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Serious insight for serious situations.

Serious insight for serious situations.

Bad news for little buddies

The Little Buddies Preschool Centre recently learned some valuable lessons about how human rights laws work in Ontario. Amber Lougheed had worked for Little Buddies as an Early Childhood Educator for just over a year when she learned that she was pregnant with her second child.  Ms. Lougheed was a single mother and so had

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Developing transgender-inclusive policies

In June 2012, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33, also known as Toby’s Act, adding the grounds of gender identity and gender expression to the Ontario Human Rights Code(“Code”). Since then, numerous other Canadian jurisdictions – i.e. the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador – also explicitly reference gender

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An avatar’s connection to the Divine

As workplaces become increasingly diverse, claims of “conflicting rights” appear to be on the rise as well. Often when there is a conflict of rights, one of the conflicting claims is grounded in creed – where an employee raises a religious objection to performing a particular job-related function. For example, many people recall the 2012

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Was race a factor? Drawing inferences in a discrimination analysis

We often hear from clients and participants in our training courses that they have difficulty determining whether discrimination has occurred at the conclusion of their investigations. A recent decision of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario succinctly articulates the test for discrimination and demonstrates its application.  In Pieters v. Toronto Police Services Board (2014 HRTO

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Rudeness is not a Russian personality trait

When I’m conducting training sessions on human rights and respect at work, I predictably talk about how people can be found liable for breaching the Human Rights Code even if they didn’t intend to offend.  Someone will usually then ask whether that means that anyone can complain about behaviour that they find offensive, even if

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One of these things is (not) like the other

These are the words, or more accurately the lyrics (I think they may belong to a Sesame Street song sung by Big Bird about his bowls of bird seed), that came to mind when I recently had opportunity to read the case of Stephen Henshaw v. Rochester Place Resort Inc.  2014 HRTO 1727 (Can LII).

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More isn’t always better: What can happen when employers receive too much medical information

In a case reported by the CBC last week, a Yellowknife woman said that she was distraught after a detailed report about her mental health was released to her employer.  The woman has a mental illness and agreed to a psychiatric assessment because she was seeking various workplace accommodations.  She says that she never agreed

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More on childcare: When saying no is not discriminatory

I recently blogged about a case (Clark v. Bow Valley College 2014 AHRC 4) in which an employer was found by the Human Rights Tribunals of Alberta to have discriminated against an employee on the basis of her family status.  The Tribunal concluded that the College had not accommodated the employee when she asked for her

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