Toronto "public" housing allowed to discriminate by religion, ethnicity, etc

Meet Austin Lewis. He's 21, and disabled by a disease that attacked his spinal cord when he was 8. And he's homeless. He needs to live in a wheelchair-accessible building, and has applied to more than 100 in the Greater Toronto Area, without success.

Mr. Lewis did succeed, a few months ago, in getting himself on the list at a building called the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace, on Finch Avenue West in northwest Toronto. The 16-storey building is subsidized by the taxpayers as part of a programme to encourage religious and other non-profit groups to build affordable housing.

In the USA, if your organization gets public funds for something like a school or hospital or affordable housing, the facility must be open to all members of the public. In the USA, there's no discrimination on the basis of race, colour, "gender preference", religion or anything else.

One might think that in Canada, generally a more socially liberal society than the Excited States, the same rules apply. After all, Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms which protects the same "human rights" as those enjoyed and abused by Americans, eh?

If that's what one thinks, one would be wrong. Austin Lewis found that out last week when a letter arrived at his mother's house telling him that he had been removed from the waiting list at the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace because... wait for it... he is not a follower of the Prophet Mohammed, i.e. a Muslim.

How can this be, Mr. Lewis wonders. "This letter came as a complete shock," he told a Toronto Star reporter. "Why would a government segregate its own building?"

A spokesthingy for the City of Toronto explained that "The City’s mandate policy allows social housing providers to restrict their housing to individuals belonging to an identifiable ethnic or religious group if specific conditions are met." The city provides a subsidy of C$1.7 million ($1.275 million real dollars) for 94 rent-geared-to-income units under an agreement that restricts tenants to "members of the Muslim Jama’at".

But, the city's flak-catcher said, it's not like the Muslims are getting special treatment by being allowed to bar non-Muslims from their building, with its prayer rooms and other "facilities from which others would get no benefit". There are eight such buildings in Toronto, catering to Muslims, Macedonians, Germans, Chinese, Greeks, Hungarians, Lithuanians and "Christian seniors". So that's all right, then.

Final word comes from lawyer Barry Swadron (a classmate of Agent 3), who has extensive experience in disability law. "Here you have a building for Muslims, and normally that would be discriminatory because other religions could not be accommodated there," he told the Toronto Star. But the Ontario Human Rights Code says if it's a special-interests organization -- religious, philanthropic, educational or social -- they can discriminate in that way. It's very unfortunate, but that’s how the law was written."

But what about Austin Lewis? Mr. Swadron explained that, while the intention was to create safe spaces for minority communities, this kind of permissible "positive discrimination" inevitably produces collateral damage. Unfortunately for Mr. Lewis, he's "an unintended casualty of the system."

Mr. Lewis says the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace is the only landlord who's had the courtesty to tell him in writing that he's inadmissible, and wonders how many others have refused his application without bothering to notify him. Seems to me the solution for him is obvious. Don't wait for the politically correct Ontario or Toronto government to change the law to make "public" mean truly public -- open to all. Convert to Islam!