competing rights

A good example of rights and responsibilities colliding is the case of Deepinder Loomba, a Sikh man who wears a turban. In his job as a security guard, he was assigned to monitor security at a Home Depot store that was still under construction. Although there were signs stating hardhats were required on the site, Mr. Loomba did not wear one because it interfered with the turban he wore as an element of his faith.

After the policy dialogue, we created a draft framework for dealing with competing rights in a respectful way that considered the rights of all involved. We presented this model to a diverse group of stakeholders in an intense two-day session. The framework is now being fine-tuned for the next step – creating a formal policy that offers practical steps for considering the possibility of solutions that will both respect and support everyone’s rights.

This section of the paper surveys the balancing tools found in the Code and relevant case law. Documents such as Commission briefing notes and Policy Papers provide invaluable commentary on these tools and their insights are woven into the following discussion. The goal of this section is to identify the resources for balancing conflicting rights that will be utilized in the scenarios discussed in Section IV.

Factum of the intervener Ontario Human Rights Commission.