How Can I Tell If I Have A Social Condition?
Canada To Make It Illegal To Discriminate Against . . . Um . . . They’ll Let You Know If You’ve Done It
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has discovered a new and exciting way to chill, and retaliate against, unpopular speech — by broadening the scope of its power to punish discrimination against, and speech unflattering to, “social condition.”
The Human Rights Commission is seeking to protect an entirely new array of people:
It wants to add discrimination based on “social condition.”
How would you tell if someone has a “social condition” that makes it illegal to refuse to serve them? How will you know what groups you may not speak ill of?
Well, that’s an excellent question.
In its report suggesting adding “social condition” as a protected group, the Human Rights Commission has an entire section devoted to that question, called “What is Social Condition and How Has It Been Defined?”
Does social condition mean poverty? Does it mean being on welfare?
It means all of those things, maybe, and possibly more — because the Commission thinks that the flexibility of the definition is a good thing:
In the other provincial and territorial jurisdictions, narrower but related grounds of discrimination have been adopted, such as “receipt of public assistance”, “source of income” or “social origin”. An important distinction between these grounds and social condition is the potential for social condition to cover a much broader range and/or intersection of characteristics.
The legislative discussions leading up to the adoption of social condition in these three jurisdictions, as well as recommendations by human rights agencies in other jurisdictions to broaden protection to include social condition, make it clear that this breadth and flexibility is a valuable feature.
In short, if you want to open up a Tim Horton’s franchise in Quebec and put up a “no shoes, no shirt, no service” sign, not only do you not know whether you are violating the law by discriminating against shoeless, shirtless, and thus possibly impoverished people, the Human Rights Commission thinks that it is a good thing that you do not know, because the law should be “flexible” to let them prosecute you if they think they ought to be able to.
Giving censors discretion to determine what speech is permissible and what speech is impermissible is chilling and fatal to freedom of expression.
The Human Rights Commission has already demonstrated a willingness to abuse such discretion. Now it would like to make it illegal to discriminate against — or say insulting things about — a potentially vast, constantly shifting, undefined and undefinable array of social and economic groups. From PopeHat
When is Canada going to wake up to what these thugs are doing… hopefully before it’s too late. Or before they make such articles illegal.
Maybe being conservative in Vancouver is a social condition… and I’ll get to file a few complaints? Where to begin…
