Juno News - Grown man files human rights claim after not getting babysitting job

Would you ever sue your way into babysitting someone s 5 or 8-year-old children? Seemed a little weird, but that's exactly what an Alberta man is trying to do through the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The case revolves around a complaint from James Sironofsky, who was asked by a father identified only as Todd for a number of details in regards to a babysitting job advertised on Kijiji.

00:00:00.000 Would you ever sue your way into babysitting someone's five and eight-year-old children?

00:00:07.720 Seemed a little bit weird, but that's precisely what an Alberta man is trying to do through the

00:00:12.400 Alberta Human Rights Commission. The case revolves around a complaint from James Sironofsky,

00:00:17.320 a 28-year-old man who was asked by a father identified only as Todd for a number of details

00:00:23.900 in regards to a babysitting job advertised on Kijiji. Todd was going to take a night off,

00:00:30.100 was looking for someone to babysit his children at the time age five and eight, and asked James

00:00:35.060 Sironofsky, who was I think the first applicant for the position, a number of questions including

00:00:40.120 what's your sex and how old are you? Questions that I think are pretty relevant for wanting to

00:00:45.120 invite someone into your home to look after your young children. And what James did is said,

00:00:50.640 well, I'm a 28-year-old male, didn't hear back from Todd. The reason was that Todd decided not to

00:00:56.360 go out after all and didn't hire a babysitter, didn't need Mr. Sironofsky's services. But instead

00:01:02.040 of just moving on and lamenting the loss of, I don't know what babysitters make, $5 an hour or

00:01:06.940 something, Sironofsky decided to file an Alberta Human Rights complaint, said that his human rights

00:01:12.960 were violated because he was asked for personally identifying details that are not allowed in the

00:01:19.260 course of employment. Now what makes this case so troubling is that the same complainant has filed

00:01:24.420 according to the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, numerous requests against other parents

00:01:30.420 for the same reason, for not hiring this 28-year-old to babysit their children. One of these cases going

00:01:39.180 back to 2014 made its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now in this case, a lower court determined

00:01:46.040 that the normal rules of hiring practices should be suspended with something as intimate as bringing

00:01:52.340 a babysitter into your home. And the court found that no, the Human Rights Commission does not have

00:01:58.360 to intervene in this man's case. But despite this ruling, now the Human Rights Commission has decided

00:02:04.140 to take a bit of a different stand on it and is hearing it. They've accepted this complaint, which may

00:02:09.540 well go to a tribunal, meaning a single father who was trying to look out for the best interests of his

00:02:14.420 children, may find himself being prosecuted for asking a question that any parent would have and

00:02:21.280 any parent would be fully justified in asking to make sure that you're not getting, well, a 28-year-old

00:02:26.560 male as a babysitter when you might be looking for a teenage girl or a grandmother, whatever the case

00:02:32.340 may be. These are your decisions to make as a parent, which means you need to have the right to solicit

00:02:38.500 that information. This case, regardless of where it goes, illuminates the major problem with Human Rights

00:02:45.220 Commissions. They are asking for these fights. They are asking to create victims out of people who have

00:02:51.440 no earthly case in the world to suspect that they have been victimized or somehow been oppressed.

00:02:58.480 We saw this a couple of months ago with the famous waxing case by Jessica Yaniv. Again, a Human Rights

00:03:04.080 Commission that entertains for far too long this idea that you might have a human right to have your 0.99

00:03:09.020 testicles waxed in a salon. And obviously, these cases are fundamentally different, but they speak 0.98

00:03:14.660 to the same problem, which is that we have allowed the human rights industry to govern the rule of law

00:03:21.300 and our own ability as individuals to decide who it is we want to do business with. That has to stop.

00:03:27.020 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.

Juno News - August 22, 2019

Grown man files human rights claim after not getting babysitting job

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript