Revised review of HPOA prepared Nov. 13, 2025
The Health Professions and Occupations Act is a danger to personalized consent-based health care, a danger to rights, and a danger to democracy in BC
The Health Professions and Occupations Act, (formerly Bill 36) was improperly passed on 24 November 2022 when the NDP government used closure to force a vote by the Legislative Assembly of BC when only 1/3 of the sections had been reviewed by Members of the Legislative Assembly.
It has never been subject to the notice, consultation, transparency, access to information, debate, and consensus required in a democracy including consultation with and debate by health care workers, the Legislative Assembly, or the 5 million residents of BC in need of access to ethical personalized medical care.
This Act impairs or destroys rights to provide and receive personalized consent-based health care, and prohibits giving medical advice or opinions–in private or public–that are not in line with opinions sanctioned by authorities.
This dangerous Act must be repealed.
Background and Stated Rationale
The Health Professions and Occupations Act received Royal Assent on November 24, 2022 and comes into full force on April 1, 2026. At 276 pages with 645 sections, it is one of the most significant pieces of health legislation in BC history. Only 233 of 645 sections were debated in the Legislature. The government presented it as a patient safety and modernization measure, based on the Cayton Report commissioned in 2018 from Harry Cayton, a UK health regulation consultant. Cayton was simultaneously engaged to conduct a governance review of the Law Society of BC — a dual appointment that is addressed in the section on the LPA below.
How the HPOA Undermines Democratic Governance
Abolition of Elected Professional College Boards
The HPOA consolidates health regulatory colleges from a previous total of 22 down to 6 — a process largely completed through amalgamations in 2024 — and moves all college boards to fully government-appointed membership, eliminating the elected-by-members governance model. The government defends this by arguing that elected members are “beholden” to their profession rather than the public. But this argument, if accepted, would justify eliminating every elected body on grounds that elected representatives are accountable to their voters. The entire premise of democratic governance is that accountability to constituents is the mechanism of public protection — not its enemy.
Under the HPOA, board members are selected through a merit and competency process overseen by the Superintendent’s office. “Merit and competency” as defined by government appointees is not the same as democratic mandate. The replacement of elected college governance with appointed governance is a transfer of authority from professional communities to the executive branch.
Warrantless Search and Seizure Powers
Section 131(2) grants investigators the power to enter premises used by a health professional and inspect and copy records — including personal information and confidential information — without a court order. This is a constitutional concern of the highest order. The warrant requirement under section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms exists precisely to ensure that state searches are authorized by an independent judiciary, not by the executive branch acting through its own agents. The HPOA’s warrantless search provision for health professional premises represents a direct intrusion on this constitutional protection.
Mandatory Vaccination as Licensing Condition
Section 49(1)(b)(v) makes vaccination for transmissible disease a condition of licensing and employment. No definition of “vaccine” or “transmissible disease” is provided. This gives regulatory colleges — operating under government-appointed boards and government oversight — the authority to condition professional licensure on medical interventions without legislative definition of what those interventions are. The absence of definitions is not an oversight; it is a structural choice that maximizes administrative flexibility at the expense of professional rights.
Misinformation Enforcement Mechanism
The government’s own FAQ states that the HPOA “does have provisions that can be enabled to protect the public by requiring regulatory colleges to take action against health professionals who are spreading misinformation that could bring harm to patients or the public.” The LSBC’s own Chief Legal Officer was publicly discussing regulatory authority over health professionals who “profess against the wearing of masks or assert that COVID is harmless” as early as June 2021 — at a CLE BC seminar on self-governing professions — the same year the HPOA was being developed.
A regulatory framework in which a government-appointed board can discipline health professionals for clinical speech deemed to be “misinformation” — without an independent definition of what constitutes misinformation — is a speech control mechanism, not a patient protection measure. It converts the exercise of professional clinical judgment into a compliance risk.
Removal of Appeal Rights
Section 212 provides that a health occupation director is not required to give an applicant notice or an opportunity to be heard, and that an applicant is not entitled to review by the Health Professions Review Board. The removal of procedural fairness and appeal rights from licensing decisions means that persons denied licensure have no mechanism to challenge that decision. Rights without remedies are not rights. The HPOA makes licensing determinations effectively unreviewable administrative decisions — precisely the pattern of “rule by law” rather than “rule of law” identified by the Law Society’s own Rule of Law Committee as enabling “the powerful to pervert the law to their own ends.”
Statutory Immunity for Regulatory Colleges
Section 400(2) provides that no legal proceeding for damages may be commenced against a regulatory college in respect of actions taken in good faith under the Act. Combined with the removal of appeal rights and the warrantless search powers, this provision creates regulatory bodies that can act without judicial authorization, without procedural fairness obligations, without right of review, and without liability for harm caused. This is an immunized bureaucracy — an entity with coercive powers that cannot be effectively challenged in court.
The Harry Cayton Connection
The architect of both the HPOA framework and the concurrent LSBC governance review was Harry Cayton, a UK regulator brought in by Health Minister Adrian Dix in 2018. The same consultant who designed BC’s health regulatory restructuring was then deployed to assess BC’s legal profession governance. His governance review of the LSBC — adopted by the Benchers in December 2021, months before the HPOA received Royal Assent — recommended exactly the same structural changes: more public board members, government-aligned oversight, reduced self-governance. The parallel development of identical governance transformation templates for both health professions and the legal profession by the same consultant is not coincidental.
