CALGARY: The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) will be in the Alberta Court of Appeal this Friday, April 10, at 10:00 a.m. Calgary lawyer and JCCF President John Carpay will argue the appeal of Okotoks dentist Dr. Darcy Allen.
Dr. Allen seeks to extend to Alberta the 2005 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec, which held that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” In Chaoulli, the Supreme Court noted that painful and sometimes deadly waiting lists, in combination with laws that make it illegal to access basic health services outside of the government’s monopoly, are a violation of rights.
Dr. Allen was unsuccessful in the Court of Queen’s Bench, which in 2014 dismissed his application to challenge the Alberta Government’s health care monopoly, and refused to apply the Chaoulli precedent. The Court ignored the evidence that many patients in Alberta are on waiting lists for surgery, and many of those patients, like Darcy Allen, suffer severe pain for years. This evidence was substantially similar to the evidence before the Supreme Court of Canada in Chaoulli. Further, the Alberta law challenged by Darcy Allen is almost identical to the Quebec law struck down in Chaoulli.
Media availability
Darcy Allen and John Carpay will be available for media in the lobby (ground level) of the TransCanada Pipelines Tower, at 450 – 1st Street SW at 9:15 a.m., Friday April 10.
The Alberta Court of Appeal, on the 26th floor of the TransCanada Pipelines Tower, will hear oral argument from 10:00 a.m. through to about 12:00 noon. This hearing is open to the public.
Background on Allen v. Alberta
Publicly-filed Court documents pertaining to this case are posted atjccf.ca.
In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Chaoulli v. Quebec that Quebec’s ban on private health insurance violates the right to “life, liberty and security of the person” set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Declaring that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care,” a majority of the Court held that the ban on private health insurance – which causes Canadians to suffer and die on waiting lists – is neither necessary nor justified. The Court’s minority justified the ban on private health insurance as necessary to preserve the government health care system.
Thousands of Canadians suffer in pain while waiting for surgery or diagnosis. Some die. The Chaoulli judgment explained how, in this context, confining patients to government waiting lists by prohibiting private health insurance violates the right to life, liberty and security of the person.
Extending the Chaoulli judgment to Alberta would be a significant stride in securing the right to life, liberty and security of the person for all Canadians.
Darcy Allen
Dr. Darcy Allen was forced to stop practising dentistry due to debilitating back pain. What began in 2007 as a seemingly minor hockey injury gradually turned his life into a nightmare of around-the-clock pain. Normal tasks, like shovelling snow or tying shoelaces, became impossible. On one occasion, Dr. Allen watched helplessly as his one-year-old daughter, while crawling on a bed, lost her balance and fell off, and he could not move to catch her.
Dr. Allen suffered moderate but increasing pain for eight months (January to September 2008), then severe pain for eight months (October 2008 to May 2009) before obtaining a doctor’s formal recommendation for surgery. He finally received a referral for surgery in 2009, but no surgery could be performed until September, 2010 – a date later pushed back to June, 2011.
Specifically, Dr. Allen waited four months in a state of severe pain before obtaining the requisite discogram (which would have been a twelve-month wait but for the intervention Dr. Allen directly sought and received from the Office of Alberta’s Minister of Health). Dr. Allen was then scheduled to wait twelve more months for surgery. Four months into his twelve-month wait for surgery, in December 2009, Dr. Allen was told he would need to wait a further eighteen months for surgery. Had Dr. Allen not paid for his own surgery in December of 2009, the total time he would have needed to wait in a state of severe and continuous pain before receiving surgery would have been almost three years.
Unable to work or enjoy life, and unwilling to face another 18 months of severe, constant and debilitating pain, Dr. Allen paid $77,503 out of pocket to receive back surgery in Montana in December 2009. The surgery immediately and significantly reduced his pain and started his slow journey back to better health.
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For more information contact:
- Dr. Darcy Allen, the Applicant in Allen v. Alberta
dmdallen00@gmail.com
