The University of Waterloo's "vaccination requirement" was not legally required

But the university lied by saying it was.

The University of Waterloo (UW) repeatedly claimed that it was legally required to impose a covid-19 "vaccination requirement" or mandate on its students and employees.

Provincial legislation in Ontario required universities to follow instructions issued by Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health. So if the Chief Medical Officer of Health, currently Dr. Kieran Moore, instructed universities to mandate vaccination, then UW would have been required to do that.

And UW has repeatedly claimed that Moore instructed universities to mandate vaccination. For example, an early iteration of UW's covid-19 FAQs page included this:

Communications from Human Resources tell employees:

And disciplinary letters from the administration tell faculty:

To verify that these claims by UW are false, one need only read the actual instructions from Moore (or listen to him say it again at a recent press conference). In Moore's own words, each university "must establish a COVID-19 vaccination policy." Having a policy was mandatory. Moore did not instruct universities to make vaccination mandatory.

To the contrary, Moore explicitly allowed for a university’s “COVID-19 vaccination policy” to consist of requiring persons coming to campus to "declin[e] vaccination" and "complet[e] an educational session" instead:

It defies belief that UW's senior administrators and lawyers failed to comprehend the plain meaning of Moore's instructions. And in their more careful moments, they make the weaker claim that UW's requirement is "consistent with" Moore's instructions.

In conclusion, UW's claim that it was legally required to adopt and enforce its "Vaccination Requirement" is false, UW should have known it was false, and it is highly likely that UW did know it was false.

In other words, UW lied.

But if UW was justified in imposing the requirement, then why would it invent a justification by lying? It wouldn't, which implies that UW lacked a sound basis in existing law, university policy, and morality to impose the requirement.