MPP TARGETS DISCRIMINATION THAT PEOPLE FACE EVERY DAY
Aims at treatment based on genetics, immigration status, ‘social condition’
Employers shouldn’t be allowed to demand their employees take genetic tests, dentists shouldn’t be allowed to evict homeless-seeming people from their waiting rooms, landlords shouldn’t be able to refuse to rent to refugee claimants, and people who have had criminal charges dropped shouldn’t have that held against them, says Ottawa Vanier Liberal MPP Nathalie Des Rosiers, who’s proposing changes to Ontario’s human rights code.
“I think it’s very important to have a human rights framework that speaks to the discrimination that people actually experience,” Des Rosiers says.
She has a private member’s bill before the Ontario legislature that sailed through its second reading late Thursday. Progressive Conservatives approved of it for “closing loopholes.” New Democrats liked it for seeming to do much bigger things. Reconciling those opposite impressions could be tricky.
For a short bill, Des Rosiers’ legislation does an awful lot, adding three new prohibited grounds of discrimination to the Ontario Human Rights Code (based on your genetic characteristics, social condition or immigration status) and revising a fourth (whether you have a criminal record). Unlike the Charter of Rights, which is about what governments can and can’t do, the code mainly covers dealings between private citizens.
The changes wouldn’t forbid discrimination where there’s a good reason for it, she says, any more than the human rights code does now. That’s the case with criminal records, for instance.
“The essence of a human rights protection is always that a bona fide requirement of a job can always be demanded of someone,” she says. “So in a school, requiring people to have a police record clear of certain offences (is) certainly a bona fide requirement that can be expected.”
Unless there’s such a specific reason, the current code protects people from having criminal records used against them if they’re charged, convicted and later pardoned. But the code has a quirk.
“What was weird about this is, there was a finding by the tribunal that you could discriminate based on a police record. So there was a charge, and it was withdrawn, and you apply for a job or a promotion and there’s a record check required and there it appears, you can suffer discrimination based on that,” Des Rosiers says.
So someone who definitely broke the law can be better protected from discrimination than somebody who was the victim of careless police work.
Also, Des Rosiers points out, it’s been six years since the federal government stopped issuing pardons. They’re now called “record suspensions.”
This is one of those “loopholes” the Tories are happy to close. They’re not all so simple.
Adding immigration status to the human rights code targets discrimination against refugees in particular, Des Rosiers says.
“So this is people who go to get an apartment and get asked, ‘Are you a refugee, are you a Canadian citizen, are you an immigrant?’ when the actual question is, ‘Can you pay for this apartment?’, and if the answer is yes, then it’s yes,” she says.
It could also cover people with no immigration status at all — people who came to Ontario illegally.
The NDP’s Jennifer French spoke approvingly of that in the legislature Thursday, saying that it “essentially codifies a sanctuary province,” where being here without legal permission wouldn’t keep a person from doing business.
The idea that you even could
In a school, requiring people to have a police record clear of certain offences (is) certainly a bona fide requirement that can be expected.
discriminate based on genetic characteristics is relatively new. Des Rosiers says she wants to forbid employers from making workers take genetic tests to see whether they might have a predisposition to cancer or heart disease, for instance. (The federal government passed a law on this earlier this year that already covers a lot of the same ground.)
Or if you’re already sick with an illness that has a genetic element, that would be fair for an insurance company to consider when deciding how much you should pay for coverage, she says. But you couldn’t be forced to get genetic screening to qualify for a policy, or to turn over results from one of those tests you can get done for your own curiosity.
“So once you’re trying to diagnose something, for medical purposes, that can be relevant. But not just on a fishing expedition,” Des Rosiers says.
“Social condition” might be the furthest reaching addition to the code Des Rosiers proposes, covering everything from whether you have a job to how much education you have.
“It’s about how much discrimination there is based on people who appear poor or are poor,” she says. “So, for instance, a dentist who refuses to serve someone who appears homeless, even though he can pay or the province of Ontario can pay, because he doesn’t want someone like that sitting in his waiting room.”
Enforcing that will surely mean cases over whether looking dishevelled and smelling bad, reasons you might understandably want someone out of your office, are inextricably linked to poverty.
Many private member’s bills stall at the stage this one has reached, never scheduled for the committee time it takes to iron out details, never coming up for final votes.
Des Rosiers says her fellow Liberals are supportive. If she can get Ottawa Centre’s Yasir Naqvi to pick it up as government legislation, since he’s both the attorney general and the Liberals’ overseer of business in the house, it will stand a better chance of passing before next spring’s election wipes the legislature’s to-do list clean.
“But if it doesn’t get passed, well, I’ll table it again,” she says. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely