Toronto Police and Vaccine Mandates
As to whether the Toronto Police Service will be able to mandate vaccines for their employees, in Canada, the prevailing legal opinion is a strong "it depends."
August 26, 2021 at 12:10 PM
4 minute read
While Toronto remains one of the safest cities in the world in 2021, according to an ongoing project by The Economist, it is also a city with a history of questionable policing. With some highly-regarded analysts calling it the Minneapolis of Canada, Toronto finds itself in the midst of several police controversies this week.
In a statement issued late Tuesday afternoon, the Toronto Police Association (the police union) rejected the Toronto Police Service announcement of the implementation of a mandatory vaccination policy for all members. The vaccine policy applies to both civilian and uniformed members of the force and gives a deadline of Sept. 13 for employees to prove that they have been immunized.
The union's position is crystal clear:
This announcement, however preliminary, is missing critical details that are central to understanding the impacts, timelines, or potentially alternative options available to our members.
The TPA must make every effort to protect all of our members and therefore, does not support this mandatory vaccination announcement or mandatory disclosure.
The police union's announcement will not be well-received by the public, with one Toronto physician tweeting a common frustration earlier in the week before the announcement:
If policing is really about serving & protecting the public, why is the Toronto Police Service refusing to mandate COVID19 vaccines for its 7,400 employees?
All of this comes at the heels of events over the past weekend that could become known as Hoofgate. Jenn Agg, a famous Toronto restaurant owner who rose to fame with her former restaurant, The Black Hoof, has a restaurant that has been a protest target of anti-vax protesters. Things got ugly this weekend as the Toronto police simply stood by and watched. Agg, who explained on Tuesday to a Toronto TV station why she feels she has been targeted, is now deeply embroiled in a controversy that has become larger than one about vaccines — it is about what Toronto's police and mayor are doing to keep people safe in politically — and emotionally-charged times.
This is just one more example of Toronto police having some deservedly bad press over the years. With recent news of police violently breaking up massive camps of homeless people during a peak of the pandemic, Toronto police may need better leadership and a new PR agency.
As to whether the Toronto Police Service will be able to mandate vaccines for their employees, in Canada, the prevailing legal opinion is a strong "it depends." Canada has something called the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it's as wrongly applied to most COVID-19 situations as HIPAA is in the United States. In Canada, "the Charter" applies only to government action, so seeking to invoke it against your employer is going to work as well as trying to invoke HIPAA if the Dallas Cowboys ask you to show proof of vaccination if you want to get into AT&T Stadium.
Some legal experts believe Canadian employers can terminate employees who refuse to follow their vaccine policy, while others believe that it could be a human rights violation where the person has a religious belief or medical condition. It is worth noting that the Toronto police policy, as well as similar policies enacted by some large Canadian businesses have a medical condition exemption. But this isn't stopping large Canadian businesses from at least threatening termination of employees who are unvaccinated by a set date, as Air Canada did on Thursday.
Aside from the fact that the police union may have the law on their side, there is no workable practical way for Toronto Police Services to win this battle against their own employees. Toronto's mayor, John Tory, basically called the manager on Monday with an ineffectual finger-wagging statement that reminded voters and the police force how weak he can be under pressure. Stating that he was "dismayed," Tory simply set the foundation for further debate on whether Toronto police will comply with both enforcing the law to protect the public from things such as anti-vax protests and need to be vaccinated themselves.
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