Rex Murphy:
Human rights meets their match: The microwave ovenhttp://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/05/rex-murphy-human-rights-meets-its-match-the-microwave-oven/Rex Murphy February 5, 2011 – 8:08 am
Thank God for the Ontario Superior Court. Or, if you’re a Dawkins man, thank Providence, or Fate, or whatever benign anonymous forces silently preserve the common sense of things. For the Ontario Superior Court, in overruling a recent decision of an Ontario Human Rights tribunal, struck an awesome blow for decency.
The case, according to the tribunal’s overseer, represented discrimination on “the basis of an intersection of … race, ancestry, ethnic origin and place of origin” — which, judging from all the clutter than emerges from it, must be a very busy junction indeed. More prosaically, it involved a newly hired blind, Muslim woman who took her employer — a small, federally-supported business for assisting new immigrants — to court after she had been fired only six weeks into her job.
Arguments over proper office attire were part of the dispute. But by far the most gripping contention centred on how to warm up an entrée: According to the complainant, her employer raised a fuss about the foul-smelling food she cooked in the office microwave. How far we’ve travelled. It’s an interesting moment we’ve reached when the high and noble Enlightenment ideals of human rights and liberty are thrown into fraught juxtaposition with the use and operation of a kitchen appliance.
Until I read the tribunal’s judgment, I never fully appreciated how deeply the commonplace microwave oven could “intersect” with the grand operation of basic human rights. Burke, Wendell Holmes, Solzhenitsyn, America’s founding fathers, even the ancient Greeks: All were silent on the microwave oven. It is the singular gully in the otherwise soaring uplands of Western political speculation.
Fortunately, the tribunal sorted it all out. They found, as they almost always do, for the complainant (Seema Saadi), and against her employer (Maxcine Telfer). “Nothing in the evidence suggests that the respondents deliberately targeted the applicant for discriminatory enforcement of the microwave policy,” concluded the tribunal. “However, the applicant argued that she was adversely affected by the enforcement of the policy.”
There were, it must be noted, from the employer’s point of view, some other serious concerns about the employee’s behaviour that had nothing to do with microwave cookers at all: visiting other peoples’ desks and accessing their computers, for instance. These the tribunal declined to ventilate. The tribunal also would not allow the calling of a witness for the employer, and the Superior Court gave them a tap on the head for not so doing.
The court found the tribunal’s judgment “fatally flawed” and, most damming of all, that it was “simply not possible to logically follow the pathway taken by the adjudicator.” That doesn’t sound so much like an overruling as an expression of judicial shock and horror, and a none-too-subtle cry for help.
Yet it was upon this flawed edifice and impossible reasoning that the tribunal moved on to its penalties. It ordered fines and costs totalling $36,000 against the employer, Ms. Tefler. Since the accused had little money, the lawyers working for the complainant decided they would go after the woman’s house — have it auctioned off — to get the microwave money for their client.
Did no one at this “human rights” tribunal look at the penalty of the ill-decided case and see that the consequences flowing from the penalty was itself the real violation of human rights?
How long must it be before provincial and federal political parties come out of their respective caves of cowardice and timidity and pronounce on the degradation of human rights in Canada? The public are so far ahead of the politicians on this issue that it has become a matter of wonder why the politicians continue to hold back.
National Post
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