Mother calls on feds for clarity on protections of Good Samaritan act
A Prince Albert Court of Queen’s Bench justice is expected to deliver his verdict Thursday in the trial of a 31-year-old man accused of killing his cellmate, Christopher Van Camp, 37, in June 2017.
Van Camp’s mother, Lauren Laithwaite, wants the federal government to clarify who would be protected by the Good Samaritan Overdose Act, which came into force in 2017. Her lawyer, Tavengwa Runyowa, sent a letter to federal Justice Minister David Lametti and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair on March 2 asking for clarification.
Runyowa wrote that the attorney general’s statement of defence in Laithwaite’s lawsuits, filed in Saskatchewan in 2018 and Alberta in 2019 over her son’s death, claims that the legislation doesn’t apply “at least to certain people, including Chris.”
The claims made in the statement of claim and statement of defence have not been proven in court.
Van Camp was on parole when he took cocaine laced with fentanyl and overdosed on May 24, 2017. He was in a coma until May 29, then was arrested and found to have breached the conditions of his release.
Van Camp was returned to federal custody and eventually sent back to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, where he was housed in a cell with Tyler Vandewater, who is charged with second-degree murder in connection with his death.
Runyowa’s letter called the government’s statement of defence a “contradiction” to the legislation’s wording. It states that no one who seeks emergency medical or law enforcement help because they or someone else is overdosing will be charged if the evidence used against them was obtained because they asked for help.
Runyowa wrote that if Van Camp was deemed not to have committed an offence by seeking medical assistance after overdosing, then the minister and attorney general
“must be relying on some characteristic that disentitled” Van Camp from the act’s protections. He added that whatever the “undisclosed traits are, they likely disentitle many other people across Canada who may overdose ...”
Clarity is needed about whether other Canadians would be exempt in this way from the act’s protections, he wrote.
The letter’s release was timed to coincide with the expected verdict, Runyowa said in an interview.
He spoke on behalf of Laithwaite, who was travelling from her home in Calgary to Prince Albert on Wednesday.
“The federal government doesn’t have the power to raise the dead,” but what he and his client want to hear from the government is an unequivocal statement that it failed in Van Camp’s case, Runyowa said. Such a statement could even save lives, he added.
The federal justice and safety departments did not respond to a request for comment by press time.