MODERATOR
Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, MD, FRCPC 

Dr. Gill is the President and Co-Founder of Concerned Ontario Doctors. She is a passionate advocate for accessible healthcare, and the protection of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. She has represented the interests of Ontario’s and Canada’s patients and frontline physicians at Queen’s Park, the House of Commons and the Senate of Canada to advise on healthcare policy. Dr. Gill is a frontline physician practicing in the Greater Toronto Area. She completed her medical and post-graduate training in pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario with her research with Dr. Frank Plummer at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s only Level 4 National Microbiology Laboratory focusing on HIV-1 vaccine development. (Twitter: @dockaurG)

OPENING ADDRESS
Dr. Frank Ulrich Montgomery, MD
via video from Geneva, Switzerland 

Dr. Montgomery is the Chair of Council of the World Medical Association and the President of the Standing Committee of European Doctors. He was elected President of the German Medical Association from 2011 to 2019. He was Chairman of the Marburger Bund, the professional organization of the hospital-based and employed physicians of Germany, from 1989 until 2007. Dr. Montgomery is a radiologist from Hamburg, Germany and had completed his medical and post-graduate training in Hamburg, Germany and Sydney, Australia.

CLOSING ADDRESS
Dr. Catherine Frazee, OC, DLitt, LLD (Hon)
via video from Nova Scotia, Canada 

Dr. Frazee is Professor Emerita at Ryerson University, where prior to her retirement in 2010 she served as Professor of Distinction and Co-Director of the RBC-Ryerson Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education. She served as the Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1992. Dr. Frazee's primary areas of focus in recent years have been the exploration of cultural work grounded in the experience of disability, the illumination of ableist habits embedded in our social ethos and the reframing of disability as a distinct and resilient social identity. She has provided expert testimony before Federal and Provincial Courts on human rights and disability disadvantage and has contributed actively in Supreme Court of Canada interventions of strategic concern to disabled Canadians, most recently in relation to the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. She has published extensively on human rights, precarious citizenship, and the activist resistance of disabled people. Dr. Frazee has received honorary Doctorate degrees from four Canadian universities: University of New Brunswick in 2002, Dalhousie University in 2009, McMaster University in 2015, and Carleton University in 2018. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014 for "her advancement of the rights of persons with disabilities, and as an advocate for social justice".

PANELISTS

IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER 

Dr. Brian Bird, JD, BCL, DCL 

Dr. Bird is the 2019-20 John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA. Dr. Bird completed a doctorate in law at McGill University on the topic of freedom of conscience. He also holds degrees from the University of Oxford, the University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University. After law school and prior to pursuing graduate studies, Brian served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of British Columbia and for Justice Andromache Karakatsanis at the Supreme Court of Canada. He is a non-practising member of the Law Society of British Columbia.

Dr. Farr Curlin, MD, ABIM 

Dr. Curlin is a physician practicing in hospice and palliative care at the Duke University Hospital in North Carolina, USA. He completed his medical and post-graduate training at the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago. Dr. Curlin is the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine; Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; and Director of the Arete Initiative in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. His empirical research charts the influence of physicians' moral traditions and commitments on physicians' clinical practices. His areas of expertise are medicine, medical ethics, doctor-patient relationship, and conscience.

Dr. Natasha Fernandes, MD 

Dr. Fernandes is a graduate of the University of Ottawa medical school. She knew very early on that she wanted to pursue psychiatry as a specialty. Dr. Fernandes is currently a resident physician completing her fourth year at the University of Toronto Psychiatry Residency Program. Her plan is to eventually focus her practice in dual diagnosis and psychosis. She is a conscientious objector.

Ms Tracy Odell, BA, BEd, MA 

Ms Odell has spent her lifetime working with community organizations and the Province of Ontario to improve the lives of persons with a variety of types of disabilities. She is a qualified teacher of English and Special Education, with an Honours B.A., B.Ed and Masters degree in Critical Disability Studies from York University. She is the recipient of the John Lord Award for Participatory Action Research conducted as part of her Master's work and has received awards from community organizations for her work to advance independent living in Ontario. Ms Odell is currently the President of Citizens With Disabilities – Ontario.