Gay man launches Charter challenge against blood-donor screening

Since the Krever inquiry, there has been general agreement that the personal questions asked by Canadian Blood Services are a reasonable limitation on our Charter rights. The idea is to limit the health risk posed to blood recipients. But Kyle Freeman, a Thornhill, Ont. man, has called this assumption into question by suing the agency on the grounds that its questionnaire is unjustified and discriminatory. The suit arose after Freeman lied on the part of his questionnaire that asks whether he’d had sex with even a single man since 1977 (he had). He later emailed the agency to tell them as much, and now maintains he’d recently tested negative for blood-born diseases like HIV. "I felt the benefit of giving blood would outweigh the political position of Blood Services,” he said.

Ottawa Citizen