Special Program Designation

Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, organizations are prohibited from treating people unfairly because of Code grounds. Barriers that cause discrimination must be removed, and stopped when they occur.

Legal Protection

The Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms both recognize the importance of addressing historical disadvantage by protecting special programs to help marginalized groups. The Supreme Court of Canada has also recognized the need to protect programs established by legislation that are designed to address the conditions of a disadvantaged group.

Section 15(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms outlines the protection of affirmative action programs, to prevent them from being attacked by people who are excluded from the program's purpose.

Forms of Protection for Special Programs

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. The Ontario Human Rights Commission ("OHRC") encourages the development and use of special programs as effective ways to achieve substantive equality by helping reduce discrimination, or addressing historical prejudice.

Under Section 14 of the Code, it is not discrimination to put in place a program if it is designed to:

Relieve hardship or economic disadvantage;
Help disadvantaged people or groups to achieve, or try to achieve equal opportunity; or
Help eliminate discrimination.

A program must satisfy at least one of the above bullet points in order to be considered a special program under the Code. These listed objects above are exactly what the Fresh Food Weekly program was achieving, yet the program was rejected by every single person mandated to seek-out these outcomes.

When the Fresh Food Weekly program closed down in January 2024, it had grown too big to be managed by one person. It needed resources and funding to hire multiple staff, as well as to pay its founder, a salary since it’s impossible to survive without having basic human needs met. Not only was Fresh Food Weekly not supported, it was attacked by the very people who should have embraced it.

Harassment

Positive Outcomes Generated by Fresh Food Weekly

The Hardship

The hardship Fresh Food Weekly relieved was starvation due to economic disadvantage. The economic disadvantage is: barricades to a sufficient-paying jobs.

The Benefit

By delivering fresh and nutritious food to the target group on an on-going and reliable basis; weekly, biweekly and monthly, depending on the point in time that the program existed, the target group was able to slow the pace in which they were dying, which helped put them in a better position to participate in the economy.

The Public

By publicizing the living circumstances in which the target group is forced to endure, the public was being educated of the true reasons for the target group’s state of material deprivation, which helped to eliminate discrimination because the public was starting to comprehend the real reasons why they behave the way they behave (mental instability), and appear the way they appear (impoverished).

Protecting Affirmative Action

At one time, "equality" meant that everyone should receive the same or similar treatment. This is often referred to as “formal equality.” The problem is that “formal equality” ignores historical and ongoing barriers that some groups face, and it doesn’t recognize special needs, which further perpetuates inequality for certain groups.

The first purpose of section 14 of the Code is to make sure that special programs are designed to help a disadvantaged group, and that they're not challenged by people who do not face the same disadvantage.

Promoting Substantive Equality

The second purpose of section 14 is to promote substantive equality. “Substantive equality” means understanding and meeting the needs of disadvantaged persons or groups using historical, legal and social contexts. It takes into account discriminatory barriers in their many forms, not all of which are obvious. When it comes to Barrie Housing, the City of Barrie, the County of Simcoe, the Ministry of Children, Community & Social Services ("CCSS") and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs & Housing ("MMAH"), discrimination has been built into their behaviour, practices and policies. This has lead to a real disadvantage for single women, disabled women and women in receipt of social assistance, which are all protected Code grounds. This is called systemic or institutional discrimination.

Engaging Those With Lived Experience

I first learned about "Lived Experience” when I wrote my grant application for the United Way of Simcoe Muskoka in the summer of 2023. It was then when I realized the true value of persons with Lived Experience. People like me are not the worthless anecdotes the County of Simcoe, the City of Barrie, Simcoe County Housing and Barrie Housing treat me as.

Engagement is different than consultation because it involves the impacted group for the duration of the project, from initial brainstorming to drafting to implementation and beyond, in whatever capacity they are comfortable. This is exactly how the Fresh Food Weekly program was formed. I designed, established and ran the Fresh Food Weekly program, and I was also a recipient of my own program too. The respondents failed to see this as the most valuable aspect of the Fresh Food Weekly program. To the contrary, the respondents saw my involvement in the Fresh Food Weekly program as a deficiency.

Levelling the Field

At an unconscious level, it is part of Barrie Housing staff’s brains to make sense of and categorize vulnerable female tenants, in which they owe a fiduciary duty to. Their biases dispense significant influence on the social assistance programs and benefits made available to them. This fact has led to devastating consequences on an individual, community and systemic level within the City of Barrie.

As a rent-geared-to-income ("RGI") tenant living in the City of Barrie, not only am I experiencing unprecedented levels of human suffering thanks to the rising costs of living, I'm witnessing my neighbours experiencing this same level of suffering too... or even worse suffering. In July 2024, during one of the heat waves, my daughter had to get something from the car, and it was raining out. When she came back in, she told me there was an elderly woman in a wheelchair sitting outside, in the rain. This woman told my daughter that sitting in the rain was better than sitting in her overheated apartment. This broke my heart. My first thought was, “you can’t even watch TV outside”.