The Supreme Court of British Columbia has resumed hearings for a class-action lawsuit brought by a non-profit organization against Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and the COVID-19 mandates introduced by the government.
The certification hearings
aim to determine whether to approve the lawsuit, proposed by the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy (CSASPP) on Jan. 26, 2021.
CSASPP said on
its website that its objective is to “obtain any available civil remedy for the maximum number of British Columbians” who were affected by pandemic-related regulatory measures. The group said the public health orders, introduced by Henry and the provincial government, have been “incrementally draconian” and have been widely challenged by physicians, private citizens, business owners, and the academia.
If the case is allowed to proceed, Henry would be required to submit to answering questions, per the
Supreme Court civil rules, the group said. In this case, the parties will have an estimated
three weeks to question Henry on her decision to introduce the mandates, according to Eva Chipiuk, a lawyer who is providing
live Twitter updates of the hearings.
The Epoch Times reached out to Henry and the B.C. Ministry of Health for comment, but didn’t immediately hear back.
Emergency Declaration
The lawsuit “challenges the very premise of the emergency declaration,”
Chipiuk wrote on Twitter.
“To be clear, the basis of this class action lawsuit is whether or not the emergency declaration was legal or reasonable. The rational is that without an emergency, there can be no basis for extraordinary executive powers used by the government,” she said.
CSASPP said that its class action doesn’t “presuppose the fundamental premise that there is an emergency,” saying that “legal challenges that construct their argument upon that assumption seek relief from the court for a limited demographic on the basis that they will be well-behaved and not make the alleged pandemic worse.”
“This is a fatal mistake,” the group said. “This argument leaves the government with the emergency card, even if a tactical victory is achieved in the best case scenario. As long as the government has the emergency card, it will always have a very strong argument for the continued exercise and abuse of extraordinary executive powers.”
The
previous round of hearings started on
Dec. 12, 2022, and was originally set to conclude on Dec. 16, 2022. But things took longer than expected, the group
said.
