In The Know

All too often, a physician's license to practice medicine is only suspended once the police have become involved.  There are multiple cases where The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario had the opportunity to properly label the behaviour and revoke the physician's license but instead disguised the behaviour.   It's only later when the physician was found guilty of multiple counts of sexual assault in a criminal court that the medical college finally revoked their license to practice.  It’s very unlikely in these cases that the regulator had not received complaints of sexual abuse by members of the public.  By cleverly disguising the physician's behaviour with vague wording "failure to obtain consent" for example and allowing him to plea no contest to "disgraceful, dishonourable and unprofessional conduct" the physician is able to return to practise after just a short suspension of a few months.  In addition, if a patient were to look up the physicians CPSO profile, they see the words disgraceful, dishonourable and unprofessional conduct not sexual abuse which denies the public the right to know and be protected from an abuser.  These are the opportunities where the regulator absolutely failed the public.  Far too often, these multi victim sexually abusing physicians go on to abuse dozens more women.

 

Health Regulatory bodies in Ontario and throughout Canada are professional oversight organizations that not just mandate practice requirements for physicians and other health professionals but are also responsible for keeping the public safe through disciplining their members.   Examples of these are The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, The College of Nurses of Ontario and the College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario.  

 

Health regulatory bodies have been given immense powers by our provincial parliament and there is little to no true oversight to see that they use these powers responsibly.  When someone reports sexual abuse to a regulatory body, every single individual they encounter is paid either directly or indirectly through medical professional fees. Remember this.  If you were paid by someone, where would your loyalty lie?  Indeed it is easy to blame those who work for these regulatory bodies especially when we hear “We take every case of sexual abuse very seriously” or “"every allegation of sexual abuse is vigorously prosecuted" or how about the classic "we have zero tolerance for sexual abuse", however the reality is successive governments have given them their powers through legislation that allows this to continue to happen.    

 

One must remember these organizations were established a long time ago.  For instance, The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario dates back to 1866, long before females in the country were emancipated and certainly long before women were part of the profession. Medicine itself is steeped in a well established history of misogyny.  For years, clinical trials for medicines were carried out on only males.  The result is certain medications and protocols meant for the male body have been also been prescribed to females.  In fact,  poorer outcomes for women in areas such as heart disease and heart attacks have been observed by the medical community and contributed to these one sided clinical trials. We can see that these values are baked into the regulatory system by failing females once again.  Should we really be surprised?

 

For the above reasons, we need your help in changing the legislation and putting pressure on the provincial parliament to take these powers away from the health regulatory bodies or at the very least make it a just system where victims may: fully participate in their own hearings (not just be mere witnesses) along with their lawyers; where their legal expertise is paid for by our province who already pays for the legal representative of the accused; where there is evidentiary rules; equal access to evidence; and where perpetrators cannot plea to lesser allegations.  The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario have shown they are not interested in providing these vulnerable victims with due process and procedural fairness.   Any changes made to date to the applicable health acts continue to fail these victims. There is an inherent bias and this is precisely what the 2015 To Zero Task Force Report concludes. 

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Shortly we will be including on our website the key information that you may use to contact your provincial MPP, the Minister of Health Ms. Sylvia Jones, Premier Doug Ford along with The Attorney General’s office.  Please check back with us and help us make the changes that provide for a true chance at justice for these sexual abuse victims.