THUNDER BAY — The dismissal of a human rights complaint filed by an Indigenous woman against the Thunder Bay Police Service alleging discrimination by an officer has been upheld by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
An application filed by the complainant to reconsider the original dismissal was denied by adjudicator Haniya Sheikh with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
The original complaint was first filed in September 2022 relating to an incident that occurred in November 2019. The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has a one-year time limit for filing complaints.
The complainant alleged that when attending a committee meeting for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls at the Thunder Bay Police Service headquarters on Balmoral Street, she exited an elevator on the second floor and encountered a male officer “in an obviously intimate conversation” with a female.
According to the complainant, the officer moved toward her in a “threatening manner,” demanded to know her business on the second floor of the police headquarters, and that he allegedly glared at her “in the familiar anti-Indigenous derogatory manner.”
The original complaint was dismissed by Sheikh in April 2023 because it was filed 517 days late from the date of the incident and no good faith explanation was provided by the complainant for the delay.
A request for reconsideration was filed in May 2023 and Sheikh released a decision dismissing that application last week.
“It is clear that the applicant disagrees with the Decision, but in my view the applicant has not shown that any compelling and extraordinary circumstances exist which warrant granting reconsideration,” Sheikh wrote in her decision. “I am also not persuaded that there are circumstances in this case which outweigh the public interest in the finality of the Decision.”
The decision states that a request for reconsideration is not an opportunity to re-argue the case, and Sheikh wrote the complainant “has not provided any new information but attempts to relitigate the issue of delay.”
Sheikh goes on to say that the delay in this case is considerable and that the: “absence of any specificity to account for why the applicant was unable to file an application is not sufficient to discharge the applicant’s burden of demonstrating that the delay incurred was in good faith.”
“Simply put, the applicant has failed to provide details, documents, or explanations to account for the delay. There are merely vague references to approximate time-periods,” Sheikh said in her decision.
“Adjudicative resources are not infinite and parties must put their best foot forward in advancing their claim. It is not an opportunity to engage in a constant back and forth between the adjudicator and a party to piece together the argument.”
Chantelle Bryson, the lawyer representing the complainant, said there were a number of reasons why this case should have been heard even outside of the Human Rights Tribunal’s one-year time limit for filing complaints.
According to Bryson, there were instances of deception by senior members of the Thunder Bay Police Service and board who attempted to deceive and manipulate the complainant prior to filing the complaint.
“[The complainant] learned about this much later. There is a one-year timeline in filing with HRTO but we felt this was worthy of trying to file given the corruption that had taken place in the complaint process,” she said.
“We thought the circumstances were exceptional and worthy because of the 25 plus human rights complaints [against the Thunder Bay Police Service and Police Services Board], many of which involve anti-Indigenous racism.”
Bryson added that the Human Rights Tribunal is very strict when it comes to timelines, but she also said it is trying to unload cases to deal with a growing backlog.
“They have a massive backlog right now and they will do anything to dump cases off their roaster,” she said. “Their position is unless you are in a coma, there’s no exception to delays these days.”
None of the other human rights complaints Bryson is involved in fall outside the of the one-year time limit for the Human Rights Tribunal.
She said she will continue to fight for those who have filed human rights complaints because their experiences have lasting impacts, including the complainant in the case that was just dismissed.
“These things matter. We can’t just be posters and flags,” Bryson said. “It has to be real to make any difference out in the community. What they did really harmed her and now she doesn’t feel safe participating in that committee and didn’t go back and fears retribution from the police and we see those examples all the time from those cases.”
With the complaint now dismissed, there are no other steps for reconsideration to be taken.
