Category: Human Rights

The duty-to-accommodate doesn’t make the news very often, but it did last week in an Ottawa Citizen article examining whether the use of medical marijuana could force the return of smoking rooms.

“In an era of smoking bans on patios, parks and restaurants, the notion may seem absurd, but those relying on marijuana to ease chronic pain and other conditions may soon be demanding accommodation for their medically prescribed and commercially grown medication.”

Medical marijuana use has been on the rise since it was first legalized in 2001. In just over a decade, the number of Canadians authorized to possess medical marijuana has jumped from 477 in 2002 to 37,359 in 2013. Health Canada projects the number to rise to 58,000 in 2014 and skyrocket to 450,000 in another ten years.

It’s no wonder some labour experts are predicting that this will become a big issue – one that is already sparking debate.

Last year, an RCMP officer made headlines when his employer told him he couldn’t smoke his legally prescribed marijuana while in uniform. The officer has been using the drug to help him calm down and treat his PTSD symptoms.

The RCMP felt that smoking in public or while in uniform would “not portray the right message to the general public.”

The use of medical marijuana poses a complex issue for employers, who have to grapple with the duty to accommodate on one side; public perception and health and safety on the other.

Given its long history of being a controlled substance, users of medical marijuana have to combat a certain level of stigma associated with the drug. The Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries hopes that discussions like these will help shift the public perception of marijuana from illicit drug to medicine.

On the health and safety front, some employers may be concerned about a person’s ability to safety and effectively perform their work while taking the drug. It’s important that these employees are not endangering their safety or that of others. In the future, it may be possible for patients to obtain “designer marijuana”; strains of the drug designed to treat specific symptoms without affecting cognitive and motor skills.

But these issues don’t negate the employer’s duty to accommodate these individuals to the point of undue hardship. Fundamentally, these are people who are merely treating a disability.

So, will the duty to accommodate lead to smoking rooms? It could: the cost of establishing a smoking room doesn’t constitute undue hardship. In other cases, a person’s accommodation needs could easily be addressed by simply offering more frequent breaks.

In an article for Occupational Safety Canada, Cheryl Edwards offers a few tips for employers. Among them, she suggests working “with the employee, his union representative and medical professionals to determine what checks and balances will need to be in place to ensure the employee, co-workers, the public and the environment are properly safeguarded.”

Finally, she recommends not getting distracted by the drug causing the impairment, but to focus on the issue of impairment instead.

“Treat this source the same as you would any other prescription drug.”

In 1939, thirteen Native people participating in a conference on First Nation welfare took a bold stand. While other delegates busied themselves passing resolutions urging greater attention to the plight of aboriginal communities, the Indian delegation defected to pass a resolution of their own.

The Toronto-Yale Conference on the North American Indian seemed very well-intentioned. Over seventy delegates participated in the two-week affair. Among them were Canadian and American academics, missionaries and government officials.¹ Thirteen Native people were invited, among them an Iroquois anthropologist, a Cherokee missionary, a Haida United Church minister and a Six Nations lawyer. The Indian delegation also included Edith Brant Monture; the great-great-granddaughter of famous Iroquois Chief Joseph Brant.²

The conference was designed “to reveal the conditions today of the white man’s Indian wards, and in a scientific, objective and sympathetic spirit, plan with them for their future.” ³

For all of its good intensions, the non-aboriginal conference participants assumed that assimilation was both beneficial and inevitable.

“The guiding belief was that the Indian peoples were to be the recipients of change, not the choosers. In standard colonial parlance, they were variously described as wards or children. It was, however, colonialism with a difference, for the goal was not independence, but disappearance.”⁴

Since assimilation was viewed as inevitable, the only debates centered on how fast it should happen.

The crackpot ideas machine went into overdrive when Diamond Jenness, a Canadian anthropologist, suggested establishing small colonies of Inuit around major Canadian cities. Because, you know, who wants to live in the North? The anthropologist believed that the Inuit would be better off learning English and marketable skills in southern Canada rather than inevitably becoming unemployed, welfare-dependant and demoralized in the North.⁵

On the last day of the conference, a resolution was passed calling for greater awareness of “the psychological, social and economic maladjustments of the Indian populations of the United States and Canada.” Then a committee was formed to determine how the conference’s findings should be disseminated. ⁶

“And then a very dramatic defection took place. The Indian delegates broke from the main group and met separately to pass their own resolutions. […]

While appreciative of their invitation to the conference, the Indians resolved to have their own meetings. They didn’t need government officials, missionaries [or] white sympathizers […] to speak for them.”⁷

The Native delegates called for an “all-Indian conference on Indian affairs,” comprising of only “bona fide Indian leaders actually living among the Indian people of the reservations and reserves”. Such a conference, they implored, ought to be “free of political, anthropological, missionary, administrative, or other domination.”⁸

Their bold move, their call to action and the conference overall went largely unnoticed; by the time the event was over, Canada was already one week into its World War 2.

The pride flag will be flown above the Gaspé town hall this month, thanks to the actions of one dedicated human rights activist.

Géraldine Fortin, our human rights representative for the Quebec region, approached her town’s mayor last week to convince him to recognize May 17: the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

“I didn’t have to do a lot of convincing,” admits Fortin. “I had all my arguments ready – I didn’t need to use any.”

“It went really well. They were very open to the idea.”

This won’t be the first time that the town of Gaspé will make a statement in favour of free expression. During the most recent winter Olympics, Gapsé’s city hall was among countless others across the country that flew the pride flag in opposition to Russia’s draconian anti-gay laws.

For a town of just over 15,000 people, it’s a very powerful statement.

“It sends a message about openness to diversity,” says Fortin.

But this time, a UNE member will be the one hoisting the flag. That’s right; the mayor is delegating the honour to Fortin.

“I’m going to wear a shirt sporting the UNE logo,” said Fortin, proudly.

With May 17 fast approaching, Fortin is daring other members to do something similar in their communities.

“I’m sure there are similar actions that can be done,” said Fortin. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who lives in a small community.”

If you take up Géraldine Fortin’s challenge, please let us know by sending us an email.

When we wrote about Asian Heritage Month last year, we focused on the difficulties faced by Chinese immigrants between confederation and the early 1920s. But the end of the Chinese Head Tax didn’t mark the end of discriminatory policies.

Japanese immigrants began arriving in Canada in the 1870s in search of a better life. Like their Chinese counterparts, they had to contend with fervently anti-Asian attitudes in British Columbia.

But those attitudes grew even worse during World War 2. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King declared war on Imperial Japan.

Only days later, 1,975 Canadian soldiers surrendered to the Japanese during the Battle of Hong Kong. Reports of murder, cruelty and starvation of these prisoners of war “increased the fear and hatred of Canadians for their Japanese-Canadian neighbours.”¹

“Of the more than 23,000 [Japanese immigrants] in Canada at the time, over 75 per cent were Canadian Citizens. All were designated enemy aliens by government regulations.”²

It wouldn’t take long before the government mandated that all Japanese immigrants, whether naturalized citizens or Canadian-born, had to register with the Registrar of Enemy Aliens.

On January 14, 1942, Prime Minister Mackenzie King declared a large portion of the Pacific coast a “protected area”. First, a curfew was imposed requiring every person of the Japanese race to home after sunset and stay there until sunrise. If you lived in the protected area, you weren’t permitted to use or own a motor vehicle, a camera or a radio. ³

Within a few months, the government began to forcibly remove Japanese men from the protected area.

“Japanese Canadians were told to pack a single suitcase each and taken to holding areas, to wait for trains to take them inland. Vancouver’s Hastings Park was one of areas where families waited, sometimes for months, to be relocated.”

More than 20,000 Japanese were moved to remote areas of British-Columbia. The majority of those displaced were actually born Canadian citizens. A year later, all their possessions that had been seized by the federal government were liquidated.

“Even at the end of the war, King continued to bow to the most strident demands of the politicians. He offered the Japanese two choices: go back to Japan or disperse ‘east of the Rockies’.”

Many men were taken from their families and sent to work in road camps in Ontario and near the border between Alberta and British Columbia – while their wives and children were sent to camps. Families who wanted to remain together went Eastward, to Alberta and Manitoba, where they often performed back-breaking work on sugar beet farms.

In her book, Japanese Canadian Journey: the Nakagama Story, Dr. Rochelle Sato-Yamagishi writes about her family’s experience. After been uprooted from Steveston, British Columbia, her father moved to Lethbridge, Alberta, where he opened the first Albertan Japanese food store.⁴

“Similar to all the evacuees to Alberta, my father and mother endured great hardship, but characteristic of Japanese Canadians as a whole, I am struck with how they turned adversity into opportunity. They focused on getting through each day, hoping for a better life, and seemed to never allow their dream to be stolen from them.” ⁵

“I am most impressed by the fact that, despite having lost so much in Steveston, they never became bitter, as they established a new home in southern Alberta.”⁶