If you have ever spoken to an employment or human rights lawyer, you have likely heard a great deal about what discrimination is. What tends to receive far less attention, but is just as important for employers, is understanding what discrimination is not.
It is easy for employees to assume that being treated differently automatically means they have been discriminated against. After all, no one likes feeling singled out. But human rights law does not step in every time something feels unfair.
In the first article of this series, we examined how discrimination is defined and assessed under the Ontario Human Rights Code (the “Code”). While the legal threshold for establishing discrimination is relatively low, it is not limitless. This article focuses on common workplace situations where conduct may appear discriminatory at first glance, but is legally permitted—or falls outside the scope of the Code altogether.
Human rights law in Ontario is aimed at achieving substantive equality, not formal equality.
Formal equality focuses on treating everyone the same. Substantive equality recognizes that identical treatment can perpetuate disadvantage where individuals or groups start from unequal positions.
In practical terms, the Code is concerned with providing supports to eliminate barriers linked to protected grounds such as disability, family status, sex, race, creed, age etc. In its pursuit for substantive equality, the Code may:
Exclusive: An online business based in Sydney will be taken to court after it allegedly made false claims it had connections to the victims of the Bondi terror attack. Bondi United, a website that...