Today the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) released a policy briefing entitled Reconciling Civil Liberties and Public Health in the Response to COVID-19, co-authored by several CHLPE members. Click to download the report or its executive summary.

The RSC has broadly developed resources and reports to ensure open access to independent, evidence-based science regarding COVID-19: https://rsc-src.ca/en/covid-19.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia released its decision in Cambie Surgeries Corporation v. British Columbia (Attorney General). The plaintiffs claimed that provisions in the Medicare Protection Act violate rights under ss. 7 and 15 of the Charter, specifically the right to life, liberty, and security of the person and the right to equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination. The court did not find an infringement of either section (finding that an infringement of security of the person was nonetheless in accordance with principles of fundamental justice). The case is expected to end in the Supreme Court of Canada.
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See also the recent book Is Two-Tier Health Care the Future?, a dive into the public-private health care debate in Canada.

Vulnerabilities and interconnectedness at the centre of the COVID-19 pandemic are examined in this new series of articles in Policy Options. At issue are the vulnerabilities of people harmed by the virus directly as well as those harmed by our measures to slow the virus’s march; vulnerabilities in our institutions, governance and legal structures; and vulnerabilities in other countries and the global level.
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Professor Patrick Fafard (Public Policy) is first author on a study of to what extent messaging by provincial chief medical officers of health varied across jurisdictions and over time in the early months of the pandemic.
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Professor Chidi Oguamanam (Law) addresses the lack of credible statistics on the extent of the COVID-19 infection in African countries and the absence of significant palliatives for ordinary citizens, businesses and corporations.
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As countries scramble to develop a vaccine to combat COVID-19, consider the possibility that although your taxes are funding a great deal of that research and testing, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be inoculated if and when a vaccine becomes available. Why? Because it’s possible that the patent will be owned by a pharmaceutical company that will decide who can get it and how much they’ll have to pay for it. The Ottawa Citizeninterviews Colleen Flood on the conception and delivery of the book Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, where 40 contributors address this and many similar topics.
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