The Human Rights Commission in the eastern province of Nova Scotia has launched a free online course to help prevent and deal with racial profiling of customers. The commission says consumer racial profiling “is a serious issue in Nova Scotia.”
It says “visible minority customers are significantly more likely to be followed, searched and ignored than non-minority customers.” It is illegal in the province to deny someone service or discriminate against them based on their race, colour or ethnicity.
Grocery chain agreed to train employees
In 2015, a human rights tribunal ruled that Andrella David, who is black, was a victim of racial profiling by the grocery chain, Sobeys in 2009. A store in the town of Tantallon, Nova Scotia had wrongly accused her of shoplifting. There were protests.
Eventually a settlement was reached and the chain agreed to train its employees on racial profiling and discrimination. Now, the Human Rights Commission is making such training widely available to businesses on the internet.
Statistics from the 2011 census show 20,790 black people live in Nova Scotia. They formed 37 per cent of all blacks in Canada. Many of the Nova Scotians are descendants of people who remained loyal to Great Britain and fled to eastern Canada after the American Revolution. There were also escaped slaves and other immigrants.
The training course is called Serving All Customers Better and was developed in collaboration with the business community.
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