This is personal, and I allow myself to be slightly emotional here, unlike when I write on professional matters. If my readers sense any sarcasm, satire or disrespect toward government institutions or their individual representatives, however, they probably underestimate the editorial effort that went into toning down this article.
It all started as a kneejerk reaction to the time my son wasted applying for a Java Programming course offered to high school students over the summer of 2021. My son was in grade 10 at Maple High School in Vaughan, Ontario (just northwest of Toronto) and learned about this offer in a letter from the school. While it wasn’t obvious from the letter, which pointed students to a website, the application process eventually requested that he confirm his “blackness” or…forget about it.
The Java course was part of the “SummerUp” program, offering high school students free courses ranging from computer programming to photography and filmmaking, all funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Education (in other words, by all of us colourless taxpayers). According to the website, it is meant to “connect historically excluded Black students with the skills, confidence, and opportunities they need to thrive and find personal and academic success.” This would thereby “close the ‘opportunity gap’ so often experienced by Black students.” That the program does so by means of racial discrimination against all others, and is blatantly segregationist, struck me as curious. I also felt sorry for my son – not because of the pity programming course, but because he was upset about the obvious lack of equality at work.
I called the school to ask a straight question: was my son automatically disqualified due to his non-blackness? In a phone conversation filled with verbal acrobatics, the school principal finally said, “Yes,” but refused to confirm this answer in writing. I sent an email directly to Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Minister of Education, with copy to my federal (Liberal) MP, Francesco Sorbara, demanding a meaningful explanation, to no avail. I then launched a petition objecting to the discrimination, but that didn’t exactly catch fire either.
And so began an absurd and eye-opening odyssey through Ontario’s human rights machinery. It turns out that Canadian institutions, governments and companies are allowed to discriminate against some people provided it’s in the name of reducing or eliminating disadvantages for other groups. The Canadian Human Rights Commission calls such efforts (which in the U.S. were euphemistically dubbed “affirmative action”) “special programs.” This is why (to take just two of a disturbingly high number of examples) universities can offer STEM admissions to female students that are denied to males, or why VIA Rail can offer race-based discounts to Indigenous passengers.
SummerUp is not the most insidious example of such discrimination, but I thought it would be worth asking the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) if it was in fact sanctioned as a “special program” under Section 14 of the OHRC Code. The Commission’s response?
“Organizations do not need permission from the OHRC to develop a special program,” was the emailed reply from Paola Floro, an “Information Officer” with the Commission. “The Code allows for programs designed to help people who experience hardship, economic disadvantage, inequality or discrimination. The Code also protects these programs from attack by people who do not experience the same disadvantage [emphasis added].” The Commission said it encouraged such special programs “as effective ways to achieve substantive equality by helping reduce discrimination, or addressing historical prejudice.”
So the Government of Ontario does not insist upon prior approval of new discriminatory “special programs.” If a program is formally designated as “special,” then it is authorized to discriminate. And if a non-designated program discriminates, why then, that makes it special! This gives free reign to organizations, including school boards and ministries, to discriminate arbitrarily merely by applying the affirmative action concept. But how do they determine a particular group faces “hardship, economic disadvantage, inequality or discrimination”?
Read the full Op-Ed at C2CJournal.ca
