Complaint against Sooke store’s COVID-era mask restrictions dismissed Published 12:40 pm Wednesday, December 31, 2025 By Bailey Seymour
Woman says she was discriminated against because the manager asked for specifics of her exemption for wearing a mask, and because she was given a limited amount of time to shop. (Black Press Media file photo) A woman who filed a human rights complaint against a Sooke grocery store for denying her entry due to COVID-era mask mandates has been dismissed by the B.C. Human Rights tribunal.
In April 2021, Sun Chun Lau entered Village Food Market without wearing a mask despite the store’s policy that customers not wearing masks would be asked to wear one, and if they refused, they would be asked to leave. The assistant manager at the time spoke to Lau and gave her a limited amount of time to complete her shopping and leave the store after she said she had a medical exemption. She said she was discriminated against because the manager asked for specifics of her exemption, and because she was given a limited amount of time to shop.
In the tribunal’s decision, it laid out Lau’s medical conditions and medical history, which includes thyroid cancer, a stroke, migraines, metabolic disorders, vascular disease, and asthma – though her asthma was not confirmed by the tribunal at the July 2025 hearings.
“Ms. Lau testified that she tried to wear a mask on multiple occasions before she went to the store, but found it had potentially dangerous effects on her. She says she is unable to breathe normally when she wears a mask, and she feels like she is drowning or gasping for air,” noted the decision from tribunal member Andrew Robb.
At the hearing, she provided a report she found online from an organization called Action4Canada that advocates against abortion rights, the LGBTQ, “political Islam,” vaccines and more. The report, which was prepared in support of a court application in Quebec, said an experiment found that non-medical “blue masks” reduce the amount of oxygen available to people wearing them, as wearers continually “re-breathe” the air inside the mask. The report says this creates hazardous levels of carbon dioxide inside the mask. Robb found that he was provided with no other information about whether the court application was successful, and that the report was outdated.
“The report says some masks, including respirator masks, eliminate the health risks that the report says are associated with wearing blue, non-medical masks. At the hearing, Ms. Lau testified that she had not tried wearing a respirator mask,” noted Robb. “Based on the report, it would appear that if Ms. Lau wore a respirator mask, she would not face the same difficulties breathing that she experienced when she tried wearing other masks.”
As a result of Lau being unable to prove that her disabilities interfered with her ability to wear a mask, the case was dismissed.
Read more at: https://vicnews.com/2025/12/31/complain ... dismissed/