The Lynch List, 24-Jan-2011

First: You know that the human rights system has problems when those with discrimination grievances bypass them in favour of the court system – because it’s faster.

Rather than wait years for the human rights commission to process the complaint, New Directions is going to court, Qually said. The agency and its clients can’t afford to wait, she said.

This complaint is about a municipality that won’t allow a non-profit agency to open a group home for disabled persons on residential-zoned rural property. The bylaw, which restricts dwellings in this zone to “single housekeeping units”, is discriminatory against disabled individuals that require live-in care aids who need their own suites, says the agency.

Second: So your employee with performance problems has a heated argument with his supervisor. As their boss, you summon both of them to a meeting to iron things out. The employee is a no-show, and doesn’t show up to work for weeks. According to the BCHRT, you are required to assume that the absence is due to mental disability, and cannot fire him until you learn the truth. $15,000 later…

Third: The Alberta HRT got its hands slapped by the courts – again. This time, it was concerning the broadest possible definition of “employer” that the HRT used to find Syncrude liable in a drug-testing complaint:

The Court of Appeal held that co-employment is possible under the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act and articulated factors for assessing whether co-employment exists, but held that the Panel erred in finding Syncrude was a co-employer. It appears that Syncrude’s relationship with its general contractor and the various subcontractors on its site was nothing out of the ordinary.

Fourth: Okay, maybe it’s an American version, but here’s a great example of what Human Rights Commissions inevitably turn into – public funding for political activists:

During its July meeting, the commission voted to draft a letter of denouncement against Israel for its attack [on the Gaza flotilla] at the request of Mariah Leung, a local member of the pro-Palestinian group Al-Nakba Awareness Project.

The commission also voted that once the letter was finished, it should be forwarded to the City Council; it also asked the council to write its own letter of denouncement.

While the statement has yet to be drafted, the vote to move forward with a statement proved enough to outrage local constituents.

Fifth: The root cause of the societal problems that manifest in Human Rights Commissions and their ilk is debatable. In my opinion, the strongest explanation is grounded in a shift of societal norms towards group responsibility (positive rights) and away from personal responsibility (negative rights). The National Post has a great series going, “Death of Personal Responsibility”, in which Kevin Libin scribes the first chapter:

It’s reasonable to blame a hyper-litigious legal profession and the judges and juries who go along with outlandish lawsuits, without stopping to consider the pernicious effect on broader society of penalizing reasonable risk taking — like installing playground slides, selling hot coffee or a fish hook without warning labels. It would also be unfair not to consider the tendency of politicians to pander to the aggrieved with populist promises of protection. Both of those, however, are products of a more fundamental shift in society, Mr. Howard believes: the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, both in the United States and Canada, where it culminated in the passing of the Charter.

“People confused rights, which were defensive rights, the rights of freedom that we were brought up with, like government can’t take your property away without due process, can’t tell you what to say, and all that. Those are rights.” Today, people see their rights not just as these negative rights, but believe that they are entitled, also, to positive rights: say, the alleged right to listen to a radio station and not be offended by a misunderstood lyric — instead of just tuning to a different frequency. “When you talk about having the right to get something, that’s just power. That’s power over other people,” Mr. Howard says.

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