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Canada’s agency responsible for the country’s national health policy last week told government officials that it needs up to 15 years to release records on vaccine injuries, Rebel News reported.
Health Canada revealed the timeline after Member of Parliament Colin Reynolds asked the agency which access to information requests — equivalent to U.S. Freedom of Information Act requests — had been active the longest without resolution.
Reynolds’ question was prompted by “unusually long delays” by Health Canada and several other Canadian government agencies in responding to access to information requests, the Western Standard reported.
Health Canada said it requested the 15-year extension “for a very voluminous request (several million pages) which sought vaccine and adverse drug reactions reports since 1998.”
Health Canada said the request “has since been successfully rescoped and is actively being processed.” However, the agency said the original extension “still stands,” as Canada’s Access to Information Act “does not provide an opportunity to amend it after the first 30 days of the request.”
The response did not provide additional details about the nature of the request or the person or entity who requested the information.
Canadian attorney Eva Chipiuk said Health Canada’s withholding of vaccine injury data for up to 15 years is “frankly troubling.” She added:
“Canadians were told repeatedly that these products were safe and effective, and many people made life-altering decisions based on those assurances. Some complied under extraordinary pressure from governments, employers, and institutions. Others experienced serious injuries, loss of livelihood, or the death of loved ones.
“To now shield records documenting vaccine injuries from public scrutiny undermines trust at a moment when transparency is most needed.”
Canadian physician Dr. Charles Hoffe, who faced an investigation for reporting COVID-19 vaccine injuries his patients sustained, agreed. He said Health Canada’s actions are “entirely consistent with the behavior of the Canadian government and public health authorities throughout the pandemic.”
A Health Canada spokesperson declined The Defender’s request for comment.
‘Pandemic-era secrecy remains entrenched’ at Canadian health agencies
Rebel News reported that Health Canada is “following in the FDA’s footsteps” — a reference to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2021 claim that it needed 55 years, later amended to 75 years, to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request about the licensing of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
In 2022, a federal judge rejected the FDA’s argument and gave the agency eight months to release what later became known as the “Pfizer documents.”
In its annual report on its compliance with the Access to Information Act, Health Canada claimed that it “has made more information available to the public, continuously reassessing the balance between its commitment to openness and transparency, with the need to safeguard confidential business information.”
Canadian researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., an expert in all-cause mortality and excess deaths related to the COVID-19 vaccines and author of over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, disagreed. He told The Defender that “extension times for government departments to respond to access to information requests are abused in current practice.”
Rancourt said:
“The laws were first written when paper records needed to be studied and redacted individually to protect privacy and state secrets.
“However, in today’s technological reality, paper records (even millions of pages) can be quickly scanned, mined and redacted using standard industry data handling, mining and interpreting tools. Even complex text can be analysed for context and textual elements, and reliable accuracy tests can be applied.”
Patrick Provost, Ph.D., a retired professor in microbiology-infectiology and immunology at the Université Laval in Quebec City, said Health Canada’s claims amount to “excuses and pretenses to avoid doing what they are paid for and asked to do to inform and protect the public.”
Bernard Massie, Ph.D., former associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the Université de Montréal and a former employee of the National Research Council of Canada, said access to information requests was typically “taken very seriously and processed diligently” by Canadian federal agencies.
“The only instances that I’m aware of that processing of the requests were delayed are cases raising some fairly sensitive political issues,” Massie said. “I have never witnessed such a long delay, and that raises the question of what the real underlying issue for such an exceptional delay is.”
“Pandemic-era secrecy remains entrenched at the Public Health Agency of Canada,” Rebel News reported, noting that several other Canadian federal agencies reported shorter delays, or no delays at all, in responding to access to information requests.
“Canada’s access to information regime increasingly resembles a pharmaceutical confidentiality agreement where the public is told to wait (indefinitely) for answers about products injected into their bodies,” Rebel News added.
Canadian government ‘grossly underestimates’ number of vaccine injuries
Health Canada’s annual report on its compliance with the Access to Information Act also referenced ongoing federal court cases involving disputes over requests for documents submitted to the agency.
In one such case, Jordan Ash v. Canada (Minister of Health), the applicant asked Canada’s Federal Court to review “Health Canada’s response” to an access to information request for “information on all death reports associated with COVID-19 vaccines.”
According to Health Canada’s report, “the Information Commissioner of Canada investigated a complaint and found that Health Canada had conducted a reasonable search in response to the request.”
But according to Ash, this was not the case. He told The Defender that Health Canada provided him with “about half of the 450+ reports” and told him the other half was with the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Ash said this led him to file a complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner and then a lawsuit.
He argued that Health Canada “should have the totality of reports in federal possession, and should provide the remaining 200+ reports under the original data request.” But in May 2025, Canada’s Federal Court ruled against Ash.
A hearing was held in Ash’s case on Tuesday at the Federal Court of Appeal in Toronto. Ash said the hearing was “lively” and a ruling is pending.
“The default mode is to lose these kinds of cases as the Canadian courts vastly side with government — especially regarding COVID policy cases. However, there are exceptions, and a win is possible,” Ash said.
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‘Many of the injured are still waiting for help’
These revelations come amid growing attention to vaccine injuries in Canada.
In July 2025, Canadian national broadcaster Global News presented a series of stories on vaccine-injured people who said they were left waiting by Canada’s federal Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP).
“Many of the injured are still waiting for help,” Global News reported. The outlet cited VISP employees who described the inner workings of the program as “chaos.”
Canadian national broadcaster CBC reported last year that due to a lack of public awareness of the VISP, which was established in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, some vaccine-injured people have missed the program’s filing deadline, which requires claims to be submitted within three years of the onset of symptoms.
As of June 1, 2025, VISP had received 3,317 vaccine injury compensation claims. Although 2,699 of those claims were deemed admissible, only 234 were approved. Payouts totaled 18,140,998 Canadian dollars (approximately $13.3 million).
According to the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System (CAEFISS), 58,712 adverse events were reported as of Jan. 1, 2024, by people who received a COVID-19 vaccine, with 11,702 reports listed as serious.
CAEFISS lists myocarditis and thrombosis (blood clots) with thrombocytopenia syndrome as “adverse events of interest” related to the COVID-19 shots. However, the database is no longer being updated, “because the COVID-19 response has evolved from managing a global pandemic to an ongoing health issue.”
CAEFISS is the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). A 2011 Harvard study found that less than 1% of all adverse events following vaccination are reported to VAERS.
Yet, according to Massie, “vaccine injury reporting in Canada is lagging behind what is done in the USA through the VAERS system, which itself is suboptimal.” He said CAEFISS “grossly underestimates the frequency and severity” of adverse events.
“Instead, COVID-19 vaccine safety data will be shared in a surveillance report that will include data on all vaccines approved in Canada,” CAEFISS states.
As of today, the surveillance report does not appear to have been published.
Sarah Choujounian, a former nurse and co-founder of Canadian Frontline Nurses, said that despite the rising awareness of vaccine injuries, this information is “not changing the trajectory” of the Canadian government’s vaccine injury policies.
Choujounian, who is facing disciplinary action by the College of Nurses of Ontario for publicly questioning COVID-19 vaccine safety during the pandemic, said the withholding of vaccine injury data violates informed consent.
“Informed consent means that someone knows … the benefits, but also the risks and also alternatives,” Choujounian said. “People are allowed to know the risks of what they’re putting in their bodies.”
“As mRNA ‘vaccines’ continue to be developed, promoted and administered, the release and sharing of information related to the injuries they are causing becomes an urgent matter of public health of the utmost importance to Canadians that we simply cannot ignore,” Provost said.
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