Under the Emergencies Act, government would have the power to do things like using cellphone data to track people who may have been exposed to coronavirus and get them tested.
This column is an opinion by Colleen M. Flood, Teresa Scassa and David Robertson. Flood is Director of the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. Scassa is Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Robertson is a physician and teacher at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto, and a senior fellow at Massey College. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
The prime minister is called upon almost daily in the media scrum outside his home at Rideau Cottage to explain why the federal government has not invoked the Emergencies Act. Canadians perceive the COVID-19 pandemic to be an emergency and rightly so.
The problem is that the Act can only be employed when an emergency rises above the ability of any one province to cope with the situation and there is, as a consequence, a risk to other provinces. The mere fact that there are different approaches to the pandemic across the country is not by itself sufficient to trigger the Act.
However, as the pandemic unfolds, it has been clear that our provinces are not able to ensure sufficient testing for COVID-19. Without this, there is no hope of notifying all those who have been exposed and, in turn, testing and – crucially – isolating them too, if positive.
Other countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, have had success with taming COVID-19 this way. It is only through this method that we can hope to eradicate nests of infection. Otherwise, lock-down and social isolation measures will stalk us for months to come, wreaking unsustainable havoc on the economy and social and cultural life.
The World Health Organization has urged countries to “isolate, test, treat and trace.” The provinces’ inability to achieve high levels of testing and tracing collectively from coast to coast arguably is a sufficient ground for the federal government to trigger the Emergencies Act.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the nation Tuesday, touching on legislation to help Ca