Personal Selectiveness

The Ontario Human Rights Commission put out a warning recently to landlords. Against placing within their online classified advertisements any warning that prospective tenants would be screened with respect to race, ethnic origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or disability. These discriminatory classifications contravene the Ontario Human Rights Commission's housing policy, along with the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Fair enough, one supposes, in a society that congratulates itself on egalitarianism, fairness, and respect for all. We do live in a pluralist society, however, with people originally emanating from a hugely other types of geography, society, culture, history. People tend to clump together, finding comfort in the presence of others, like themselves. It has always been so, and always will be.

Apart from our gregarious nature as humans, we also favour sameness.

So it's perfectly understandable when, in a site that gears itself to the needs of a particular community, advertisements will cite specific parameters. When people advertise apartments or flats or suites or rooms for rent in a housing area that is majority Sikh or Muslim or Jewish, for example, they often look for rental to those who fit the majority profile. There is a certain predictability in this.

And if the rental is in, for example, a private home, or a duplex where the owner lives next to the rental unit, it is perfectly explicable that he might find himself more trusting of those with a background similar to his own. People should be able to specify whether they will rent to smokers, to pet owners, to habitual alcohol consumers, to singles. After all, they have to live with them, at a remove.

So when someone advertising to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Brampton, Ontario, claiming he "does not want to give the apartment to any other people" other than Indians or Muslims, and yet is fully aware of the implications of the Ontario Human Rights Code, what he's doing is exercising his right to be selective, another word for discriminating, without the deleterious connotation.

Although the Ontario Human Rights Code claims that everyone has a right to seek housing without discrimination, perhaps we should make a distinction between a kind of socially institutionalized discrimination aversion and a personal selectivity option. After all, one person's right should not impinge upon another's.

"We haven't investigated any of these housing things because it's kind of hard to do. We're such a small organization with such a large number of possibilities for contravening the code", admitted Rosemary Bennett, spokesperson for the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

And thank heavens for that.