Michele Brill-Edwards is a Canadian whistle-blower. She is a lecturer and emergency physician in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Ottawa. Brill-Edwards is best known for heading Health Canada drug approvals between 1987 and 1992 and quitting in 1996 after blowing the whistle on the agency's suppression of prescription drug risks. She won a 1992 federal court case against her employer. [1] She completed medical school at the University of Toronto in 1974 and her pediatrics residency, with a fellowship in clinical pharmacology, in 1986 at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She was a member of the Division of Emergency Medicine at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) from 1980 to 1992 and returned to the division in 2002. [2]
Brill-Edwards was honoured with a whistle-blowers national award in 2005. This was reported as: "Michele Brill-Edwards, who took a Health Canada director to court in the 1990s for overruling scientific decisions on drug safety. She was demoted and resigned, and continues to speak out on drug issues." [3] As a representative for the Alliance for Public Accountability, Brill-Edwards intervened in the media in Canada's tainted-blood scandal involving the Red Cross. [4]
Brill-Edwards was "the central character" in an episode of CBC's The Fifth Estate (TV), in which she was depicted "as a tireless moral crusader; a champion of the people who was justifiably suspicious of the big drug companies, HPB, and doctors like Myers and Leenen who, the program alleged, seemed to be conspiring to keep the drug on the market despite the fact that a number of red flags had been raised in the United States, Canada and Britain." [5]
Henekh "Henry" Morgentaler, was a Polish-born Canadian physician and abortion rights advocate who fought numerous legal battles aimed at expanding abortion rights in Canada. As a Jewish youth during World War II, Morgentaler was imprisoned at the Łódź Ghetto and later at the Dachau concentration camp.
The Canadian Red Cross Society is a Canadian humanitarian charitable organization, and one of 192 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. The organization receives funding from both private donations and from Canadian government departments.
The Westray Mine was a Canadian coal mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia. Westray was owned and operated by Curragh Resources Incorporated, which obtained both provincial and federal government money to open the mine, and supply the local electric power utility with coal.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is an agency of the Government of Canada that is responsible for public health, emergency preparedness and response, and infectious and chronic disease control and prevention.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is a psychiatric teaching hospital located in Toronto and ten community locations throughout the province of Ontario, Canada. It reports being the largest research facility in Canada for mental health and addictions. The hospital was formed in 1998 from the amalgamation of four separate institutions – the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Addiction Research Foundation, and the Donwood Institute. It is Canada's largest mental health teaching hospital, and the only stand-alone psychiatric emergency department in Ontario. CAMH has 90 distinct clinical services across inpatient, outpatient, day treatment, and partial hospitalization models. CAMH has been the site of major advancements in psychiatric research, including the discovery of the Dopamine receptor D2.
Ruth Anna Grier is a Canadian former politician in Ontario. She was a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1985 to 1995, and served as a high-profile cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae.
William Sterling Blair is a Canadian politician and former police officer who has served as the minister of National Defence since 2023. A member of the Liberal Party, Blair represents Scarborough Southwest in the House of Commons. Blair previously held the portfolios of Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction and minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Before entering politics, Blair worked for three decades with the Toronto Police Service (TPS), serving as the chief of police from 2005 until retiring in 2015.
Apotex Inc. is a Canadian pharmaceutical corporation. Founded in 1974 by Barry Sherman, the company is the largest producer of generic drugs in Canada, with annual sales exceeding CA$2.5 billion. By 2023, Apotex employed close to 8,000 people as Canada's largest drug manufacturer, with over 300 products selling in over 115 countries. Apotex manufactures and distributes generic medications for a range of diseases and health conditions that include cancer, diabetes, high cholesterol, glaucoma, infections and blood pressure.
Kevin Chan is the Chair of Pediatrics at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Clinical Chief of Children's Health at the Janeway Children's Health and Rehabilitation Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland where he also works as an emergency physician. He previously worked as an emergency physician at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario.
Arthur Schafer is a Canadian ethicist specializing in bioethics, philosophy of law, social philosophy and political philosophy. He is Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, at the University of Manitoba. He is also a full professor in the Department of Philosophy and an ethics consultant for the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. For ten years he was head of the Section of Bio-Medical Ethics in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Manitoba. He has also served as visiting scholar at Green College, Oxford.
Dorothea Palmer (Ferguson) (1908 – 1992), a former employee of the Parents' Information Bureau, was arrested and charged under section 207(c) of the Criminal Code for advertising information on family planning and birth control by means of a pamphlet. Palmer was acquitted on March 17, 1937 when her actions were deemed to have been carried out in the interest of the public good or pro bono publico. Palmer is honoured for her role in advancing family planning in Canada.
Patrick Brazeau is a Canadian senator from Quebec. At the age of 34, he was and is the youngest member of the Senate during his appointment. From February 2006 until January 2009 he held the position of national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. Brazeau was expelled from the Conservative caucus following his February 7, 2013 arrest for domestic assault and sexual assault. On September 15, 2015, Brazeau pleaded guilty to simple assault and cocaine possession as part of a plea deal in which other assault charges were dropped, and he was acquitted of sexual assault.
Evelyn Agnes Pepper CStJ RRC was a Canadian nurse and nursing sister, named as a Commander of the Order of St John. She was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal and was made Honorary President of the Nursing Sisters Association of Canada
eHealth Ontario was the agency tasked with facilitating the development of Ontario's proposed public Electronic Health Record system. Health Informatics in Canada is run provincially, with different provinces creating different systems, albeit sometimes under voluntary Pan-Canadian guidelines published by the federal body Canada Health Infoway. eHealth Ontario was created in September 2008 out of a merger between the Ontario Ministry of Health's electronic health program and the Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA), with a mandate to create electronic health records for all patients in the province by 2015. It was plagued by delays and its CEO was fired over a multimillion-dollar contracts scandal in 2009. eHealth Ontario was consolidated into Ontario Health in 2019.
Dr. Khristinn Kellie Leitch is a Canadian surgeon and former politician who served as the Member of Parliament for the riding of Simcoe—Grey from 2011 to 2019 as a member of the Conservative Party. She was first elected in the 2011 federal election, succeeding Member of Parliament Helena Guergis who was dismissed from the Conservative Party caucus. Following her election, Leitch was appointed as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development. On July 15, 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper named Leitch Minister of Labour and Minister for the Status of Women. She served in Cabinet until the defeat of the Conservative government in the 2015 federal election. Leitch ran in the 2017 contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party. On January 23, 2018, Leitch announced that she would not be seeking re-election for the 43rd Canadian federal election and would return to being a full-time surgeon.
Jane Philpott is a physician, academic administrator, and former Canadian politician who represented the riding of Markham—Stouffville in the House of Commons. Philpott was first elected in the 2015 federal election as a member of the Liberal Party and was appointed to the Cabinet of the 29th Canadian Ministry, headed by Justin Trudeau, on November 4, 2015. On March 4, 2019, Philpott resigned from her cabinet position as President of the Treasury Board over the SNC-Lavalin affair. On April 2, 2019, she and Jody Wilson-Raybould were both expelled from the Liberal caucus in the aftermath of the controversy.
Rosemary Moodie is a Canadian neonatal physician who was appointed to the Senate of Canada on December 12, 2018. Moodie is a neonatologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and Professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto's Department of Pediatrics.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto was a viral pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), localized in Toronto. Toronto is the most populous city in Canada, and the fourth most populous city in North America.
James Maskalyk is a Canadian emergency medicine physician, author, and meditation teacher.
A series of protests and blockades in Canada against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions, called the Freedom Convoy by organizers, began in early 2022. The initial convoy movement was created to protest vaccine mandates for crossing the United States border, but later evolved into a protest about COVID-19 mandates in general. Beginning January 22, hundreds of vehicles formed convoys from several points and traversed Canadian provinces before converging on Ottawa on January 29, 2022, with a rally at Parliament Hill. The convoys were joined by thousands of pedestrian protesters. Several offshoot protests blockaded provincial capitals and border crossings with the United States.