Grown man files human rights claim after not getting babysitting job
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178.3287
Summary
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.
Transcript
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Would you ever sue your way into babysitting someone's five and eight-year-old children?
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Seemed a little bit weird, but that's precisely what an Alberta man is trying to do through the
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Alberta Human Rights Commission. The case revolves around a complaint from James Sironofsky,
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a 28-year-old man who was asked by a father identified only as Todd for a number of details
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in regards to a babysitting job advertised on Kijiji. Todd was going to take a night off,
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was looking for someone to babysit his children at the time age five and eight, and asked James
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Sironofsky, who was I think the first applicant for the position, a number of questions including
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what's your sex and how old are you? Questions that I think are pretty relevant for wanting to
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invite someone into your home to look after your young children. And what James did is said,
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well, I'm a 28-year-old male, didn't hear back from Todd. The reason was that Todd decided not to
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go out after all and didn't hire a babysitter, didn't need Mr. Sironofsky's services. But instead
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of just moving on and lamenting the loss of, I don't know what babysitters make, $5 an hour or
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something, Sironofsky decided to file an Alberta Human Rights complaint, said that his human rights
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were violated because he was asked for personally identifying details that are not allowed in the
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course of employment. Now what makes this case so troubling is that the same complainant has filed
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according to the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, numerous requests against other parents
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for the same reason, for not hiring this 28-year-old to babysit their children. One of these cases going
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back to 2014 made its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now in this case, a lower court determined
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that the normal rules of hiring practices should be suspended with something as intimate as bringing
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a babysitter into your home. And the court found that no, the Human Rights Commission does not have
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to intervene in this man's case. But despite this ruling, now the Human Rights Commission has decided
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to take a bit of a different stand on it and is hearing it. They've accepted this complaint, which may
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well go to a tribunal, meaning a single father who was trying to look out for the best interests of his
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children, may find himself being prosecuted for asking a question that any parent would have and
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any parent would be fully justified in asking to make sure that you're not getting, well, a 28-year-old
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male as a babysitter when you might be looking for a teenage girl or a grandmother, whatever the case
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may be. These are your decisions to make as a parent, which means you need to have the right to solicit
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that information. This case, regardless of where it goes, illuminates the major problem with Human Rights
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Commissions. They are asking for these fights. They are asking to create victims out of people who have
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no earthly case in the world to suspect that they have been victimized or somehow been oppressed.
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We saw this a couple of months ago with the famous waxing case by Jessica Yaniv. Again, a Human Rights
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Commission that entertains for far too long this idea that you might have a human right to have your
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testicles waxed in a salon. And obviously, these cases are fundamentally different, but they speak
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to the same problem, which is that we have allowed the human rights industry to govern the rule of law
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and our own ability as individuals to decide who it is we want to do business with. That has to stop.