This Month in
Labour History

Supreme Court of Canada banned discrimination on sexual orientation

Many milestones in recent years have marked the struggle for 2SLGBTQI+ rights in Canada. On April 2, 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on a case of a worker being firing for being gay.

In 1991 Delwin Vriend, a chemistry laboratory coordinator in Edmonton Alberta, worked at The King’s College which was affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church. Vriend, who was open about being in a same-sex relationship was told by his supervisor to resign for being in violation of the college’s “statement of religious beliefs or he would be fired when he refused the college fired him.

Vriend contacted the Alberta Human Rights Commission, hoping to file a discrimination complaint, but he was refused on the grounds that sexual orientation was not protected under the province’s human rights code. Failing in his attempt to gain justice he was forced to turn to the courts and sued the Government of Alberta and its Human Rights Commission.

In 1994, an Alberta court ruled sexual orientation must be treated as a protected class under human rights legislation. The provinces Conservative government appealed and in 1996 and the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the decision of the lower court. The case was then appealed by Vriend to the Supreme Court of Canada where the Canadian Labour Congress was one of the intervening parties on his behalf.

Finally, in 1998 the court ruled on Vriend v. Alberta. It found that there is no legal basis for drawing a distinction in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms between a positive act and an omission in the law. While Alberta’s human rights legislation and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms omitted any reference to sexual orientation, the decision ruled that while not explicitly written down, orientation was a prohibited ground of discrimination.

The Vriend v. Alberta decision was successfully used in the legal challenges to provincial bans on same-sex marriage throughout Canada. The decision has helped shape legal precedent concerning provincial and federal government relationships as well as labour and other civil rights and constitutional laws.