When the herd panics, a stampede results: a common scenario in the animal kingdom. Is it happening with COVID vaccination in Canada? It's hardly surprising that COVID has caused panic, but where will a stampede toward vaccination take us? “Safety” is the destination, but as the virus continues to mutate, safety from illness may elude us while safety from official coercion might disappear altogether.
Canada's Constitution protects Canadians' right to security of the person, which includes the right to control the substances inserted into one's bloodstream. In addition, provincial privacy laws offer some protection against having to reveal personal health information, such as whether one's been vaccinated or not. Are these legal defences strong enough to withstand intrusion on individual freedom of choice through COVID vaccination “passports”?
According to Health-Infobase, by early June 2021, 61% of Canadians had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Safety studies continue to flip-flop: is Astrazenica safe? As first dose? Second? Should second doses consist of a product different from the first? Should the time between doses be lengthened (or shortened)? Can the Pfizer vaccine be stored at warmer temperatures after all? What are the long-term effects of vaccines, how many people are experiencing the short-term effects, and how do they affect people differently with different genetic susceptibilities? It is hardly surprising if the “reasonable person”, defined in law as someone who exhibits “ordinary, reasonable and prudent” conduct and judgment, would decline to be part of a mass medical experiment. (1)
There are good reasons to get vaccinated and good reasons not to, such as pre-existing illness which precludes it. Obviously, then, it's a matter of personal choice, yet media and medical officials pressure citizens to persuade acquaintances to get vaccinated. Many people don't want non-vaccinated people anywhere near them, but when the right to be safe from infection conflicts with the right to access necessities like housing, education and groceries, a more refined policy around vaccination choice needs to be crafted.
The digitality of this passport control will be another intrusion on top of the intrusion of substances into the body. It will involve smartphones, or palm or facial recognition, which will create a pandemic of surveillance.
Facial recognition uses biometric software to map facial features and store them as a face-print. Corporations get this under our privacy defences with a promise of push-button “convenience”: Apple for instance uses it to let customers unlock their cell phones, and Amazon to facilitate easy customer payments. It has turned up in shopping malls where crowd-sourced face images could be passed on to police, in case someone non-vaccinated illegally turns up in the mall. We're not there yet, but the first Trojans are already spilling out of the horse.
Yuan Stevens, Policy Lead for the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Ryerson University, tells us that “in Canada it is currently possible to collect and share facial images for identification purposes without consent, and without adequate legal procedures, including the right to challenge decisions made with this technology” (Stevens, Solomun: Facial recognition tech speeds up; privacy law lags | Ottawa Citizen). This might include decisions by government and business to exclude the non-vaccinated from resources and services; in other words to create an underclass, ostracized and having fewer rights than other Canadians enjoy.
Most of the hesitant are neither anti-vax fundamentalists nor anti-science. Rather, they find it ironic that intellectual property privacy for vaccine manufacturers is protected (they needn't reveal the ingredients in their vaccine), yet personal privacy for patients is not.
Hesitancy used to be considered rational. “Hesitant” means cautious. It means being scrupulous, a word derived from the Latin noun for pebble: “scrupulus”. Small points of hesitancy are like moral or practical pebbles on the path, grating and niggling. There are many pebbles on the road to mass inoculation, and those who notice them must, if the civil right to freedom of choice means anything, be allowed to hesitate and perhaps take a different route.
Vaccine-bullying in the workplace occurs in every country. A human resources firm in Australia, weighing the religious, personal and medical reasons for remaining non-vaccinated, warns that “mandatory vaccinations ... open up the risk of separating (non-vaccinated) employees from the rest of their colleagues, causing knock-on effects on their mental health and wellbeing”. (2)
Surveillance is itself bullying, but Canada's federal Privacy Act does not forbid it, and provincial privacy commissioners merely declared in May 2021 that forced disclosure of personal health information for vaccine certification “is an encroachment on civil liberties that should be taken only after careful consideration” -- a rather feeble response to such an egregious loss of a basic civil right.
While we longed for the return of indoor restaurants and hockey games, a darker legacy of COVID rolled out beneath our radar. The Public Health Agency of Canada working with other G7 countries will now demand digital proof of COVID vaccination which Canadians will need in order to travel. The data management platform being designed uses smartphones, opening the door to general tracking of individuals' movements within our country and across international borders. Everyone will be forced to own a smartphone -- a herding device (conveniently for the communications companies which charge higher smartphone rates in Canada than anywhere else in the world). The planet will become a series of digitally guarded camps. Entering and exiting them will be exactly like entering and exiting maximum security prisons, as managed in Canada today.
This is not the result of the pandemic. The world has always had pandemics, lock-downs, guarded borders and No Entry zones, but the turning of the whole world into a series of armed camps is a result of advances in the surveillance cyber-technology which make it possible. Anonymity will henceforth not be possible, and privacy a quaint notion from the past.
Karen Eltis, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa (and past director of the University of Ottawa Human Rights Centre), sounds more alarmed about this than do the privacy commissioners. She warns against policy makers' attitude that ‘this is about life and death, forget about privacy’.” It’s not only about privacy, she says, “it’s about democratic governance ...” (Privacy concerns complicate vaccine passports - iPolitics)
After the recent theft of patient information from Life Labs in BC and Ontario, fifteen million patients’ electronic health records were exposed. Michael McEvoy, Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC, adds that “these kind of attacks ... are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Even if an organization does everything right, there is no guarantee that they will not fall victim to a cyberattack.”
Canadians learned how smartphones track our physical location as well as our data trail, when the controversial “smart city” deal between Toronto and Google-owned Sidewalk Labs collapsed partly due to fears about civic surveillance. Vaccination certification has the same “huge data-mining potential of an app whose use would create many otherwise unobtainable very large data sets … An amazing gold mine for data extractivism”, warns Mariana Valverde in What have we learned from the Sidewalk Labs saga? Smart city plans in Toronto | Centre for Free Expression (ryerson.ca).
We will never fully banish corona-virus, but a virulent epidemic of privacy invasion could be controlled, if we had the will. We need the legal equivalent of a privacy plexi-glass shield. Which agency though is actively protecting the public against vaccine dictatorship and policies that wipe out privacy faster than you can say “extractivism”? Provincial ombudsperson offices are wobbly. Although BC's Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry continually urges the public to get vaccinated, she also comes out clearly against the imposition of internal vaccination certification, citing its potential to create inequities which will do more harm than good. In this she is stauncher than is the provincial ombuds-office, which only recommends “guidance” for governments. Even Dr. Henry's doubts about the wisdom of certification however will be overwhelmed by the pressure of international travel certification, which will bleed into the national realm from the international one.
The Angus Reid Institute reports that as of May 17, 2021 only about 10% of Canadians definitely refuse the vaccine, although more in some provinces and more if the vaccine is Astrazeneca. Will the 10 to 24% who refuse, be denied a “passport” to access the full benefits of Canadian citizenship?
To date, 79% of Canadians support the use of vaccine passports for international travel, but 41% oppose them for accessing public places. Clearly, if 59% still don't oppose them at home, the non-vaccinated have work to do to protect themselves against loss of privileges and privacy (words, let it be noted, with a common root). Among public officials they have few allies to work with. We lack a “Private Lives Matter” movement. Even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association only goes so far as to say “serious consideration on ethical, moral, social, health, and legal grounds needs to be given before moving forward” with certification.
We know that free speech, security of the person, and privacy rights are the three pillars that hold up a democracy. We should not be stampeded by emergency thinking into consenting to give up any of them. In the wake of vaccine passport pressure, one legacy of COVID could be a resolve to strengthen our civil liberty and privacy organizations -- if it's not already too late.
1 The Reasonable Person (lawnow.org)
2 Will workplace bullying rise as a result of COVID-19 vaccines? | HRD Asia (hcamag.com)
4 FAQ: Vaccine Passports – CCLA
5 Office of the Ombudsperson | Province of British Columbia (bcombudsperson.ca)
