my income and career ended overnight, as I knew it. And then because I recognized what was going on, I couldn’t help but speak out about it. And I was very aware that in the process of speaking out about what was actually going on and the truth of what was actually going on, that that was a killer for any future speaking work because it’s very reputation-based and most of these places are very sensitive and politically correct.

Shawn Buckley

So I just want to make sure that we understand. So the type of clients that were hiring you to give lectures tend to be, I assume, bigger corporations and the like. And they buy into a specific message. And so when you started speaking out, you understood that this was basically going to end your business.

Sherry Strong

Absolutely. I was very aware of it. And even on social media, because I also promote a lot of my work by social media, not only was I very aware that my speaking out would, I have online courses that I sell and things like that, that it would impact that. And if I wrote honestly in my newsletters, it would impact sales from there, but also to the point where I had friendships, decades long, who were very afraid to actually like any of my posts or comment on anything or me to comment on their things because they know that association with me could kill their brand or the brand they represented.

Shawn Buckley

Okay. So pre-COVID, probably people would be liking your stuff all over,

[00:05:00]

and just enjoying being a part of your social media presence. But post-COVID, basically because you were telling truth, you became somebody that was dangerous to associate with online.

Sherry Strong

Yes. Social pariah and all-around dangerous woman.

Shawn Buckley

And how did that make you feel?

Sherry Strong

Well, you know, people talk about being courageous. I never felt, it’s one of those things when you’re a person, and in my career as a nutritionist and, you know, celebrity chef, I lost a lot of work because I was a truth-teller and I wouldn’t promote brands that sold horrible things even though they, to give you an example, I was offered $120,000 to shoot a commercial that was two days, work for a brand of milk that was targeted at children called Calcium, and I turned it down right away. So I didn’t have a problem with that piece of the courage piece. I was afraid for humanity. I was really sad and went through a real dark night of the soul around, that humans couldn’t see through this and what they were willing to do to one another to save their physical assets or their social reputation as opposed to be more concerned about their fellow man or their soul. That was hard.

Shawn Buckley

Yeah, that’s kind of following up. I don’t know if you were here when Danny Bulford was testifying earlier, but that’s been a theme today.

And what are your thoughts on why humans can’t see through this, or couldn’t see through it? I guess they still can’t, a large number.

Sherry Strong

Well, it’s a very complex web that I believe is very well designed to get us addicted, not just to food that dumbs us down and makes us sick and makes great business for other businesses, but our social networks. So I have a friend who literally: by liking my stuff, and if she could actually see through the narrative, her marriage would end, her friends would disappear, her career, which is very high profile, would end. So I am incredibly concerned and worried that we have been manipulated from birth to like things, to become addicted to things, to have social constructs, to even social events, sporting events; I mean, how many people took something they didn’t want to take to go travelling or to attend sporting events? The very fabric of our society: it was like they looked at all the things that we loved and depended on, and I think, were addicted to. And they really pressured us to do things that went against our body, our conscience, and our soul.

Shawn Buckley

I want to switch gears, because you weren’t living in the beautiful province of Alberta before, and you moved here for your parents, and there’s been a couple of experiences with them. Can you share that with us?

Sherry Strong

Yeah, so my mom about eight years ago took an antibiotic and almost died. She went to heart, kidney, and liver failure. It has a black box warning, and she survived; but she was disabled. My father had been looking after her for six years on his own, but approaching eighty he could no longer do that on his own. So in November 2020, my sister said, “Would you come to Alberta and take care of mom and dad?” I found a house and moved them in with me and was taking care of them, and about ten months later my mom got pneumonia and we took her to hospital even though we were really afraid of, because of my work with Children’s Health Defence I have interviewed over a hundred experts, witnesses, victims of the mandates, but I’ve heard many hundreds of more stories of people who aren’t willing to speak out or don’t feel safe speaking out, those kinds of things. So I was afraid to take my mom to the hospital. On the first night we admitted-

Shawn Buckley

Can I just stop you?

Sherry Strong

Yes, of course.

Shawn Buckley

That’s because your mother was not vaccinated. Am I right?

Sherry Strong

Well yes. Yes, not vaccinated and we as a family refused to test as well. And so we were afraid for her care. The night she was admitted, on New Year’s Eve 2021, we had a great doctor. And when people say there’s no good people left in the system, I will deny that because we have met beautiful, good-hearted people, trapped in a very broken system,

[00:10:00]

who are trying to do their best; and for whatever reasons, I’m actually glad they’re still good-hearted people there. So this doctor assured us that my mom would be fine, they wouldn’t try and vaccinate her or test her or that kind of thing. And I went home at about midnight. I came in the next morning and my mother was absolutely terrified. She had been abused by a doctor. A doctor stood at the door and yelled at her for 15 minutes and abused her, yelling at her, and my mom said, “I can hear you, why are you yelling at me?” She said several times and the doctor continued to yell so everyone in the emergency ward could hear, and she said, “Why are you refusing testing? Why are you refusing treatment?” And my mom said, “I’m not refusing treatment, I’m choosing treatment.”

We were very selective about things. We definitely didn’t want a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. That had disabled her, so it would disable her further, things like that. We didn’t want to test. My mom was actually willing to take a swab test as long as it wasn’t one of the official COVID swabs. But they refused to do that. And this woman was so abusive to my mother that my mother, who’s not religious, was reciting the Lord’s Prayer as she left and as I came in because she felt she wasn’t going to make it out of the hospital alive. And I’ve since told that story many times, and I’ve had many people tell me, “You’re so lucky you took your mom out of the hospital that day because had you not she would have been dead.” Because they’ve had family members under the exact same circumstances who had died, and there’s a very important kind of afterward to this story that I think is absolutely significant.

It took me nine months to make a complaint. I went to patient services. I made a complaint with patient services. I went through the College of Physicians, made a complaint. And my intuition said to phone the chief administrator of the hospital. And so that morning I did, this is September 2nd, and I got through to this administrator, and I had a long conversation about the treatment because I said, “My mother’s file will come across your desk but it won’t have her picture and according to your policies it won’t even have her name and I want you to know her story and what happened to her and how your doctors are treating people here who are choosing treatment, not refusing treatment.” And she said to me, she was actually really kind; she listened to me, she was reasonable, and she said, “You know, I’m on the opposite fence of you. I’m fully boosted.” And I said, “Well I suspect you are, but, I said, “as the chief administrator of a hospital you should know that the number one cause of deaths in Alberta, September 2nd at that time, over 3,600, was unknown causes, and as someone who’s administering this and enforcing this to every staff member you should actually know this.”

Now, I don’t know if she was, she felt earnest but it was like she didn’t know. And the significance of this story is that a month later when I was talking to Patient Services, I was saying how lovely this woman is and how compassionate she was and the woman from patient services said, “Oh Sherry, I’m so sorry to tell you, she died unexpectedly and suddenly at work on September 8th.” So she went in the prior week. She actually knew about it. Whether it registered in the incredible timing of it, that I chose that week to make the complaint and I chose to actually speak to her, the irony or the extraordinary nature of it was not lost on me.

Shawn Buckley

I think we’ll just slow down a bit because for people that will be participating in watching your testimony that aren’t from the province of Alberta, they may not understand exactly what you’re saying. So what you’re saying is that in the province of Alberta, the leading cause of death last year, and you can tell me if it was the year before because I think it was too, is actually unexplained cause. So that’s where they’re not attributing it to any cause, and yet there’s no investigation. So here we are where the main cause of death is unexplained and there’s no official explanation, and that’s what you were referring to. Am I correct?

Sherry Strong

Correct. And the Chief Administrator of a hospital said she didn’t know that.

Shawn Buckley

Which is quite amazing, isn’t it?

Sherry Strong

Yeah, it is.

Shawn Buckley

Okay, and then something also happened with your father. Can you share that with us?

Sherry Strong

Yeah, so recently my father was admitted to hospital. We since found out that he has a tumour

[00:15:00]

which is blocking/obstructing his ability to eliminate. And we were again, based on my mother’s experience, a little, well, we were a lot paranoid going into the hospital. But it was the right decision to take him in. So I stayed with him. I camped out on the floor kind of thing, wanting to protect him. And I truly do believe that that also saved his life: not staying over, but being his patient advocate and digitally advocating for him.

When he left the emergency and went up to the second floor, as the nurse was putting him into the room, she said, “Do you know how much you’re costing this hospital?” My father hadn’t been to a hospital in 55 years and the cost that she was referring to was because he wouldn’t test or be vaccinated, and so they had to put on the gear. They had to put on the gowns and the mask and the gloves. Their policy, which I explained, which, “We don’t mind if you don’t wear all those things. It’s your policy not ours, so the cost is basically on you guys, and I’m quite certain my father saved you hundreds of thousands of dollars by not going to the hospital in 55 years.”

The other thing that happened a few days later, and of course, I advocated for him. At one time when they brought a social worker in that said, “How are you doing?” like trying to treat me like I was a mental patient. So I said, “I’m fine how are you?” There was five people in the room and my dad was just overwhelmed. My dad, he’s 80, he’s emaciated, he’s essentially only had liquids for weeks and he’s seriously ill.

And they brought five people in to mediate the medical directive that I had legally filled out correctly, to basically say that it wasn’t valid because I needed two doctors and a social worker to assess that my father wasn’t of the mind to make me his personal medical advocate. Which is all incorrect, but when the five of them walked into the room, my dad was so overwhelmed he started crying.

We had another doctor who, she came in. They have doctors that are there for a week. So seven days and then a new doctor, and then a new doctor, so there’s no continuity except what they read on their system, their multi-billion dollar system that was actually designed as an inventory system not a medical system. So they don’t get all the information. And this one doctor came in, and fortunately, I had said, “Well if you’re not going to respect the directive, at least get my father to call me and put me on speakerphone if you’re going to speak to him when I’m not there because you’re going to have two conversations if you don’t do this: one with him at the time, and then one with me afterwards.”

And this one doctor couldn’t get a hold of me. My mum was on the phone and she had told my doctors, sorry, she told my dad and my mother that surgery wasn’t even likely a possibility because the cancer was riddled throughout his entire system.

There was not one test that they did that could have given her that information. And when I spoke to her the next day she tried to say my dad didn’t understand what she was saying. I said, “My mum is very lucid and she was shaken to the core by what you said as well.” And I said, “What test were you referring to, to actually give my father that information?” And she tried to deny it and I said, “Because there’s no test. They’ve identified there’s a tumor. But we’ve not had a biopsy, we’ve not agreed to a biopsy. So there’s no way you can even say that there’s cancer in his body, let alone throughout his body.” And when she came into his room to discuss this with me, I said, “Yesterday my father was hopeful about surgery. This morning he asked me about medically assisted death. You took away his hope.”

And there are many instances. These are the ones that stand out of bias in care. I know from my own personal experience, from the stories that I’ve heard, that bias in care literally can kill people. So we have a very broken system. There are still good people in that system, but it’s very scary to actually navigate that, and as you probably gather, I’m not a wallflower. I will stand up for my dad, and I will fight for my dad. And that poor nurse who also suggested he get a COVID test and vaccine; a young new nurse bore my wrath, so that was another instance.

He went in and did all his things with my dad and then said,

[00:20:00]

“Well, why don’t you get tested? Why don’t you get a COVID vaccine. It’s going to protect you. You’ll be able to live longer, that kind of thing. My father was furious. So I know that bias of care actually does cost lives. And the elderly are treated differently. There’s more of a disposable attitude towards the elderly in hospitals; I’ve witnessed it. And I have many other witnesses who will corroborate that.

Shawn Buckley

Right. Now, to end on a good foot, my understanding is, actually in your life some really positive things have happened since our COVID pandemic.

Sherry Strong

Yes, I was worried that you may not want to hear this because we want to basically say that the COVID response was wrong, and it was. It was absolutely wrong. But what I do know that in every tragedy there’s the opportunity for humanity to rise up. What I have witnessed in my own life is: not a big fan of six months of winter a year, I definitely got weak and soft in Vancouver and Melbourne. But I’ve always said that cold cultures breed warm people. And coming to Alberta, specifically, what I have found is I lost a lot of friends that I shared interests with. I still have friends, even though I see things differently to them because we share values and we truly love each other, but what I’ve gained is a community of people.

Honestly, it feels like It’s a Wonderful Life. That kind of community of people who are actually there for each other, salt of the earth people, who have common values, who will help one another out, who don’t always agree on everything. don’t see the things the exact same way, but they understand what’s really important for us. As hard as it’s been, I have a bank of memories with my parents, of caring for them, in a way that COVID wouldn’t have brought the people in this room, the people that I’m meeting, I never would have met any of you had it not been for this, what we would all say is a terrible event.

Another like big surprise is: I did go on dating sites when I came here; it was really scary, and I had one person who actually wished me dead when he found out that I wouldn’t get vaccinated or test and also said, “It’s so good that you weren’t able to reproduce” because I was not able to have children. It was a big thing in my life.

I met someone else on that site who said, “This might change things for you, but next week I’m taking custody of my one-month-old niece.” And I said, “Can I help?” We never ended up dating, but she now calls me mama, and I get to see her and care for her and love her and have that experience of having a child that never would have happened if not for all of this. So yeah, the number one thing is for all the inhumanity that we’ve seen I think one of the best gifts of being within what we call the freedom movement, people who are truly interested in other humans, is there’s a richness in life that I only thought was in Capra movies.

I probably think the last thing, too, is all of this is really deep in my faith, not just in aspects of humanity, but in our Creator, in God. I had kind of a superficial relationship and belief beforehand. I would say I’m spiritual but not religious. Although I’m not religious, I have a greater faith in something, a Creator, and something way bigger than us, and a grander plan. That’s the thing that through all the darkness and the dark nights of the soul that that keeps me realizing there’s a phrase that I’ve used a mantra that I’ve used that’s kept me going: Love wins, Good wins, God wins.

Shawn Buckley

So that’s a beautiful ending. So I’ll ask if the commissioners have any questions And they don’t.

Sherry, on behalf of the National Citizens Inquiry I sincerely thank you for your testimony. And I have to say I’m particularly touched with the end of your testimony. It’s beautiful.

Sherry Strong

Thank you.

[00:25:10]

Final Review and Approval:  Anna Cairns, August 30, 2023.   

The evidence offered in this transcript is a true and faithful record of witness testimony given during the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) hearings. The transcript was prepared by members of a team of volunteers using an “intelligent verbatim” transcription method.

For further information on the transcription process, method, and team, see the NCI website: https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/about-these-transcripts/

Credentials

• Alberta Director of the Children’s Health Defense

Summary

The Alberta Director for Children’s Health Defense Canada, a previous board member who was consulted regarding Australian health policies, and a professional author and public speaker for health and nutrition. Her career and income “literally was lost overnight” at the beginning of the pandemic. Despite being fully aware that speaking out about the mandates, etc that she might lose her reputation and career, she did so. She was upset witnessing what people were willing to do to “save their social reputation” vs being concerned about their fellow man, or their own soul.

She was living with her elderly parents, helping care for her disabled mother, all three of them were not vaccinated. Her mother was admitted to hospital for pneumonia and was abused verbally by a doctor. Sherry complained formally about this and found out later that the hospital contact who she felt was helpful and admitted that they were fully vaccinated, died soon thereafter “suddenly and accidentally”. Later her father was admitted to hospital and received inferior care and pressure to get vaccinated from the nurses that were to be treating him at the hospital.

Note: the leading cause of death in Alberta at this time was “unexplained causes.”