The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a bid by a fired B.C. health executive to seek employment insurance benefits, nearly five years after he lost his job for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds.<\/p>\n
Donald Sturgeon was the Interior Health authority\u2019s executive director of medical affairs, but was fired in November 2021 due to his refusal to be vaccinated.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon\u2019s bid for benefits has gone through several layers of appeals, including from the Social Security Tribunal, the Federal Court and now the Appeal Court.<\/p>\n
He argued his bid for benefits wasn\u2019t a challenge to the health authority\u2019s vaccination policy, but rather the tribunal\u2019s apparent \u201cfailure\u201d to interpret how misconduct is weighed against religious freedom that is guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.<\/p>\n
The Appeal Court found he didn\u2019t properly raise his Charter arguments with the tribunal, and dismissed his appeal on Tuesday in Vancouver.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon\u2019s lawyer Lee Turner says he believes the court and the tribunal have not properly considered religious freedom arguments in respect to the Charter, and they\u2019re considering an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.<\/p>\n
Turner said Sturgeon had been self-represented and didn\u2019t fill out his appeal form correctly, raising access to justice issues for non-lawyers navigating the system.<\/p>\n
He said it\u2019s very difficult for laypersons to represent themselves and is a \u201creal concern (for) what people are expected to go through to have these rights adjudicated.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Federal Court dismissed Sturgeon\u2019s case in 2024, finding that his appeal fell outside the tribunal\u2019s mandate.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon told The Canadian Press at the time that he had followed his \u201cmoral conscience\u201d according to his Roman Catholic beliefs in refusing the vaccine.<\/p>\n
He said he wanted to give a \u201cvoice\u201d to other employees who had also lost their jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in a leadership position at Interior Health and I was aware of staff like a single mom who has children in a mobile home who lost her job because of this decision and she received no severance, just like me, and she received no employment insurance,\u201d he said after the 2024 ruling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a bid by a fired B.C. health executive to seek employment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-520220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}