THE OLD GUARDIAN
theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism
By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026
Michael Oesch used to walk across countries.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Thousands of kilometres on foot, across Canada, the kind of thing most people put on a bucket list and never do. He did it. He was that kind of man.
In October 2022, he took his fourth COVID dose. Thirty-six hours later he was walking with his granddaughter when his leg stopped working. Just stopped. He couldn’t lift it. The MRI showed a lesion near the top of his spinal cord. He lost the ability to walk. He now lives in long-term care.
He applied to Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program. They said no.
No explanation that distinguished his case from the ones they did approve. Just no.
Cameron Hitchcock was 29 when his kidneys started failing after his second Pfizer dose. Nephrotic syndrome. Five months in hospital. Kidney failure. Dialysis six days a week now, still waiting for a transplant. He arranged his treatment schedule around a trip to Ottawa to testify publicly, because in five years no formal Canadian institution had made space to hear him. His VISP claim was approved. He is one of 252.
Same program. Same government promise. One man recognized, still on dialysis. One man denied, no longer able to walk.
To understand how that happened, you have to go back to before the program existed. To a contract clause. And a promise that was never quite what it sounded like.
What the Promise Actually Was
December 2020. Justin Trudeau announced the Vaccine Injury Support Program alongside the beginning of the rollout. What he said was this:
‘By getting vaccinated, we protect one another and our way of life. The chances of this are extremely rare -- less than one in a million -- and we have a duty to help if this occurs.’
It sounded like a commitment born of decency. A government saying: we’re asking this of you, and if it goes wrong, we’ll be there.
It was also, buried in the fine print of a pharmaceutical contract nobody was talking about publicly, a legal obligation.
Pfizer’s advance purchase agreements -- the ones signed with governments around the world in 2020 and 2021 -- contained standard indemnification language. Governments were required to shield Pfizer from lawsuits arising from their vaccines. And as a condition of that indemnification, they were required to create and maintain what the South African version of the contract called ‘a no-fault compensation fund sufficient to undertake and completely fulfil the indemnification obligations.’
VISP wasn’t created because it was the right thing to do. It was created because it was in the contract.
Procurement Minister Anita Anand confirmed the indemnification publicly at the time: ‘All countries, generally speaking, are faced with the issue of indemnification of companies, especially in cases of novel technologies like this. Yes we are, and we are definitely not different than any other country in this world.’
She was right about that. What she didn’t mention was that a 2017 Public Health Agency of Canada document, updated in 2019, had already established that during a pandemic, indemnity clauses should be standard practice to protect supply. This was planned before COVID existed. The promise Trudeau made in December 2020 had a contractual architecture behind it that had been built two years earlier.
Daniel Freiheit is a Toronto lawyer, LSO certified in corporate and commercial law, who has represented multiple VISP claimants and testified about the program at the Allison Inquiry in September 2026. He confirmed that Canada’s advance purchase agreement with Pfizer follows the same indemnification structure as the contracts exposed in other countries. The jurisdiction clause in Canada’s version was redacted.
The program the government announced as a humanitarian commitment was, in contractual terms, a liability management mechanism for a pharmaceutical company.
Sources: Trudeau announcement, December 2020. Anita Anand public statement, December 2020. PHAC 2017/2019 pandemic indemnity policy. South African Pfizer contract, Pretoria High Court 2023, Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Daniel Freiheit, Allison Inquiry September 9, 2026 and interview September 24, 2026.
The Accounting Firm
Here is something the government noticed early on: it had a conflict of interest.
It had approved the vaccines. It had signed the indemnification clause. It had promised to compensate people harmed by those same vaccines. A draft 2023 government report put it plainly -- administering the compensation program itself would create ‘a conflict of interest that would arise from serving as both the approver of the vaccines and the one that compensated people for the harms vaccines caused.’
The solution was not to resolve the conflict. It was to hire someone else.
In February 2021, PHAC put out a call for proposals. Companies had roughly three weeks to apply. Four did. The winner was Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton Consulting Inc., since rebranded as Oxaro.
Four Conservative MPs who later investigated the contract wrote: ‘There was no clear indication that Oxaro had credible experience in healthcare or in the administration of health-related claims.’
That’s understating it. Oxaro’s cited relevant experience was administering a memorial grant program for first responders and liquidating an insolvent life insurance company. They had never run a health claim adjudication program of any kind. The Health Minister pushed them to launch three months ahead of schedule anyway.
The budget was $65.2 million over five years covering operations, administration, and actual claim payments combined. What happened was that Oxaro received $80.8 million total and directed $36.3 million of that -- 67 percent -- to administration. As one former worker told Global News: ‘It’s frustrating. I can’t help these individuals out.’
Freiheit called VISP the only secret tribunal he knows of in Canadian law. The names of the medical professionals reviewing applications were never made public. The appeals process was not explained to claimants -- it had to be obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
Oxaro got paid on time. Every time. While claimants waited 18 months or more for a case manager to be assigned.
Sources: Global News investigation, July 2025. Draft 2023 PHAC/Health Canada VISP review report. Conservative MP letter to Health Minister, July 2025. Daniel Freiheit, interview September 24, 2026.
The Numbers
Trudeau said the chances of serious injury were less than one in a million.
By December 2025, 3,557 Canadians had applied to VISP.
252 were approved.
7.1 percent.
A peer-reviewed comparative analysis of 14 COVID vaccine injury compensation jurisdictions, published in the journal Vaccine in March 2025, found Canada’s review approval rate at 19.92% as of November 2024 -- an improvement, but still well below most comparable countries. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all operate above 50%. Germany and France higher still.
Thailand’s system runs differently. The National Health Security Office provides mandatory preliminary compensation within 30 days of a claim. Subcommittees must complete their review within 30 days and announce results within five. The amounts per claim are smaller than Canada’s maximum payouts. But by early 2022 -- before Canada had approved barely a handful of claims -- Thailand had already compensated 12,714 people to the tune of roughly $45 million USD.
Cameron Hitchcock is still on dialysis six days a week. Michael Oesch still lives in long-term care. Both went to Ottawa in September 2026 to tell their stories to the Allison Inquiry, a forum built by volunteers, because in five years no government body had created a formal space to hear them.
3,557 Canadians applied. 252 were compensated. The rest were told, in one form or another, to keep waiting.
Among those who did not receive compensation: 225 claimants whose applications were denied not on medical grounds, but because they missed a procedural three-year deadline. Their injuries were never assessed. Under VIAP, those 225 have been reinstated. Whether their claims will now be evaluated on merit -- rather than process -- remains to be seen.
Sources: PHAC VISP program statistics, December 2025. Comparative COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation systems, Vaccine journal, March 2025. Cameron Hitchcock and Michael Oesch, Allison Inquiry public testimony, September 2026.
The Conflict That Came Back
In April 2026, PHAC took over direct administration of the program, now renamed the Vaccine Impact Assistance Program. The conflict of interest that was serious enough to require outsourcing in 2021 was apparently no longer serious enough in 2026. No public explanation was offered for the change.
The person now running VIAP is Nancy Hamzawi, President of PHAC since June 2025. She is not a medical professional. Her background is chemical engineering and public administration. Before becoming PHAC President, she served as Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch -- the branch that authorized COVID-19 vaccines for use in Canada. She moved to PHAC as Executive Vice-President in February 2023, in the middle of the program’s worst period of non-approvals and administrative chaos.
The woman now overseeing compensation for people harmed by vaccines previously helped oversee the authorization of those vaccines. The conflict the government once said it needed to outsource to avoid is now sitting in the office of the person running the program directly.
Nobody has been asked to account for that publicly.
The transition also came with a hard deadline. October 1, 2026, was the cutoff for incomplete VISP applications. Claimants who had started applications but not yet submitted were required to do so by 11:59 p.m. that night -- or they would need to begin again under the new VIAP structure and forms. For people dealing with serious, ongoing health consequences, the administrative pressure of a hard restart cutoff is not a minor inconvenience. It is another barrier dressed in paperwork.
Sources: PHAC organizational structure, canada.ca, April 2026. Nancy Hamzawi biography, phac.gc.ca. CBC News, PHAC takeover announcement, April 2026.
The Legal Maze
When injured Canadians try to go around VISP -- when they try to find some other path to accountability -- they run into what Freiheit calls a maze.
Want to sue Pfizer? You get redirected to VISP. You can technically name Pfizer as a defendant, but Pfizer then brings in Health Canada through a third-party claim. The case bounces. The years pass. The legal costs grow. The injured person waits.
Courts in Canada remain deeply deferential to Health Canada’s regulatory judgment. As Freiheit put it plainly: ‘Courts trust the system, because Health Canada said so.’ The internal ATI documents that show what Health Canada was actually concluding privately -- the possible myocarditis link nineteen days before the public was told no association existed, the CAEFISS data unavailable in real time, the surveillance progressively wound down -- have not yet been tested in a Canadian courtroom. Nobody knows yet what they mean legally.
A class action is working its way through the Alberta courts, naming both the Government of Canada and the Province of Alberta. It alleges negligence, misfeasance in public office, and conduct that amounts to assault and battery on the public. It is in early stages. These things take years.
In the meantime, the maze holds.
Sources: Daniel Freiheit, interview September 24, 2026. CanLII case summaries, vaccine injury litigation. ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 2026.
What the Documents Show
This piece connects to a larger body of work.
The Old Guardian’s What They Knew series, published in September 2026, examined 2,460 pages of Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance records obtained through ATI Release A-2025-001410. Those documents showed that Health Canada’s own reviewers concluded a possible link between the vaccine’s second dose and myocarditis in young males in May 2021 -- nineteen days before the public was told no clear association existed. They showed that fatal report monitoring for the bivalent vaccine was removed from monthly tracking at Pfizer’s request. They showed that adverse event data from CAEFISS was not available to Health Canada in real time as of June 2022, when 58 million doses had already been administered.
The surveillance system that was supposed to catch rare injuries had documented gaps. The compensation system that was supposed to acknowledge them couldn’t get out of its own administrative structure. The legal system redirects anyone who tries to hold someone accountable back into the same failing program.
None of this required malice. That’s the part worth sitting with. The indemnification clause was standard policy written years earlier. The outsourcing decision made a kind of bureaucratic sense. The conflict of interest was real and the government acknowledged it. The surveillance reductions were documented negotiations. Each piece had a reason. Together they built something that left Michael Oesch in long-term care and Cameron Hitchcock on dialysis without adequate explanation, redress, or accountability.
That’s not incompetence. That’s architecture.
The Promise, Five Years Later
Trudeau said the chances were less than one in a million.
3,557 Canadians disagreed -- with their bodies, with their claims, with their presence in an Ottawa committee room in September 2026.
The program that was supposed to be there for them consumed more than half its budget before most of them were heard. It was administered by a firm that had never run a health claim program. Its medical reviewers were kept anonymous. Its appeals process required a Freedom of Information request to find. It paid its administrator on time and in full while claimants waited a year and a half for a case manager.
And when the administrator’s contract ran out, the government quietly brought the whole thing back in-house -- into the same agency that approved the vaccines in the first place.
Michael Oesch walked across Canada. He cannot walk now. The program said no.
Cameron Hitchcock will be on dialysis again tomorrow. The program said yes. He still had to go to Ottawa on his own to be heard.
The promise was less than one in a million.
There were 3,557 of them.
Sources and Notes
Global News, July 2025
Primary mainstream investigation into VISP: Oxaro contract, administrative cost breakdown, worker testimony. globalnews.ca/news/11258737
Vaccine journal, March 2025 (ScienceDirect)
Peer-reviewed comparative analysis of 14 COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation programs. Canada, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Germany, France. Approval rate data.
South African Pfizer contract, Pretoria High Court 2023
Standard indemnification language: governments required to indemnify Pfizer and maintain a no-fault compensation fund. Bureau of Investigative Journalism primary reporting.
Procurement Minister Anita Anand, December 2020
Public confirmation of indemnification clauses as standard in all Canadian COVID vaccine contracts.
PHAC 2017/2019 pandemic indemnity policy document
Pre-pandemic policy establishing indemnity clauses as standard practice during pandemics. Predates COVID by two years.
Daniel Freiheit, Lion Law, Toronto
LSO Certified Specialist, Corporate and Commercial Law. Allison Inquiry testimony September 9, 2026. Interview with The Old Guardian September 24, 2026. Confirmed Canadian contract structure, characterized legal landscape as a maze, identified VISP as only secret tribunal in Canadian law he is aware of.
ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026
2,460 pages of internal pharmacovigilance records. Myocarditis internal timeline (p.62). CAEFISS real-time data gap (p.198). Surveillance wind-down documentation (BBRS Signal Tracking, May 29, 2023).
PHAC organizational structure, canada.ca, April 2026
Nancy Hamzawi confirmed as PHAC President since June 2025. Previous role: ADM Health Canada Health Products and Food Branch. No medical training.
Cameron Hitchcock and Michael Oesch
Public testimony, Allison Inquiry, September 2026. Both named voluntarily and publicly. Cameron Hitchcock: VISP approved. Michael Oesch: VISP denied.
Conservative MPs letter, July 2025
Four Conservative MPs to Health Minister demanding probe into Oxaro contract and VISP mismanagement following Global News investigation.
The Old Guardian is an independent investigative outlet based in Toronto. The full What They Knew series and ATI Release A-2025-001410 are available on request. Contact: tips@theoldguardian.ca
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