Jay Currie

(I posted a version of this over at Dawg’s comments and it pretty much sums up my own views as to HRCs in light of Hudak’s election as Ontario Conservative leader.)

I am not a fan of dumping the anti-discrimination work of the Commissions into the Courts for many of the reasons tw cites. This work, if narrowly defined to housing and employment, could be handled effectively by Administrative tribunals. I am leery about Commissions having carriage of these matters. I suspect the system could work rather like the Residential Tenancy system in BC where parties pay their own costs and if they want to have a lawyer it is to their account.

In Ontario the only jurisdiction over speech that the Commission has is over signs and I suspect that signs saying “No Blacks need apply” could easily fit under either the housing or employment sections.

The key thing here is that neither housing nor employment anti-discrimination rules take a Charter Right away from anybody. There is no right to discriminate and there is s.15 promoting equality.

Rather obviously, the situation is very different with respect to free expression or freedom of the press as those rights are guaranteed by the Charter.

Where an individual’s Charter right is threatened by governmental action, administrative convenience and various access issues should, in my view, be subordinate to extending the full protections of the law to that individual. And, why yes, that would mean more work for lawyers.

Any decision limiting freedom of expression or freedom of the press will not only limit the Charter rights of the respondent, it will also chill the exercise of those rights by other citizens. Which is another critical reason to require the full protections of a criminal standard going to evidence, standard procedural protections and the presumption of innocence. If the government wants to take a citizen’s rights away from him it should have to satisfy a real judge that the citizen has broken a real law.

This position is not controversial when it comes to situations in which the state wants to strip a citizen of their rights per s7-14, it is difficult to see how s. 2 rights are any less worthy of protection.