More on Death, Dying and Profit, and Burjoski v Waterloo Region District School Board - Dinner Table Digest № 68
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This Digest features two posts relating to the dying process and, more specifically, what happens to our bodies after we are declared deceased. While this may be morbid material for many, I find the concept of death to be fascinating, and I desperately wish that our culture was more open to talking about the process of human death and dying. The other featured piece is the official legal (CanLII) filing of the Ontario Superior Court in the case of Carlyn Burjoski v. Waterloo Regional District School Board, which shows the legal reasoning for ruling against Ms. Bujoski’s claim that she was unfairly cut off from finishing a presentation to the School Board. Also included is the YouTube link for my most played Spotify song in 2023.
Sections: When Does Life End? / Burjoski v. WRDSB / Donated Bodies, Missing Organs
When does life end? - Ann Neumann - The Guardian
In the last Dinner Table Digest, I featured an optimistic look at some of the latest advances in the prolonging of human life. The quoted experts suggested that with better medical technology and a bit more knowledge about the human body, we might be able to push off death indefinitely.
Of course, this kind of approach fails to recognize that the moment of death is, for many of us, anyway, occurs when the body has run its course. We are often at our weakest at the moment of death. Indeed, one of the dangers in thinking that life can be extended indefinitely is that we can become overly optimistic about what it means to be at the moment of death, or, to use the common turn of phrase, to be on death’s doorstep. In this Guardian piece, we meet a father who is convinced that his daughter, having been pronounced as deceased by medical professionals, is actually still alive. Moreover, he is convinced that the hospital is lying to him about her status because they want to procure her organs.
While the hospital was not lying to him about his daughter’s status as deceased, they did take several of her organs from her without her father’s knowledge and despite her having indicated previously that she did not want to donate her organs.
This is a story about how a physician’s determination of death is directly linked to lives saved through organ donation
The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) offered two statutory definitions for when an individual is legally declared dead. There were now two ways to die: based on circulatory criteria (heart and lungs) and neurologic criteria (the brain).
In the latter, patients can not respond to external stimuli, like touch, but latent nervous system activity can be deceptive. Mike, for example, mistakenly thought that Brittany was responding to his touch. The body is warm, the patient breathing because circulation is often continued with medical assistance.
The UDDA was effectively adopted by all 50 states. Ultimately only one, New Jersey, offers a religious exemption, and three others – New York, California, and Illinois – allow “reasonable accommodations” to families who require additional support in coping with the diagnosis.
It was apparent to the UDDA authors that clear guidelines were imperative to the public’s comfort with organ donation; the act allowed the creation of today’s organ procurement and transplantation system.
More than 40,000 lives a year are saved by organ donation. It is a revolutionary technology that has changed the medical system for the absolute good. It is also directly tied to the development of brain death criteria because, like Brittany, a vast majority of donors – more than 65% – are declared dead by neurological criteria, or brain death, before their organs are procured.
“If anything, it is a relief not only for physicians but for families [of organ donors] when patients do meet the criteria for brain death,” Warraich wrote. Surveys show that these family members who choose donation find solace in their grief, knowing that their tragedy has extended the life of someone in need.
But for some who are mistrustful of or feel manipulated, bullied, or disrespected by the medical institution they are at the mercy of, their loved one looks deceptively alive.
This tune by the band Grave Pleasures was my most played Spotify song for 2023!
Carolyn Burjoski v. Waterloo Region District School Board, 2023 - CanLII
TL;DR: Carolyn Burjoski lost in Ontario Superior Court.
A local school board issue that has made waves not only here in the Waterloo Region but also in the United States concerns a teacher, Carolyn Burjoski, who, after beginning to make problematic comments about transgender people at a meeting of the Waterloo Region District School Board, had her presentation ended by the then-chair, Scott Stager Piatkowski.1 The teacher was subsequently removed from the classroom, and has launched a number of legal proceedings against the Board and Piatkowski, claiming, among other things, that her charter rights to self-expression had been violated. On November 27, 2023 it was reported that a judge ruled that at least one of those lawsuits could proceed. However, in a decision handed downtwo days later, another judge ruled against her claim that her Charter rights had been violated. This decision will likely impact the results of the lawsuit that was allowed to proceed, which had to do with allegations of defamatory statements. In the November 29th decision, on the question ‘was it reasonable [for the board to end the presentation,]’ Judge Stewart, with Judges Lococo and Williams concurring, writes,
I agree with the submission of the WRDSB that the decision was not unreasonable. The WRDSB has codified certain operational matters in its Bylaws that include procedures for delegations, for its committees and committee members, for public meetings, and for WRDSB meetings. The Bylaws identify duties of the Chair to maintain order in WRDSB meetings and, in particular, to preserve order and decorum and decide upon all questions of order, subject to an appeal to the WRDSB. The Bylaws also set out procedures for delegations to make submissions at meetings which include the requirement to make written submissions ahead of time that provide a summary of the points being presented.
On the question of procedural fairness, the Judges write,
The WRDSB followed its own procedures in coming to a resolution to end Burjoski’s presentation. Although the Bylaws do not specify how the board may stop a delegation, even where a mode of procedure is not prescribed by statute, any reasonable mode not expressly forbidden by law may be adopted (see: Knight v. Indian Head School Division No 19, 1990 CanLII 138 (SCC), [1990] 1 S.C.R. 653). The Chair did provide brief reasons when he referenced the delegation procedure and his concern that Burjoski’s comments may have violated the Human Rights Code.
[We] consider that the process that was afforded to Burjowski [sic] was not unfair. She was given more than one opportunity to deliver her delegation on the topic approved in advance, but declined to do so even after she was reminded of its scope. [We] therefore would not give effect to this ground of review.
And finally, on the question of bias, the Judges write,
The only evidence of bias raised by Burjoski are statements that were made after the meeting. The WRDSB submits that the comments that Burjoski takes issue with merely support the decision that was made after the fact and do not in any way leave a reasonable person to believe that the Chair had a closed mind before he voted in support of the decision. In addition, the decision was made by five members of the elected WRDSB. The Chair also specifically passed the chair position to the Vice-Chair to preside over the vote. Having formed a reason for voting a certain way is not the same as being biased before the vote is cast.
[We] see no basis established upon which any finding of a reasonable apprehension of bias, or any actual bias, on the part of the WRDSB could be justified.
In other words, the panel of Judges at the Ontario Superior Court found that the Waterloo Region District School Board acted reasonably when it terminated Burjoski’s presentation, that the termination fell within the bounds of precedural fairness, and that there was no evidence of bias on the part of the Chair, especially in light of the fact that the Chair’s decision was upheld by a vote of the entire board, which is an elected body.
My view: I am very surprised with this decision. For my part, I thought that Piatkowski responded too quickly in cutting off Burjoski’s presentation. I thought (and have shared with Scott personally) that he should have afforded her more time to speak, and, once it became clear that her speech would violate the Human Rights Code, only then should he have intervened. I did not, however, give enough weight to the fact that Burjoski had been reminded that she had been granted the right to speak on one issue, and, despite this, kept trying to speak on a separate issue.
I also did not realize that the Chair’s decision to cut off Burjoski’s presentation was followed by a confirming vote by the whole Board. That an elected body had the opportunity to confirm the procedural decision made by the Chair likely played a significant part in the decision of the panel of judges. That it happened at all was, in some ways, serendipitous, with the vote occurring as the result of an attempt to Challenge the Chair - one member’s opposition to the Chair’s decision ultimately resulted in a majority of the elected body voting to support the Chair’s action. In the mind of the Superior Court judges (and in mine as well,) the supporting vote acts as a reinforcement to the democratic legitimacy of the Chair’s decision to terminate Burjoski’s presentation.
Their Bodies Were Donated to Harvard. Then They Went Missing - Brenna Ehrlich - Rolling Stone
As if Mike O’Connor’s experience with the organ donation system in the United States wasn’t horrifying enough, this story about the theft of body parts from cadavers donated to Harvard Medical School will leave you asking even more questions.
Once a body is given over to Harvard, that’s meant to be its final destination, where various parts are studied by Ivy League students suited up in surgical gowns and latex gloves. Future doctors and dentists work carefully on their assigned embalmed cadavers, learning about, say, the collection of nerves in the upper arm, or the tiny ligaments and bones that come together at the knee. They’re taught and tested and trained, and the donor’s ashes are usually handed back over to their family, their final sacrifice complete. The donors are generous people like Mazzone, who opted to give up traditional burials in the name of science.
When a grieving son or daughter hands over their loved one to Harvard, they’re trusting the storied institution to handle them with respect. They’re passing over their parent or grandparent believing that they’re in safe hands with the academy.
But in 2018, the unthinkable happened. Lodge, the longtime manager of the university’s morgue, and his wife, Denise, a former New Hampshire state government worker, allegedly started selling pieces from those donated bodies. The imprimatur of the Harvard morgue — the official procedures, the sterile facilities — became twisted and entwined with a dark corner of the world of oddity enthusiasts, people who collect out-there specimens. Donors were traded like baseball cards. And for years, family members, who thought their loved ones were laid to rest, were none the wiser.
There is clearly a lot of money to be made over the bodies of dead people. When profit is at the centre of the equation, it will be almost impossible to properly honour loved ones when they pass on. That’s a crying shame.
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Thank you so much for supporting my writing, with your eyeballs, your time, and your $5 bills. I am deeply grateful, and I appreciate any feedback you might have. Please feel free you leave a comment below, or, if you’d like to connect with me directly, you can email me at peter(at)peterthurley(dot).ca. You can also connect with me on Facebook or on Twitter.
In the interest of transparency, Scott is a longtime friend of mine, and fellow volunteer with the New Democratic Party. I have volunteered on many of his campaigns, including his school board runs. Scott was also the Coordinator at my Co-op for a number of years.