After months of advocacy to UBC to implement a vaccine mandate, the AMS is struggling to come up with a vaccine mandate of its own for staff members, due to legal and logistical challenges.
Cole Evans, AMS president, had initially said that following legal advice, the AMS was not in a position to mandate vaccines for its employees. Councillors raised concern that this was inconsistent with the AMS’s COVID-19 advocacy to the university.
The student society is “committed to continuing to evaluate” and looking at how it can “potentially work towards getting something implemented,” according to Evans.
“We're focusing more on developing a system that works well for employees and is focused on keeping our work environment safe,” Evans said.
The main legal concern around vaccine mandates for existing staff is potential human rights complaints.
According to Professor Gillian Calder from the University of Victoria’s faculty of law, whether employers can require vaccinations from their employees is “the open question of our time.” She clarified that she is not an employment lawyer and that she cannot give legal advice, and that her expertise lies in constitutional law.
“All the levels of who is your employer and and all of that will guide what sort of constitution you have as an organization, all of that is going to dictate what you can and can't do. But at the end of the day you're going to be governed by human rights legislation,” Calder said.
Calder signed an open letter on why universities should implement a vaccine mandate, and wrote an opinion letter on why that should happen at the University of Victoria.
“Within the student society, you would be balancing the consequences of a vaccine mandate versus the reason for doing it and what is the impact on those that are at this stage, electing not to vaccinate,” Calder said.
“The question really then becomes if you put in place a vaccine mandate, how might that discriminate against one of your employees and on what basis would they [have] raised the point of discrimination,” she added.
Evans said the legal consideration is a factor in the society’s decision.
“The most important factor is again making sure it's something that works for employees and that ultimately makes AMS a safe place to work,” he said.
In an email to its legal counsel DLA Piper, the AMS asked whether it could require all of its employees to be vaccinated. DLA Piper responded to the AMS on August 12 saying no.
“However, if an employee refuses, AMS will have to assess the impact of that refusal on the health and safety of the workplace,” DLA Piper wrote.
The AMS does not currently have “a formal organization-wide program” to check its employees vaccination status, although “some managers and team leads may have knowledge about certain employee’s vaccination on a case-by-case basis,” Evans wrote in an email to The Ubyssey.
“We haven't looked into it super in depth yet, that was just sort of the initial summary that was provided to us from our legal counsel. But as we are now committed to evaluating and looking more into this, we will probably engage our legal counsel a little bit more on the issue,” Evans said.
Kat Nell, a third-year biophysics student, said she would support a vaccine mandate by the AMS. She said that she doesn’t want the AMS to implement a mandate that allows for “loopholes.”
“Of course as any kind of mandate there should be the regular exceptions for proper medical reasons and whatnot but again the definition of that can get very blurred very quickly,” Nell added.
When it comes to the AMS’s advocacy on vaccine mandates to UBC and whether that is consistent with the AMS’s approach to its own staff, Evans said that the circumstances of the two organizations are “quite different.”
“Comparing UBC, which is a multibillion dollar post-secondary institution, to the AMS, which is a not-for-profit student society, they’re not really comparable ... UBC has much more capacity, much more resources and much more connections with [the] government to figure out how to make these things happen than we do,” Evans said.
He said he doesn’t believe the AMS advocacy has been “misaligned” with their approach to a vaccine mandate.
“The university part of it is a priority first and now that that's been worked on a lot over the summer, now we can start to turn our attention more to how we can make it work as [a] ... significantly smaller organization,” Evans said.
Calder added that in a “free and democratic society ... sometimes in order for all of us to be able to live safely we have to infringe certain people's rights and it's a rigid test and it isn't done willy nilly.”
“But at the end of the day it comes down to balancing between the harm of infringing someone's rights and the benefit of infringing their rights for the larger context and there is no greater example of that than a health pandemic.”
Update at 6:47 p.m. on November 3, 2021: This article has been updated to add another quote from Calder.