Ouster from restaurant no rights violation
A woman, who was kicked out of an Abbotsford restaurant after a birthday dinner with her brother and his crime-linked friends, was not a victim of discrimination, according to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.
The woman, who won a bid for anonymity during tribunal proceedings, filed a complaint against the Cactus Club alleging that she was treated unfairly because her brother had once been charged with drug trafficking. She claimed that she was asked to leave “based entirely on (her) family status,” which is protected under the B.C. Human Rights Code.
But tribunal member Parnesh Sharma didn’t accept that explanation and dismissed the complaint last week.
“In short, (she) was asked to leave because six members of the group she was with had known criminal or drug associations. She has no reasonable prospect of establishing that her family status was a factor in this adverse treatment,” Sharma wrote in the decision.
RS, as she is referred to in tribunal documents, was part of a group of 15 to 20 people who celebrated her brother’s birthday at the restaurant’s lounge area on June 27, 2014. Cactus Club is a participating member of the antigang program Bar Watch, and the restaurant manager called police after he noticed three members of the same birthday party smoking marijuana.
Police stopped by the restaurant soon after the phone call and began checking customers’ identification. RS’s group was asked to settle up and leave shortly after an officer ran their IDs through the computer system.
RS told the tribunal that the officer made her feel like a criminal and that it was an “arbitrary abuse of power” when she was asked to leave. But after she filed her complaint with the tribunal, Cactus Club management followed up with police and discovered that every man in her party that night — or at least the ones who didn’t leave as soon as they saw the officers — had criminal or drug connections.
None of the women in the group had any known links to drugs or crime. Sharma wrote that their expulsion may have been arbitrary and suggested that the human rights implications of the Bar Watch program are worth discussing, but said there was no evidence that RS was singled out because of her family relationships.