Juno News - September 12, 2022


ArriveCan to become a permanent requirement？

Mentioned
Sia Hassan Andrew
Conservatives choose a NEW leader Compilation of Justin Trudeau “uniting” Canadians

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

185.69

Word count

909

Sentence count

55


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, JCCF lawyers Sia Hassan and Eva Chepiak join me on the show to talk about their challenge to Arrive Can, the government's pandemic vaccination app, and the 14-day quarantine policy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And I want to just along that vein turn to Arrive Can here, which has become as people travel, as more people leave the country and for some reason come back into it, has become something that more and more Canadians and foreigners are facing.
00:00:13.300 And it's this app that the government originally thought would be a pandemic management app.
00:00:18.420 It felt like it was an easy way for them to get people to give their vaccination certificate when they come in and it saves time at the border and saves time with the public health officials and all of that.
00:00:28.020 And now they're making it a permanent fixture in entry.
00:00:32.460 So I'm glad to see it's being challenged, not just by Canadians that are not complying and are taking huge fines as a result, but even in the courts.
00:00:40.420 The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has filed a legal challenge, a charter challenge against Arrive Can.
00:00:47.140 And JCCF lawyers Sia Hassan and Eva Chepiak join me on the program live.
00:00:53.360 Sia, Eva, it's great to talk to you both.
00:00:55.620 I'll ask, I don't know which one of you wants to take it first, but what is this case about?
00:01:00.220 Because it's one thing to not like Arrive Can, it's one thing to find it annoying, but fundamentally, what is it that this challenge is going after?
00:01:08.980 Thank you, Andrew, for having us on your show.
00:01:11.300 And I guess I'll go first.
00:01:12.720 And I want to talk about what this case is not about, because we have seen so much division in our society, vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
00:01:21.140 This case is not about whether you're vaccinated or you're not vaccinated, because the Arrive Can applies to everyone.
00:01:29.060 And even if you're fully vaccinated, but you choose not to use Arrive Can because of privacy concerns, you're still going to be compelled to quarantine for 14 days.
00:01:38.400 You're still going to be given a fine of $5,000 or more.
00:01:42.080 So it's really important, I think, to point that out, that this is not a case of whether you're vaccinated or not.
00:01:48.280 This impacts all Canadians.
00:01:50.660 And one of the major things, major concerns of a lot of our applicants and Canadians is the privacy aspect.
00:01:57.780 And we have applicants in our case that are fully vaccinated who simply don't want to use Arrive Can because they're concerned about privacy.
00:02:06.440 We don't know what's going to happen to this data.
00:02:08.800 We don't know who has access to it.
00:02:10.680 We don't know who's storing it.
00:02:12.200 Where is it getting stored?
00:02:13.940 This is a major concern for Canadians.
00:02:16.260 And that's the kinds of questions that we're going to be asking the court to answer.
00:02:20.760 I think the privacy aspect is key.
00:02:24.240 And I'll ask you about this, Eva, because I know that when I have come into the country and I've used Arrive Can, basically, it's tied to my passport or my Nexus card.
00:02:33.020 So when I scan that at the point of entry, they already have my Arrive Can.
00:02:37.760 So it's in a database.
00:02:38.960 And it looks like the government has done a fair bit of integration on the back end, which is not the kind of thing you do with just this temporary public health measure.
00:02:46.640 Yeah, so we've heard a lot of concerns, of course, about the Arrive Can and, you know, the utility of it.
00:02:54.920 I think in your intro, you mentioned that it was meant to speed up the process and everything we've heard about it is it's delaying travel into Canada and in a significant way, too.
00:03:06.220 So what is it actually achieving is a really good and important question that we're going to be asking the government to answer on our end.
00:03:14.340 Is this being fought?
00:03:17.380 I mean, I know it's a charter challenge, but what's really the key sections of the charter that you think are impugned by this?
00:03:24.800 I'll take that.
00:03:25.840 So I think that one of the most important one is Section 8, which deals with privacy.
00:03:31.000 That's a major concern.
00:03:32.840 Another charter section is Section 7 and the 14-day quarantine.
00:03:38.520 And one of our arguments is that people are being detained arbitrarily for 14 days.
00:03:46.440 We've had applicants who are fully vaccinated.
00:03:49.540 There is no scientific reason, and we can't see any legal reasons why they have to quarantine, and yet they've been asked to quarantine.
00:03:56.560 So it's very arbitrary.
00:03:57.620 And we know about the glitch in the RIF can in July where 10,000 people who were fully vaccinated, who had no issues, were told by the app that they have to quarantine for 14 days.
00:04:09.560 And then it took the government 12 days to contact these people to say, oh, this was a glitch.
00:04:14.240 It was a mistake.
00:04:15.420 So Section 7, Section 8.
00:04:17.300 And another important section, which is dear to my heart because I was a former criminal defense lawyer, is the right to counsel.
00:04:24.300 Because we have law-abiding citizens, some of our applicants included, who are being stopped.
00:04:30.320 They're being detained by police officers, not by border service agents, not by FAC agents, police officers.
00:04:38.240 They're being detained.
00:04:39.180 They're not being allowed to leave, and yet they're not being told that they have a right to speak to counsel at that moment.
00:04:44.300 That's really scary, really intimidating, and it's an issue that's been coming up with the quarantine cases constantly.
00:04:51.120 So that's another very important issue that we're raising.