Black leadership and community engagement have been at the forefront of action to address systemic discrimination and advance racial equity in Ontario. The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) recognizes that Black individuals, organizations, and grassroots movements have been working on issues of anti-Black racism in education for decades. The OHRC acknowledges and embraces the work of generations of grassroots and community-led organizing and academics and the significant strides toward protecting the safety and well-being of Black children in Ontario’s publicly funded education system. The OHRC has tried to capture and preserve those works in its initiative to address anti-Black racism in Ontario’s education system. We are grateful for those works and honour the people who have contributed to them.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission is developing a new policy statement on the discriminatory display of names, words and images, and wants to hear from the public about this quickly-evolving issue.
May 7, 2021 – The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) congratulates the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) for launching this consultation and welcomes the opportunity to provide input on the proposed changes to its Rules and Forms.
The OHRC generally supports the overall intent of the Ministry’s draft Policy/Program Memorandum (PPM) for school board policies on service animals in schools.
May 3, 2017 - During the consultation, we heard many perspectives and experiences. We heard concerns about racialized and Indigenous peoples being subjected to unwarranted surveillance, investigation and other forms of scrutiny, punitive actions and heavy-handed treatment. We also tried to explore other, less well-understood forms of racial profiling, which may be systemic in nature. This report presents what we learned about institutional policies, practices, prediction and assessment tools, and decision-making processes, which may seem neutral but may nonetheless amount to systemic racial profiling.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) will host a policy dialogue on racial profiling early in 2016. The primary purposes of the event are to stimulate dialogue and generate relevant research to help inform the development of a new OHRC policy on racial profiling.
January 2014 - The survey was open from September 5, 2013 and closed October 16th, 2013. A total of 1,719 persons responded to the survey. Survey questions related primarily to (1) the definition and scope of creed rights under the Code; (2) experiences of discrimination based on creed; and (3) accommodation issues and challenges faced by both accommodation seekers and providers.
2013 - The primary aim of this paper is to report on OHRC research and consultation findings and analysis to date on key creed-based human rights issues, options and debates. We hope that this will add further transparency to our creed policy update process, and help to increase general public awareness of creed-based human rights issues. Another goal is to develop a stronger contextual framework for understanding and addressing contemporary creed-based human rights issues.
September 2013 - The OHRC is currently updating its 1996 Policy on creed. The goal is to clarify the OHRC’s interpretation of human rights based on creed under the Ontario Human Rights Code (the Code) and advance human rights understanding and good practice in this area. The update, which began in 2011, will take two to three years to finish. It will involve extensive research and consultation, and will draw on lessons learned from the OHRC’s recent work on the Policy on competing human rights.
