By Jason Stephan

family treated in unaccountable, heavy-handed way

MLA Stephan: Conduct of airport detentions violate our fundamental freedoms

Feb 3, 2021 | 10:31 AM

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the “supreme law of Canada”, recognizing in its preamble, the “supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

Under the Charter, everyone has the “Fundamental Freedoms” of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly, and association.

Under the Charter, “every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada” and “to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province”.

This past weekend, the Public Health Agency of Canada forced a young man from Red Deer arriving from the U.S.A. at the Calgary International Airport into isolated quarantine. The young man had in his possession a negative COVID test result, obtained in good faith prior to departure, and was permitted for boarding, however, did not meet the agency’s particular requirements in landing.

All of this was unknown to the young man’s family, who had not seen him for almost two years, were so excited to see him, and were waiting at airport arrivals to take him home.

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This federal agency treated the family in an unaccountable, heavy-handed way. The agency would not tell the young man or his family where he was being taken and for how long. The young man did not have a cell phone and the agency tried to prevent them from even seeing each other. This harshness was unnecessary. The young man’s mother stated that all of this “feels wrong”. She is correct.

The onus of proof is on government to justify limits on our Charter freedoms. Under the Charter, government is required to demonstrate “proportionality” between objectives and limits imposed to achieve them. That in turn, requires demonstration of a “rational connection” between the limit and the objective, and “minimal impairment” of no more than is necessary to accomplish the objective. These foundational Charter principles are to be applied with rigour to government health “measures” to ensure they are “reasonable” and “demonstrably justified”.

The WHO defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

Instead of a societal state of “physical, mental and social well-being”, we are seeing increasing societal contention, disconnection, despair, and hopelessness. This is not healthy.

Principled approaches for every day activities are better than prescriptive approaches seeking to regulate the endless varieties of these activities. A principled approach that supports freedom, is less complex or vulnerable to contradiction.

A principled vision of hope is healthy, requiring government to trust adults to govern themselves, allowing them and their families more freedom to carry on the activities of daily living as they individually see fit, in a good faith respecting reasonable health measures and the rights of their neighbors to do the same.

Jason Stephan is the UCP MLA for Red Deer-South

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of rdnewsNOW or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group. Column suggestions and letters to the editor can be sent to news@rdnewsNOW.com.