The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found that an employer and its CEO discriminated against an employee when the CEO made derogatory remarks about the employee’s ethnicity and religion, in circumstances where the CEO shared the same ethnic, cultural and religious background as the employee.
The Complainant, a Muslim man originally from Iran, worked as a marketing manager in the head office of the pizza chain Freshslice. He resigned in January 2021 after the CEO reassigned much of his work. The Complainant brought a complaint to the BC Human Rights Tribunal, alleging that the Company discriminated against him on the basis of race, colour, and religion by creating a toxic work environment through the CEO’s derogatory comments to him and others about Iranian and Muslim people.
The Tribunal found that the CEO referred to people from Iran as having “third … world mentalities,” saying such mentalities had “no place in Canada”. The Tribunal found that these comments were not one-off comments, but rather that the CEO regularly made negative comments about Iranian/Persian people in the workplace.
Both the CEO and the Complainant are of Iranian descent.
The CEO argued that, as he shared the same ethnic background, heritage, national origin, first language, and culture as the Complainant, as well as having “grown up Muslim,” he could not have discriminated against the Complainant on the basis of race, colour, and religion.
The Tribunal strongly rejected this argument, writing:
…I do not accept that because [the CEO] is also Iranian/Persian, the comments could not have been discriminatory. The Tribunal regularly hears and decides complaints involving parties who share protected characteristics, and the legal test for discrimination is the same in those cases as in cases involving parties who do not… I recognize that in the ordinary course of human interactions, comments relating to a protected characteristic may carry a different significance when made by someone who shares that characteristic.
This is why context is crucial when assessing discrimination. However, in all cases the analysis remains focused on the impact of the impugned conduct on the person subjected to it, rather than on the characteristics or intentions of the person who engaged in the conduct.
After assessing all the evidence, the Tribunal concluded, among other things, that the CEO subjected the Complainant to adverse treatment through his repeated derogatory comments about Iranian and Muslim people, which created a toxic workplace that made his continued employment untenable.
This decision is a strong reminder for employers that the Tribunal’s analysis of discrimination focuses on the impact of the conduct on the person experiencing it, rather than the intentions or personal characteristics of the respondent party. As demonstrated by this decision, a person can be discriminated against on the basis of their protected ground by another individual who shares the same protected ground. This finding serves as an important reminder that, from the Tribunal’s perspective, discrimination is culture blind.
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