Lawsuit threatened over 14-day quarantines
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is threatening to sue the federal government over ongoing mandatory 14-day quarantines for those travelling back to Canada from abroad.
“Ultimately the Justice Centre’s mission and vision is about a free society,” says James Kitchen, a lawyer with the Justice Centre who spoke to The Herald. “One in which people have civil liberties that are respected by governments. When we put that into practice it means defending the various Charter rights we have. Anything that is going to seriously impede somebody’s ability to live their life as a free person, right? With quarantine you are stuck in your house for 14 days. It is essentially a two-week house arrest, that’s what it is …. It’s a penal sanction. That’s what this quarantine is.
“For us, it is obvious that it infringes particular Charter rights,” he states. “Specifically, the right to liberty to move about and be free.”
It was pointed out to Kitchen historically governments have often deemed it necessary to curtail the right to free movement in the face of public health emergency, as is declared in both Alberta and Canada today, when faced with the potential for spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19, and that quarantines have often been deemed vital in those cases to prevent potentially infected individuals from infecting others.
Kitchen says this COVID-19 situation is markedly different from past outbreaks of infectious diseases in Canada.
“In the past, we only quarantined sick people,” he states. “We didn’t quarantine masses, millions, of healthy people. Quarantine was a very valuable tool especially going back in history where we didn’t know as much about medicine, and how things were transmitted and all the rest of it, as we do now. Quarantining sick people was a valuable tool, and it was probably very effective. Unfortunately, we have kind of flipped it on its head with COVID, and we just started to quarantine people regardless of any evidence they may actually be sick ... The problem right now is we are infringing on the civil liberties of people who are healthy without any evidence that they are, or could be, infectious.”
In Alberta the provincial government, as advised by Alberta Health Services and Chief Medical Officer of Health, is responsible for enforcing the mandatory 14-day quarantine for those coming into the province from abroad. For perspective on the Justice Centre’s threats to sue the federal government over the issue, Alberta Health spokesperson Tom McMillan says it is valuable to remember that COVID-19 first arrived in this province on flights from overseas.
“The mandatory isolation period thereby helps limit the spread of COVID-19 and protect the public health,” says McMillan in a statement to The Herald. “To date, almost 700 cases of COVID-19 in Alberta were acquired via travel internationally.”
“That’s the cautionary principle,” acknowledges Kitchen in response. “I get that. But one, if you take anything to the extreme where it becomes ideological and rigid, you are going to create harm to people. So this idea of precaution justifying gross violations of individual liberty is an extreme ideological position.
“This is September,” he adds. “We all know the numbers. We all know the extraordinarily low death rate. We all know the extraordinarily low risk for anybody under the age of 60. We all know those numbers. Maybe we are being wilfully blind in not looking at them, but we all know those numbers. It’s not March and April. The precautionary argument made a whole lot more sense in March and April. I grant that. But it’s September now.”
McMillan also points out testing is not always immediately indicative of infection in the first instance despite a result coming back negative, and it can take several days for COVID-19 to manifest itself obviously in the body of an infected individual.
“Albertans are legally required to isolate for 14 days if they returned to or entered Alberta from outside Canada,” states McMillan. “The mandatory requirement continues after a negative test because of COVID19’s long incubation period. Most infections occur between three to six days after exposure, but it can take up to 14 days for cases to develop.
“It's important to remember that a negative test offers only a point-in-time assessment,” he emphasizes. “This means an individual could have been exposed, test negative and then develop COVID-19 symptoms a few days later.”
Kitchen grants this is perhaps the case, but argues the obvious infringement on the Charter rights of individuals by imposing such a blanket mandatory quarantine period far outweighs the extremely low risk for potential spread of COVID-19 after a negative test.
“I can understand people are still concerned about this and they want sick people to be quarantined,” he says, “and as much as that is a rights violation, in our view, that makes some sense. But the continued (blanket) quarantining of people that are not demonstrably ill is no longer justifiable, in our opinion.”
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