Unionized Quebecers shouldn’t be at human-rights disadvantage

The current situation unfairly limits access to justice,

Canadians believe when there is discrimination, we are protected by a human rights charter and justice will be accessible for all.

In her recent book Speaking Out on Human Rights, Montreal human-rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis points out inequalities in access to justice across Canada. In Ontario, 80 per cent of human rights complaints are examined and make it through the first screening to the human rights tribunal. Only 5 per cent get that far in Quebec. Our province, according to Eliadis, has “the least accessible human rights jurisdiction in the country.” Underfunding of the Quebec Human Rights Commission is partly to blame, as is its outdated gatekeeping bureaucracy.

One of the gatekeeping mechanisms is the refusal to help unionized Quebecers. Forty per cent of employed Quebecers are unionized, which I believe is a good thing. But, there are serious problems for that 40 per cent in terms of human-rights protection. This can be seen in the case of Alrick Bowen, a black former municipal worker for PointeClaire who says he struggled for 10 years to end racial harassment and discrimination at work that left him ill. Because he was unionized, he could not go to the Human Rights Commission for protection. Had that been an option, there would have been an outside body pressuring his employer and his union to defend Bowen’s human rights. Further, if the commission had been involved, there would have been heightened public education concerning the continuing struggle for human rights in the Quebec workplace. Instead, Bowen had to go through the labour tribunal to fight for sick-leave benefits; the parties reached a settlement of those issues this month.

In Quebec, unlike in every other Canadian province, if you are unionized, the Human Rights Commission refuses to accept your complaint if it’s work-related. They tell you to take it to your union, which has discretion to grieve or not.

Although my situation was not nearly as vicious as Bowen’s, when I made a discrimination complaint a while ago concerning reasonable accommodation for disability, no one — not the officers of the commission, not lawyers I solicited in vain for help — disputed the justice of my cause. They simply said, in Quebec, if your union won’t help you, forget it.

Forty per cent of us have seriously reduced access to human rights protection in the province with an already very weak human rights system. Think about it: If you experience discrimination at work because of your race, religion or disability, the publicly funded Quebec Human Rights Commission will refuse to help. If your union refuses to help, your only option is to take it to court for a DFR (duty of fair representation).

Good luck. Chances of winning a DFR against a union at the Labour Board are from 3 to 5 per cent. (And, you need $10,000 for a lawyer.)

As an experiment, I pretended to be from Ontario and I called the Ontario Human Rights Legal Support Centre, a government funded agency that helps bring cases directly to Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal. They offered to meet me that week, write letters to my employer and my union, and if need be, give me legal support. I almost started to cry when I told them I was from Quebec and so they couldn’t help me.

Here, there is little pressure on the labour system to force compliance with human rights. Most workers are not even aware of their rights because Quebec unions do not make human rights protection a priority. And the National Assembly and the legal establishment ignore the ensuing injustice.

I refuse to accept that human rights justice is only for those who have the means to pay for it. This is precisely the reason why human rights commissions and tribunals were established.

The National Assembly must affirm that the Human Rights Commission be ready to defend the rights of all Quebecers, including unionized employees.

Forty per cent of us have seriously reduced access to human rights protection in the province with an already very weak human rights system.