Human rights bill needs work, labour leaders say

PATRICIA D’SOUZA

The day began with a rousing game of diversity bingo, in which social groups replace numbers on the bingo card. But as getting-to-know-you games go, this one was a stretch.

There were plenty of grandparents and people over six-feet tall, but not a single person of African ancestry. By the end of the game no one had a full card, but everyone knew exactly how many left-handers were present. And just about all participants realized they had a long way to go toward understanding what diversity in Nunavut really means.

The day-long human rights workshop on Feb. 7 was the final event of Iqaluit Union Week, organized by the Northern Territories Federation of Labour (NTFL), to coincide with a meeting of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).

Friday’s workshop was a line-by-line examination of Nunavut’s proposed human rights law. A report from the workshop will be presented to a legislative assembly standing committee reviewing the bill.

The group, made up mostly of union organizers from Yellowknife, took a dim view of the bill. But they’ve been through this process before. The Northwest Territories passed a similar law in the most recent sitting of its legislative assembly, after more than two years of public debate.

“We got nowhere. We came up against a wall called the legislature,” said Bob Haywood, president of the NTFL, during a public discussion about the bill on Feb. 6. “I feel like here we’re going to run into the same thing.”

Most agreed that the bill is a progressive piece of legislation, but far from perfect. “There are flaws in it,” Haywood said.

Some aspects of the bill, such as the definition of disability, which is so broad it includes alcohol and drug addiction, and the inclusion of the word “harassment,” are major steps forward, some said.

Harassment is not in the Yukon or NWT human rights acts. “They would not go near it in the NWT when we brought it up,” said Debbie McLaughlin, PSAC’s regional rep for the NWT and Nunavut.

The definition of family status, however, is so narrow it sets the bill two steps back.

It includes “the status of being related to another person by blood, marriage or adoption,” but makes no provisions for same-sex relationships, even though sexual orientation is a prohibited ground for discrimination. It also may not extend to the Inuit practice of custom adoption, some participants said.

Some things are absent altogether. “On the issue of pay discrimination, the act is totally silent,” said Jean-François Des Lauriers, PSAC’s regional executive vice-president. “We’re kind of scratching our heads about why this is the case.”

But the most glaring omission is the lack of a human rights commission, a structure that would investigate claims and educate Nunavummiut about the law.

While the bill sets out guidelines for a human rights tribunal, that is only the judicial arm of the body. Members of the tribunal would hear cases but you would no more file a complaint with them than you would file a court case with Judge Bev Browne.

Premier Paul Okalik, the minister of justice, spoke of creating a “small, simple body” when he introduced the bill in November.

“In Inuit culture, you try and deal with a problem as it comes up, as soon as possible, so it does not fester. We don’t want a huge body that would be costly and slow,” he told Nunatsiaq News during the sitting of the assembly in Pangnirtung.

But while several Canadian jurisdictions operate with only one body, they usually incorporate the tribunal function into the commission — not the other way around, as the Nunavut bill seems to do.

“The fact that there is no commission in this bill seems like really quite a serious flaw,” said Shelley Wright, director of the Akitsiraq Law School and a specialist in human rights issues.

But that’s not all. The most severe punishment outlined by the bill is a $25,000 fine.

That’s just the cost of doing business for many big corporations, said Shawn Hoey, regional vice-president for the Union of Northern Workers.

In addition, the offence and fines section of the bill does not take into account traditional forms of punishment, which may not involve money at all. That’s a major omission for a bill that seeks to make “special provision for Inuit culture and values that underlie the Inuit way of life.”

Despite its lofty goals, the bill makes little attempt to reflect the values of Inuit society, union representatives said, and it doesn’t include many of the suggestions put forth by elders at community consultations before the bill was drafted.

“Elders and Inuit want the act to include Inuit values — they want a system that is not totally adversarial, in which the healing process is parallel to the process of formal complaint. That’s absent from the legislation,” Des Lauriers said.

“I’m a little leery that we’re moving much too fast with legislation that is not really what people want.”

Whether the legislation is what the people of Nunavut want hasn’t yet been determined though. There were only two Inuit participants in the Friday session.

Submissions to the legislative assembly on the review of the human rights bill will be referred to the standing committee Ajauqtiit, chaired by Uqqummiut MLA David Iqaqrialu. The committee has not announced whether it will open its sessions to the public.