Analysis: Verstappen shows his petty side when FIA foolishly punishes him for cursing

TORONTO – A new Charter challenge that got underway Monday will test the constitutionality of a controversial Ontario law that allows hospitals to place discharged patients into long-term care homes not of their choosing or face a $400-per-day charge if they refuse.

The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly and the Ontario Health Coalition argue the law, known as the More Beds Better Care Act or Bill 7, violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The province disagrees.

One core item the court will address is whether the new law has fulfilled its purpose by improving the flow of patients. Documents filed with court reveal the two sides have reached different conclusions on that question.

Premier Doug Ford’s government rammed Bill 7 through the legislature within days in September 2022, bypassing public hearings.

The law allows hospital placement co-ordinators to choose a nursing home for a patient who has been deemed by a doctor as requiring an “alternate level of care,” or ALC, without consent.

They can also share the patient’s health information to such homes without consent. Patients can also be sent to nursing homes up to 70 kilometres from their preferred spot in southern Ontario and up to 150 kilometres away in northern Ontario. The law sparked outrage among seniors.

In its factum filed with court, the organizations opposing Bill 7 say it has not had its intended effect of reducing the number of so-called ALC patients. They point to government data from Ontario Health that shows the number of these patients has actually increased by 30 per cent more than a year after the law took effect.

There were about 2,300 discharged patients waiting in hospital for a spot in a nursing home at the end of January, the court documents say.

“The evidence belies any contention that Bill 7 has actually expedited the transition from hospital for the vast majority of ALC-LTC patients,” the organizations say.

The primary reason for the bottleneck is not the patients’ fault, they say.

“The most significant cause of delay in transitioning from the hospital is simply the lack of long-term care beds as evidenced by the very long wait lists for admissions particularly for homes that provide better and more suitable care,” the organizations wrote.

Because the law is ineffective, they argue, it is arbitrary. They say the law should be struck down.

Ford defended the law Monday, but lamented the threat of fines.

“I’m never in favour of that,” he said at an unrelated news conference.

He said hospitals need bed capacity and that discharged patients should be in a long-term care home, not a hospital. The hospitals appreciate the new law, he said.

“There’s no one happier than the CEOs of all the hospitals, I’ve talked to them, and it’s the right thing to do for elderly people,” Ford said.

The Ontario government argues in court documents that the increased number of so-called ALC patients is not proof of the law’s ineffectiveness, but due to a spike in population growth.

The province also points to evidence of several hospital administrators who support the law and say it has increased patient flow.

Trillium Health Partners, which runs two large hospitals in Mississauga, Ont., said the law has helped move 240 ALC patients to nursing homes over a recent three-month span.

“In the absence of Bill 7, I expect patient flow would decrease, as more acute beds would be occupied by patients who do not require acute care, leading to more patients waiting for a bed,” Scott Jarrett, the chief operating officer of Trillium, said in an affidavit.

Other hospital leaders cited similar progress.

The Advocacy Centre and the Ontario Health Coalition also say the law largely targets seniors of poor mental and physical health and deprives them of their ability to choose where to live and how their health information is shared.

More than 80 per cent of ALC patients are 65 or older and the vast majority live with incurable conditions usually associated with age. The law, the two organizations argue, interferes with the Charter’s right to life, liberty and security.

“Bill 7 infringes an ALC-LTC patient’s liberty rights by depriving them of personal autonomy with respect to their medical treatment and health care,” they argue.

“Simply put, Bill 7 clearly deprives ALC-LTC patients of the fundamental rights to informed consent to where they are likely to spend their final days, and to the protection of their personal health information.”

What both sides agree on is that there are not enough hospital or long-term care beds in Ontario. While the province is building more hospitals and incentivizing the construction of dozens of nursing homes, there’s nowhere near enough supply to meet demand, the documents say.

Provincial lawyers say the law is needed to open up beds for patients needing to get into a hospital.

“The purpose of a hospital bed is not to act as a waiting area for (long-term care) home admission,” the province says.

Ontario argues patients do not have a Charter right to live free of charge in a hospital after discharge. Nor does the law discriminate on the basis of age or disability, it says.

“Bill 7 does not infringe anyone’s Charterrights,” provincial lawyers wrote.

On Jan. 31, 2024, there were 2,243 ALC patients awaiting a spot in a nursing home who had spent a total of nearly 200,000 days in hospital beds, the province said.

The Charter does not protect against the sharing of private health information, provincial lawyers argue, pointing to several other laws that lay out how personal health information can be shared, including under court orders.

The province also said the law does not force patients into any particular nursing home. The patient can refuse such a placement.

“The consequence for an ALC patient who refuses to leave hospital despite being discharged is purely economic: they must pay a portion of the cost of the publicly funded hospital bed that they have chosen to occupy,” the province said.

The organizations say the threat of a $400-per-day fine is “coercive,” while the province contends it acts as a “deterrent” to patients in the effort to get them to agree to be moved to a home they didn’t choose.

Only five people have been charged under the law, the health minister’s office said recently.

The threat of a fine didn’t deter Ruth Poupard’s family. Michele Campeau, who has power of attorney for her 83-year-old mother, refused a hospital’s attempts to force Poupard into a long-term care home Campeau hated in Windsor, Ont.

Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare began charging the family $400 per day and they ended up with a $26,000 bill in the spring, which Campeau refused to pay. Poupard ended up in her top choice for a nursing home.

By mid-September, no one had come calling for the money, Campeau said.

“I would encourage others to fight back because in the end, the fight is worth more than putting your loved one in a horrible situation,” Campeau said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 23, 2024.

TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index posted a small gain on Monday, helped higher by energy and base metal stocks, while U.S. markets also eked out gains, with the Dow and the S&P 500 adding to recent new record highs.

The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 27.34 points at 23,894.71.

In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 61.29 points at 42,124.65. The S&P 500 index was up 16.02 points at 5,718.57, while the Nasdaq composite was up 25.95 points at 17,974.27.

The Canadian dollar traded for 74.01 cents US, according to XE.com, compared with 73.72 cents US on Friday.

The November crude oil contract was down 63 cents at US$70.37 per barrel and the November natural gas contract was up 13 cents at US$2.85 per mmBTU.

The December gold contract was up US$6.30 at US$2,652.50 an ounce and the December copper contract was up a penny at US$4.35 a pound.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 23, 2024.

Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD)

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MONTREAL – The family of a Quebec man killed by Montreal police in 2017 called on the province’s justice minister on Monday for a new, independent examination of the evidence in the case, and a review of the Crown’s decision not to lay charges against the officers involved.

Koray Kevin Celik’s parents issued their request at a news conference alongside a civil rights group and anti-police-brutality activists, a day before a provincial ethics hearing is set to begin for the Montreal officers involved in the fatal altercation.

François Mainguy, a lawyer for Celik’s parents, said his clients want the province to set up “an independent committee” to re-examine the evidence in the case and “reconsider the opportunity to lay criminal charges against the police officers.”

Celik’s parents — June Tyler and Cesur Celik — have previously asked Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette to reopen the case, but he has so far refused. In 2023, he declined to intervene and referred the matter to prosecutors, who refused to re-examine the evidence.

The office of Jolin-Barrette on Monday referred questions to the Crown prosecutor’s office, which did not immediately respond.

On March 6, 2017, Celik’s parents called police to their home in western Montreal because they were worried he would drive while intoxicated. Celik, 28, had consumed pain medication prescribed by his dentist and had drunk alcohol.

Cesur Celik told reporters Monday that his son, a medical student, had been in crisis that day and had wanted to leave the house to find sleep medication ahead of an exam.

Celik was unarmed, in his bedroom and had calmed down when the police arrived. An officer immediately went into the room to confront him, leading to an altercation. Four police officers tried to subdue Celik with force, and his parents say they witnessed officers repeatedly beat their son with their feet and knees before he stopped breathing and was in cardiorespiratory arrest.

He was pronounced dead in hospital.

In April 2019, the Crown declined to lay charges against the officers, based on an investigation by Quebec’s police watchdog, Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, or BEI.

A coroner’s report into Celik’s death last April found that officers had “provoked” the violent altercation between themselves and Celik, and that they were unprepared when they showed up at the family home. The coroner said that had police planned their intervention better and collected all the relevant information about what was happening in the Celik household, “the outcome could have been quite different.”

All four responding officers testified during the inquest that they had feared for their lives during the intervention.

The family continues to denounce the investigation by the province’s police watchdog and the decision by prosecutors not to lay charges.

A Quebec court ruling sided with the family — that the watchdog had committed a fault by issuing a news release that only gave the police officers’ version of events. The judgment noted that the media release was neither neutral nor impartial, and that it’s not the agency’s role to justify police actions but to conduct an independent investigation.

The ruling was upheld on appeal at the end of last year.

In a letter to the justice minister, Celik’s parents say the Court of Appeal made it clear that the BEI prevented prosecutors from adequately playing their role in determining whether criminal charges should be laid, “which is why it is essential that the evidence relating to Koray’s death be re-examined by independent prosecutors.”

The letter notes the BEI investigation didn’t accept the version of events of Celik’s parents, who were eye witnesses to what happened.

“It’s been more than seven years that we are pursuing,” Cesur Celik said. “And we will not go away, I promise you that.”

Mainguy noted there is a precedent for re-examining cases in which officers who kill are cleared of wrongdoing. In February 2014, five-year-old Nicolas Thorne-Belance was in a vehicle that was struck by an unmarked police cruiser. The boy died in hospital a few days later.

Prosecutors initially decided against charging the officer who had been driving the cruiser, but new testimony led the Liberal justice minister at the time to request an independent assessment of the evidence. That examination resulted in the officer, Patrick Ouellet, being charged and found guilty on one count of dangerous driving causing death.

The Celiks are also suing the City of Montreal and the Urgences-santé ambulance service, in a case that is still making its away through the courts.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 23, 2024.