Transport Canada has required airline pilots to sign a declaration granting unrestricted and compelled access to their complete personal medical records as a condition of maintaining a valid aviation medical certificate.

 

Refusal to grant such access results in suspension of medical certification assessment with no entitlement to refund, thereby constituting compelled consent under threat of loss of livelihood.

 

The Canadian aviation medical certification system has always been based on objective,

predefined criteria assessed by a designated Civil Aviation Medical Examiner for aviation relevant conditions.

 

Our current system limits assessment to defined regulatory standards and has supported safe commercial flight operations in Canada for many decades.

 

Transport Canada has not produced evidence, safety data, incident trends, or formal risk analysis demonstrating inadequacy of the existing aeromedical framework.

 

International Civil Aviation Organization Annex 1 standards rely on aeromedical examiner assessment against defined fitness criteria and do not contemplate unrestricted access to complete lifetime medical records by regulators.

 

The demand for unfettered medical record access represents a departure from internationally accepted aeromedical certification principles applied by peer aviation authorities.

 

The new declaration authorizes Transport Canada to access healthcare provider records, laboratory reports, medical record systems, and pharmacy databases without relevance, temporal, or proportional limits.

 

Such access bypasses the established role of the Civil Aviation Medical Examiner and replaces examiner assessment with centralized record mining.

 

Unrestricted access introduces subjective interpretation of historical, resolved, or unrelated medical information and enables retroactive reassessment without transparent standards or appeal safeguards.

 

The new declaration permits secondary disclosure to other government bodies under broad Privacy Act provisions without defined use, retention, or protection limits.

 

This structure erodes trust between pilots and physicians, discourages early treatment, and degrades aviation safety culture.

 

Pilots will be incentivized to limit participation in digital health systems, undermining continuity of care and public health objectives.

 

Expanded testing ordered without objective thresholds will impose direct financial costs on pilots through private testing requirements.

 

Acceptance of this demand establishes precedent for further unilateral intrusion into pilots’ private lives without collective bargaining or parliamentary oversight.

 

Unilateral changes to medical certification directly impact employability, income security, and working conditions.