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Welcome to Quillette. Narrated I chaired Canada's human Rights tribunal. Here's what I saw. Written by David Thomas, read by William Lang. Earlier this year, a human rights tribunal ordered a former school trustee in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Barry Neufeld, to pay a $750,000 penalty. Tribunal officials concluded that certain statements Neufeld had made protesting the inclusion of LGBT related content in the school curriculum had exhibited hallmarks of hate. The tribunal declared trans people are by definition people whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth. If a person elects not to believe that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not believe in trans people. This is a form of existential denial. Even by Canadian standards, the judgment appears extreme. And the backlash has included an essent effort to abolish human rights tribunals entirely. For now, Canadian human rights tribunals aren't going anywhere. But if outrageous judgments such as this one become the norm, such an outcome might be inevitable. When I moved to Ottawa in 2014 to become the chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, the chrt, I knew my first priority had to be the rehabilitation of the institution's reputation. Shortly before I arrived, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper had repealed the hate speech provisions of the Canadian Human Rights act, the legislation under which the CHRT operates. A number of high profile hate speech cases had diminished the reputation of the CHRT and similarly mandated organisations. We were no longer getting buy in from large swathes of the Canadian public. The CHRT had been established in 1977 as a quasi judicial administrative body that adjudicated complaints of discrimination regarding race, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability and pardoned criminal conviction. Such complaints were referred to us by a separate body known as the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which was supposed to investigate complaints and weed out frivolous claims. As we shall see, that didn't always happen. The vast majority of Canadians oppose the kind of discrimination that such tribunals were originally designed to remedy. There had been well publicised examples of discrimination in the past, and there was broad consensus across the political spectrum that these were unacceptable. The new regime was set up to keep discrimination complaints out of the courts and certainly out of the criminal justice system. Administrative human rights tribunals have flexible evidentiary rules and mechanisms to find expeditious resolutions to a complaint. The process was designed so that complainants would not be required to hire a lawyer, and in many cases, human rights commissions or free legal aid clinics would help complainants through the process. Because there are such low barriers Facing those seeking to launch a human rights complaint, however, there is little to dissuade vexatious complainants. As a result, we've often seen frivolous cases. This in turn has caused the process to become clogged with delays, just like the regular court system. And in many jurisdictions it now takes years for a complaint to make its way to final judgment. Moreover, most provincial tribunals have lifted damage limits and so awards in the tens of thousands of dollars are now offered routinely large payouts that give complainants less incentive to settle on anything but generous terms. In some cases, these tribunals now even sit in judgment of class action style cases, including one that ultimately led years later to a $23.4 billion payout. The original purpose of protecting Canadians who'd been denied housing, basic services and employment because of their immutable characteristics is often not reflected in current cases. The above mentioned case in British Columbia, B.C. teachers Federation and Neufeld illustrates the degree to which the system appears to have been captured by ideological special interests. The Decision runs to 143 pages and is written in a style that most Canadians would find incomprehensible even if they had the time and inclination to read it. All they will know from the news coverage is that expressing certain views in Canada today can be financially ruinous. The massive judgment against Neufeld was justified on the claim that he'd inflicted injury to dignity, feelings and self respect of unionised teachers identifying as LGBTQ people he didn't directly work with or even know. Many observers, including me, have criticised the decision for its potential to chill free speech in Canada. But as concerning as the newfound judgment may be, some of the most absurd human rights cases are the ones the public rarely hears about. These are cases that move forward in the system but are settled at the mediation stage. Often the underlying complaints should never have even passed the intake standards that the human rights bodies are supposed to apply in the first instance. But in the current environment, respondents can't predict how cases will be adjudicated and they fear the reputational consequences that could result from an adverse judgment. Settling such cases can be expensive, but such settlements often come with a promise of confidentiality, meaning the facts never reach the greater public. Some say that the process itself is the punishment, especially for the respondent, that is the party targeted by the complaint, who must fight these cases on his or her own dime. Following my appointment to chair the CHRT, I mediated nearly 300 human rights complaints. Some cases had merit, but at many times I felt like the agent of a state funded Extortion ring. My job being to persuade innocent parties to pay money. To avoid further pain, I could write a whole book about the absurd cases I mediated. I will share the fact patterns of just a few here, taking care to completely anonymize the details in order to preserve the confidentiality of all parties. In one case, a part time employee at a financial institution was found to have repeatedly accessed private client information held in the company's database without authorization. She'd been caught red handed because the operating system had precisely recorded the details of all her improper downloads. In the later police investigation, this data was discovered on the laptop of a person with whom she had a close personal relationship. A person who also happened to have a prior history of credit card fraud and identity theft. Not surprisingly, the company terminated her employment. She decided her rights had been violated. To my amazement, Canadian Human Rights Commission staff appeared sympathetic to her case. Following their investigation, her complaint was forwarded to the CHRT for mediation and a possible hearing. According to the employee's claim, the real reason she'd been fired was her non white skin colour. When a complaint is escalated to the chrt, things can become quite serious for the respondent if the matter proceeds to a hearing. The CHRT has the power to impose financial remedies such as lost wages or even force an employer to reinstate a terminated employee. The tribunal can also award damages for pain and suffering, often called injury to dignity and prisoners. Provincial jurisdictions, though this is limited to $20,000 at the CHRT. Moreover, the cost of litigating a complaint at these hearings can be exorbitant. As noted above, it is all free for the complainant. While the respondent typically must hire lawyers and treat the procedure as a de facto form of civil litigation, there is an enormous incentive to simply give a large amount of money to the complainant to make him or her go away. That is exactly what happened with this financial worker. Another bizarre mediation involved a model employer whose leaders thought they'd done everything right. As in the previous case, the Commission investigated and referred a complaint from an aggrieved former employee. Fred, as I'll call the worker, claimed he'd received discriminatory treatment because he had a disability. Fred's job involved operating heavy equipment that is deemed to be safety sensitive. Impaired performance can result in property damage, injury or even death. On separate occasions, Fred's co workers alerted management that Fred had been acting strangely. His eyes appeared glassy and they suspected Fred was under the influence of drugs. Several weeks later, Fred caused a job site accident, resulting in the near fatality of a CO worker who'd been thrown into the air. Upon hearing about the accident, a company manager took Fred to a drug testing lab where Fred was asked to provide a urine sample for analysis. It was this action that Fred identified as discriminatory. He told the commission that his previously undisclosed disability was drug addiction. According to the commission, this was adverse differential treatment, albeit not based on Fred's disability per se, because the employer did not then have evidence that Fred was an addict. Rather, the drug test reflected a discriminatory perception that the employee had a disability. As you may already suspect, Fred's sample came back positive. The lab reported he had crystal meth in his system. Notwithstanding the damage to the equipment and the near fatality of a CO worker, the employer didn't fire Fred. Instead, it put him on a short term disability leave. Management also enlisted Fred in a drug rehabilitation program at a cost to the company of tens of thousands of dollars. Fred was told that if he completed the rehabilitation program and if he passed drug tests every two weeks for a period of six months, he'd be reinstated in his old job. Fred agreed. But after five months of drug testing, Fred abruptly quit, effective immediately. He said that he'd accepted a job offer from another company, one of his employer's competitors. Unsurprisingly, to the employer. A few days later, the lab sent them the results of Fred's latest drug test. He'd tested positive. It was only months later that Fred, who surprise surprise, was once again unemployed, decided to submit a human rights complaint against his first employer. On top of paying for its ex employee's drug rehabilitation, the company now had to hire a law firm to defend itself. Despite the fact that no one could figure out what the employer had done wrong, its lawyer convinced the employer to pay Fred to withdraw his complaint. It was simply the least expensive way to deal with the situation. A somewhat analogous situation arose at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, the HRTO in Haseeb and Imperial Oil Ltd. A case dating to the mid 2010s, Imperial Oil had a program to recruit new graduates as project engineers to work in entry level positions with a view to long term careers with the company. Given the amount of resources that would be invested in training these new employees, the company restricted its recruitment to candidates who had the legal right to work permanently in Canada, that is only Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Otherwise, they risked investing in graduates whose right to work in Canada could expire or be revoked. Moreover, it is a strict liability offence under Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection act to employ any unauthorised foreign national unless the employer exercises due diligence in securing evidence of work eligibility. At his job interview with Imperial, Mohammed Haseeb lied to his interviewer and said he had the right to work in Canada permanently. In reality, he was a foreign student on a study permit and he was hoping he would be granted a three year post graduation work permit to allow him to start his career with Imperial. Muhammad was offered the job, but when Imperial asked for proof of his immigration status, he confessed to his lie. Imperial subsequently withdrew its offer of employment. Mohammed filed a complaint with the HRTO which obligingly ruled that Imperial's questioning of the interviewee's citizenship was a bona fide basis for alleging discrimination under the Ontario Human Rights Code, even though Imperial insisted the reason they withdrew the offer was Mohammed's dishonesty. At the interview, Mohammed won his case and the Tribunal awarded him $120,360 in damages for lost income, injury to dignity, feelings and self respect and pre judgment interest. All of these cases reflect an obvious pro complainant bias which many defence lawyers practising in this area accept as a reality they have to deal with. But these cases also point to another problem. It is just as serious. The people who run this system often don't seem to understand how the real world works. It should be said here that there are a lot of caring and compassionate people working in the human rights field. If you look at the biographies of human rights investigators and adjudicators, you will find many with backgrounds working in NGOs and poverty law clinics. These are good people with big hearts, often willing to work for much smaller salaries than their skills would command in the private sector. But these backgrounds may not lay the best foundation for positions that are supposed to display dispassionate objectivity. Human rights decisions can have far reaching consequences on society, setting boundaries on all manner of workplace protocols and social interactions. They can even set boundaries on the kinds of jokes we're allowed to tell. A number of prominent Human Rights Tribunal decisions involved comedians whose acts some Canadians found offensive. No matter how passionate they might be about human rights, public officials need to put advocacy aside and avoid the perception of someone willing to put a thumb on the scale. Among these workers, as among the population as a whole, there often appears to be an inclination to support the underdog. Sometimes it's a case of a marginalised person facing financial hardship against a large, profitable corporation with vast financial resources. In such a situation, one's instinct is to find some way to substantiate the complaint even if it requires mental gymnastics that distort the plain meaning of applicable statutes and precedents. Indulging this benevolent seeming instinct is emotionally appealing in the short run, but in the long run it can inadvertently harm the underdogs we hope to uplift. Consider hypothetical extrapolations of the anonymized cases described above. In the future, if a financial institution is presented with two equally qualified job candidates, there may be a tendency to avoid candidates whose characteristics can be leveraged in a manner that allows them to evade accountability for their actions in the workplace. Likewise, what if a safety sensitive employer is faced with a situation in which an employee is exhibiting signs of a drug addiction? Does the management make an effort to keep him or her on the payroll and even pay for his drug treatment? Or do they simply fire him on the spot and pay out whatever wrongful dismissal claim he might have because it will be cheaper for them in the long run? In the case I described, that's exactly what the employer said they would do next time around. Or what if the employee with a suspected addiction is kept in the workplace out of fear of an adverse human rights judgment with the result that a co worker gets injured or killed in the next accident? What would the company say in its defence when a negligence lawsuit is filed by the family of the deceased? When it becomes a potential liability for an employer to ask a prospective employee if he or she has the right to work and remain in Canada, what steps will a rationally minded organisation take? Will it be more inclined to offer job interviews to people of colour born outside Canada or less? My point is not to endorse this kind of corporate response to human rights overreach, but rather to observe that it is entirely foreseeable. When companies are punished for doing the right thing on an above board basis, they have more incentive to do the wrong thing in secret. What I am describing here is part of a broader crisis in public confidence regarding the increasingly heavy handed efforts within Canadian society to remedy old injustices by creating new ones. Our protection of human rights arose from our collective understanding that it was morally wrong to discriminate against someone solely because of their immutable characteristics. And yet, in 2026 it's commonplace. Job ads and academic opportunities that explicitly exclude men and white people have become common all over Canada. When companies are punished by human rights tribunals for doing the right thing on an above board basis, they have more incentive to do the wrong thing in secret. Such overt discrimination is even permitted by a loophole in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is supposed to guarantee equal protection under the law, a subsection permits discrimination in the service of the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups. Unfortunately, the Charter doesn't provide guidance as to what happens when such conditions are improved. And in any case, why would any group gaining an advantage in this manner willingly give it up without any limitations being applied to the use of this loophole, the guarantee of equality before the law is empty. Moreover, just because something is constitutionally permissible doesn't mean it's advisable. The proliferation of outgrade stories in the media concerning this kind of whites need not apply practice is only fuelling resentment and political backlash. Much like ideologically skewed human rights tribunals, these hiring practices are encouraging the idea that the concept of equal treatment has become meaningless in Canada because policies meant to remedy past injustices now serve to systematically disadvantage anyone who doesn't fall into a select protected category. To some extent, the problem I'm describing here is a symptom of the success that Canada has had in combating discrimination and bigotry during my lifetime. Mainstream Canadian society has rallied powerfully against the once common idea that it was fine or at least understandable to discriminate against a person just because of his or her race, sex, skin colour or religion. And some big battles were fought and won along the way. Barriers to women succeeding in the workforce were torn down. Common law couples and same sex couples were granted the same rights as straight married couples. People could not be denied employment or housing because of their immutable characteristics. These were worthy battles and as a society we deserve to congratulate ourselves for these victories. From a moral point of view, these were the right decisions. At the same time, perhaps these major victories left human rights commissions and tribunals with less and less to do as the ever increasing expansion of human rights been an effort to fill the vacuum. Disparagement of human rights tribunals is sometimes dismissed by Canadian progressives as a right wing culture war gambit. But the stakes are far more serious than that. The idea that some people have more rights than others by virtue of their skin colour or other immutable characteristics undermines public faith in the rule of law. It sends the message that the goal of public policy isn't to equalise the treatment of groups according to neutral human rights standards, but but rather to encode preferences on the basis of ideology and political fashion. My fear is that this will not end well. To the extent that our laws are not universal or equally applied to all, it is a sign that the system has broken down political winds are forever changing. And when traditional enemies of human rights get the opportunity, they may prove only too happy to apply this principle of unequal treatment in a way that undoes all the good work that human rights institutions did in the first place. That was I chaired Canada's Human Rights Tribunal. Here's what I saw. By David Thomas. Read for Quillette. Narrated by me, William Lang. Thank you for listening.