We invite applications from JD students/ JD graduates interested in pursuing a Master in Laws (LLM) project with a focus on how human life cycles are understood. We hope to hear from JD students who have an interest in health law, geriatric law, maternal health law, Indigenous law, and others. The legal and health care communities are becoming aware that their abilities to understand and respect all bodies of knowledge regarding birth, life, and death are still minimal. Co-supervised by Professors Jennifer Chandler and Signa Daum Shanks, the LLM student will have an opportunity to broaden their academic efforts in health law, Indigenous law, and the history of health sciences reinforcing colonizing attitudes about the value of Indigenous knowledge. Finding in thhe amount of $15,000 is available. (English only)

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Following on from CHLPE's 2021 conference on organ donation and transplantation, Jennifer Chandler spearheaded a collaboration with the Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program to publish a number of fast-fact documents to help us all understand the issues in simple and plain language. Nine documents cover specific issues ranging across opt-in, opt-out, living donation, donation following medical assistance in dying, and many others.

See also our YouTube channel for complete conference videos.

Professor Monique Potvin Kent is the author of a new report funded by Heart & Stroke looking at social media advertising of junk food. These online conversations are driven not only by brands but by individuals, representing a newer form of marketing called user-generated content. Younger people are especially vulnerable to this because of their greater trust and familiarity with people within their social networks...

See also Toronto Star, La Presse op eds.

In a recent interview with CBC, former minister of sport MP Kirsty Duncan related her own story of being abused as an athlete and repeated her call for a national judicial inquiry into abuse in sport. There is mounting pressure on current Minister Pascale St-Onge and the federal government to convene such an inquiry. The campaign has gained momentum in recent weeks after a group of more than 100 scholars signed an open letter in support. Daphne Gilbert was a signatory to that letter and penned an op ed on the topic—you can read the full text in the Ottawa Citizen.

CHLPE's annual conference—and our first hybrid online/in-person one—wrapped up in October. Full panel videos are available on our YouTube channel. This year the topic was border control during COVID and in pandemics to come. Here borders include not just national but also provincial/state borders as well as "borders" within locales like hospitals and long-term care homes. Panels covered history, communication, long-term care, psychiatric institutions, homelessness, migrants and refugees, international case studies and law, vaccine passports and technologies, and more.

An outbreak of Ebola in Uganda has killed dozens of people since it was announced in September. Efforts have been hampered by the fact that no approved vaccine exists for this form of the virus, the less common Ebola-Sudan species. And yet a viable vaccine candidate produced more than a decade ago in a Canadian government lab has spent years sitting on a shelf because of a medical research and development system that is driven by commercial gain rather than by public health needs. Jason Nickerson & Adam Houston write in Globe & Mail...