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Little Right With This Commission
An article by Margaret Wente - Reprinted from the Globe and Mail (May 17, 2001)

Irony is in the air. According to its own staff, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is a hotbed of discrimination and unfairness. Morale is in the sewer. The men complain that the workplace is biased in favour of women, and vice versa. People are leaving in droves. Chief commissioner Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay isn't even on the scene. She's off in Indonesia at the moment, advising on abuses in East Timor.

One of the commission's senior lawyers says that Canada's premier rights body has lost its "moral authority" and needs a complete overhaul. (He was promptly suspended.) Meantime, John Hucker, the bureaucrat who runs the place, says the problems have been overblown. He blames open-concept offices for some of the grumpiness.

It's not just the staff that should be grumpy. The CHRC was set up in 1978 to provide victims of real discrimination with faster relief than they could get in court. A great idea. But today, it is out of step with the attitudes and beliefs of most Canadians. In the great scheme of government, its budget is small change. But it has cost the public billions.

The biggest price tag was the $3.5-billion settlement it engineered for women in government jobs, based on the extremely fuzzy concept of equal pay for "work of equal value." Many people applauded. But in the end, a quarter of the beneficiaries were men. The biggest back-pay windfalls went to women earning $70,000 or more. And, even before the settlement, women in these jobs had significantly better pay, pensions and job security than women with the same jobs in the private sector.

Is there a problem here? The chief commissioner says there is. The problem is that the CHRC lacks the power to quickly impose these deals on everyone else.

As the commission lobbies to increase its power, it is exploring new frontiers in human rights. For example, it has ordered a tribunal to hear the case of Synthia Kavanagh, a jailed transsexual who has lodged a complaint against the prison system. (S)he argues that she should be sent to a women's prison and provided with sex-change surgery.

Another hearing is weighing a complaint against Statistics Canada for failing to ask inclusive questions about gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the 1996 census (a lapse it rectified in the current census). The complainants say that Statscan wilfully "misrepresented the population of heterosexual people, relationships, and families in Canada."

The rights of the disabled are also important, as they should be. No one can object to better access for people in wheelchairs, or better accommodation for the blind or hard of hearing. But the Human Rights Commission's definition of disabilities is remarkably expansive. For example, it has ordered a hearing into the complaint of a man named Vernon Crouse, whose employer, Canada Steamship Lines, fired him for being a drunk. He claims the company discriminated against him on account of his disability ? i.e. alcohol dependency.

In another case, a civil servant who flunked her French exam complained, and won, because she is dyslexic. Another tribunal is hearing the case of a woman who alleges that her employer discriminated against her because it wouldn't let her work from home. She suffers from an unspecified condition "that is aggravated when she reports to the workplace."

It's not hard to conclude that the people at the Human Rights Commission are blissfully innocent of the world in which most people live and work. In fact, all of the commissioners have spent their careers in the public sector, as bureaucrats or labour lawyers or rights advocates.

Ms. Falardeau-Ramsay has been in government service since 1975. She is the scourge of the military brass, whom she regularly berates for not meeting their gender hiring targets. There are even targets for women in combat units, despite mounting evidence that women don't want to be in combat units. Whenever she speaks, the generals apologize, and promise to do better.

Now the commission is lobbying for the rights of HIV-positive foreigners. They should be allowed to immigrate to Canada (even though we already bar people with other infectious diseases). HIV-positive applicants, it says, "should not be excluded as a group based on stereotypical presumptions about their possible health in five to 10 years."

It's not just the commission's world view that's out of touch. Over the years, Canada's Auditor-General and various federal court judges have been sharply critical of its sloppy procedures, long delays in turning over cases, its poor grasp of the law, and its dual role as both prosecutor and judge.

"It's an abuse and a waste of taxpayers' money," said Eddie Taylor, the senior lawyer who spoke out of turn last week. He couldn't be more right.

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