“Employers want to ensure that discrimination doesn’t happen and they have harassment-free environments, but at the end of the day employees have to understand that they need evidence if there’s any harassment occurring. Evidence is key to a successful discrimination complaint and, of course, the complaint has to be tied to an enumerated [human rights] ground.”
So says Jeremy Herman, an employment lawyer at Samfiru Tumarkin in Ottawa and Toronto, after the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal dismissed a worker’s discrimination complaint because some of the worker’s allegations were already dealt with in other proceedings and the worker had no evidence showing a link between alleged unfair treatment and protected human rights grounds.
The worker was employed by the Humber River Hospital Volunteer Association (HRHVA) – a volunteer association providing services to patients and their families while also engaging in fundraising activities – from October 2016 to September 2018, working at a Tim Hortons franchise that the HRHVA operated inside the Humber River Hospital in Toronto.
