The Practice of Biosecurity in Canada: Public Health Legal Preparedness and Toronto's SARS Crisis

Abstract

The experience of the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in Toronto, Canada provides an important example for understanding how the relationship between national security and public health is being defined in the contemporary context of emerging infectious diseases and the globalization of public health. This paper argues that Canada's public health legal framework is a critical part of Canada's practice of ‘biosecurity’ through which an unpredictable and continually emergent ‘new reality’, is mobilized to justify an ongoing state of emergency. Norms about state power and human rights are suspended in the interest of global capitalism and at the expense of those most vulnerable to the short-term and long-term effects of infectious disease.