June 3, 2022
Irfan Kara, Jon Silver and William Mazurek have written a piece that has been published in The Lawyer’s Daily.
The piece, titled “Courts continue trend of deferring to COVID-19 policies in McMaster’s vaccine mandate decision”, looks at Michalski v McMaster University, 2022 ONSC 2625, in which an Ontario court decision addresses a challenge to the merits of a public sector COVID-19 vaccination policy after four McMaster University students challenged decisions denying them religious exemptions to the university’s vaccine mandate.
An excerpt from the article is below:
The Court held that McMaster owed its students only “relaxed and rudimentary procedural requirements” because the exemption decisions were not quasi-judicial in nature and the students could continue their education once the mandate was lifted. In light of this conclusion, the Court found that the process followed by McMaster was fair: 1) prior notice of the vaccine mandate was provided to the students; 2) the onus was on the students to support their claims, so the university had no obligation to disclose its internal adjudication documents; and 3) the internal adjudication documentation (which included a template rejection letter) did not reflect bias or fetter the decision-maker’s discretion—the impugned documents were simply tools used to simplify the adjudication process, especially given the volume of expected exemption requests.
You can read the full piece on The Lawyer’s Daily.
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