Look at successful efforts by other municipalities as a starting point for anti-racism and anti-discrimination activities for your municipality. This section covers five key areas:
Under the Code, organizations are required to prevent and remove barriers and provide accommodation to the point of undue hardship. The principle of accommodation arises most frequently in the context of creed, family status, sex (pregnancy) and disability, as well as age, gender identity and gender expression.
It is not always possible to slot people’s experiences of creed discrimination into clear categories. Ways people face discrimination often blur together and overlap to a large degree. However, for this policy, it is helpful to describe the different ways creed discrimination can take place. The following sections cover some of the main ways.
Discrimination may be unique or distinct when it occurs based on two or more Code grounds. Such discrimination can be said to be “intersectional.” The concept of intersectional discrimination recognizes that people’s lives involve multiple interrelated identities, and that marginalization and exclusion based on Code grounds may exist because of how these identities intersect.
a) Human rights training and education for employees
As is noted in Section IV-1a(v) – “Educate and train employees on policies and procedures,” it is expected that all employees will receive human rights training so that they can know and understand their obligations in the workplace. It is very important that this be done for employees providing services to the public and senior staff responsible for hiring, managing performance, accommodations, discipline and handling human rights concerns. Failing to train these key staff may lead to human rights claims.
The Code includes specific defences and exceptions that allow behaviour that would otherwise be discriminatory. Some of these recognize the associational rights of creed-based groups to give preference in certain circumstances to persons who share the same creed beliefs and practices.[221]
a) Duty to accommodate to the point of undue hardship
The Code requires an effort, short of undue hardship, to accommodate the needs of persons who are protected by the Code. It would be unfair to exclude someone from the workplace or activities in the workplace because their Code-protected needs are different from the majority. The principle of accommodation applies to all grounds of the Code, but accommodation issues in employment most often relate to the needs of:
Under the Code, employers, unions, housing providers and service providers have a legal duty to accommodate people’s sincerely held creed beliefs and practices to the point of undue hardship, where these have been adversely affected by a requirement, rule or standard.[267]
We heard about the different types of intersecting discrimination occurring because of race, citizenship, ethnic origin, place of origin, ancestry, colour or creed, in addition to mental health disabilities and/or addictions. We were told how perceptions about people’s disabilities can contribute to negative perceptions based on race in different ways.
Ontario’s pioneering Fair Employment Practices Act of 1951 prohibited discriminatory employment practices, and a year earlier the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act was amended to end real estate provisions that required someone buying a house to agree that their property “shall never be sold, assigned, transferred, leased to, and shall never been occupied by any person of Jewish, Hebrew, Semitic, Negro or coloured race or blood.”