Mission

The daily unnecessary killing of persons with sensitivities is, in duration, numbers affected, and extent of injury, one of the top five human rights abuses in Canadian history.

The Advocacy Gateway for Environmental Sensitivities was created to document the long mainstream history, and the contribution of various parties to the exclusion, injury and unnecessary killing of Canadians with environmental sensitivities. When complete, it will provide documents collected during more than thirty years.

Scientific, clinical and consumer experience date back centuries. Documents show that a 1985 Ontario Ministry of Health report about these disorders identified an existing, publicly insured method of diagnosis. They also show that various parties have misled the public about the availability of this diagnostic method for more than a quarter century, despite the legal ramifications concerning consequent preventable harm.

The documents also show that between 1988 and 1993, CMHC, Health and Welfare Canada and the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, along with several other federal departments and Ontario ministries, were working to reduce preventable harm being caused to persons with sensitivities, something public servants and politicians are now invisibilizing. They show that current CHRC Commissioner Jennifer Lynch has reverted to eclipsing the history of sensitivities behind a revisionist version provided by so-called “doctors of environmental medicine,” while Canadians are being injured and killed daily as a result of human rights violations.

Protections that Health Canada had been encouraging were abandoned after the 1993 election. The people who were supposed to be protected are being injured or killed, instead. The response of abusers to being confronted about this negligence says a lot about governance (and journalism) in Canada.

Mapping the prevalence of sensitivities against statistics on adverse drug events provided by Terence Young, MP, in his book, “Death by Prescription,” shows that more than a dozen Canadians with sensitivities are being unnecessarily killed in health care daily. This is a significant portion of Canada's 55 daily adverse drug event deaths. Instead of protecting people in high risk groups, as was encouraged by Health and Welfare in the late 1980's, Canada Vigilance is counting the injured and killed.

Meanwhile, seriously affected individuals are subjected to a reverse onus about their experience of repeatable, controllable circumstances, as agencies of remedy, journalists and civil society trivialize the issues, join in the bullying or turn a blind eye.

Chris Brown
cbrown@ages.ca