all these arguments and confirmed the $300 judgment (Nissan v. Pelletier, scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/5539/index.do).
The Pelletier judgment effectively shut down an industry-wide scam that had generated millions of dollars in profits from leftover cars and trucks. The appeal also confirmed the constitutionality of Quebec’s small claims court system, making it impossible for other defendants to escape its jurisdiction.
Success Story
Eric Topol is an American cardiologist and geneticist who got a dangerous drug off the market and lost his job at the Cleveland Clinic in the process.
Topol was the first physician researcher to raise questions about the cardiovascular safety of Merck’s Vioxx (rofecoxib), an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat osteoarthritis and acute pain. Following Topol’s criticism, the drug was voluntarily withdrawn from the market in 1994 because of concerns about the increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
It was later proven that Merck withheld information about the cardiovascular risk from doctors and patients for over five years, resulting in between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease. Merck had sales revenue of US$2.5 billion from Vioxx during its last year on the market.
Success Story
Another physician known as “the guinea-pig doctor” kept his job, but made himself sick to prove the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry wrong about the cause of stomach and intestinal ulcers.
Barry Marshall, an Australian internist and medical researcher, was so sure conventional medical wisdom was wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers that he swallowed a broth of Helicobacter pylori bacteria to prove his point. Sure enough, the brew gave him an ulcer that a regimen of antibiotics quickly and inexpensively cured.
Both Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, a pathologist who also saw the connection between H. pylori and ulcers, had previously been dismissed worldwide as quacks by medical specialists and drug companies. After all, medical schools taught that ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle and were best treated by drugs blocking acid production. In one bizarre study they cited, scientists gave rats ulcers by putting them in straitjackets and dropping them in ice water. Antacids were given to prevent the rats’ ulcers. Based on this study, conventional treatment of patients became a lifelong diet of antacids like Tagamet and Zantac (a $3-billion-dollar industry) or removal of the stomach. Today, ulcers are easily cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics, and stomach cancer, also linked to H. pylori gastritis, has been practically eradicated in the Western world.
Twenty years after their discovery was published, both doctors received the 2005 Nobel Prize for medicine.
Success Story
Manitoba firefighter Rick Stoyko was never much of a complainer, but he needed medical help for himself and his colleagues.
He met Becky Barrett while she was going door-to-door campaigning for the provincial NDP. Stoyko had been diagnosed with brain cancer in January of 2002 and wanted Barrett’s help in having cancer recognized as a work-related illness for provincial firefighters. He showed her studies of Canadian firefighters that found they were three times more likely to contract brain, bladder, and kidney cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. She agreed to take up the firefighters’ cause.
Barrett won her seat and was appointed minister of labour. Shortly thereafter, she introduced Bill 5, a law making firefighters automatically eligible for workers’ compensation benefits for different forms of cancer, retroactive to 1992. The law created the presumption that a firefighter’s cancer was work-related. Under the new law, employers wishing to appeal had the burden of proof that the cancer was not work-related.
In a surprise move, the opposition Conservatives applauded the legislation, and Manitoba became the first Canadian jurisdiction with full presumptive cancer legislation. The list of cancers now presumed to be work-related injuries for full-time, part-time, or volunteer firefighters, as well as fire investigators and trainers, include breast cancer (a first in Canada), multiple myeloma, primary site prostate, and skin cancers. This brings to fourteen the number of cancers covered by presumptive legislation. The other cancers currently covered include: brain, kidney, lung, ureter, colorectal, esophageal and testicular cancers, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and leukemia.
Stoyko brought the media to tears during one press conference where he spoke of his love for the profession and how he hoped in his next life “to again have the honour of being a firefighter.” Rick died almost ten months after the legislation was adopted. He was only fifty years old.
The health protection law for Canada’s firefighters that Rick Stoyko and Labour Minister Barrett successfully championed in the Manitoba legislature has steamrolled around the world, as the following excerpt from Australia’s September 2, 2011 Senate Hansard clearly shows. The Senate was considering a health protection bill for Australian firefighters and invited Alex Forrest, president of the United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg and Canada’s representative for the International Association of Firefighters, to speak:
It has been a great honour to be here. I would like to dedicate the work that I have done here to a firefighter from Manitoba. He was the first firefighter to be covered by occupational cancer in all of Canada. His name was Rick Stoyko. I know his family will be happy to hear that dedication. I have also reviewed the previous Hansard from all the people. I believe that the evidence is clear. I am not going to go into anything more because I think the position has been clear that there is a link between cancer and occupational firefighting. You have the great responsibility of putting this forward and I really look forward to the report. I also look forward to the time that I come back here and see that this legislation is passed. I want to thank each and every one of you for putting your time into this. I know politics is a thankless job sometimes, but the work that you are doing here is going to have far-reaching effect for not only Australian firefighters but around the world. I know because I am working in places such as Sweden, Finland, Israel and the UK and they are watching what is happening here in Australia right now.
The Australian bill was passed.
Success Story
Beckie Williams combined the use of social media and a sense of humour to end U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer’s practice of adding a $10 surcharge to brassieres sized DD and up. Her campaign created a Facebook group called Busts 4 Justice in 2008. A year later, with over 18,000 members, the group forced M&S to adopt a one-price-fits-all policy. Since then, a number of independent websites have sprung up rating brassieres and retailers’ practices (see busts4justice.com/about-busts4justice/ and www.investinyourchest.co.uk/ratings-guide).
Success Story
Marie Valée was a mom and a journalist for Le Jour, living in Quebec, when she became fed up with TV commercials directed at her children that pushed cereals, games, and other products. Her polite entreaties with advertisers got nowhere, so she wrote a few articles and ratcheted up the pressure. Valée founded a group of several hundred Quebecers called “Le Mouvement pour l’Abolition de la Publicité Destinée aux Enfants” and carried out a media campaign that culminated in hearings in the Quebec National Assembly and the adoption of strong laws that led to the abolition of advertising directed at children throughout Canada.
Success Story
Mario Girolami is a volunteer driver who parked his truck in downtown Calgary on May 19, 2011, to deliver aid for Slave Lake fire victims. His engine was running, and he had the emergency lights on for the few moments it took to unload bedding and other items. As he was pulling away, a Calgary Parking Authority agent handed him a $315
