Cutlery controversy back on the table
Wed, November 19 2008
The Montreal-based Centre for Research-Action On Race Relations (CRARR) has asked the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission to review, and even rescind, its ruling on a complaint of racial discrimination filed by a woman whose son was exposed to discriminatory remarks and treatments for eating with a spoon and a fork in a school in Montreal.
Last month, Quebec’s Human Rights Commission ruled that Luc Cagadoc, was reprimanded for his table manners, not his choice of utensils.
“It’s not a matter of discrimination. It’s a matter of education in the classroom,” commission president Gaétan Cousineau told CTV Montreal.
The commission also said there is no evidence that the principal said the boy should eat like a Canadian.
But it noted that the lunchtime supervisor acted in a discriminatory manner by asking the boy if people in “his country” washed their hands before eating. The commission determined that the comment was an isolated incident.
The decision has infuriated the boy’s mother, Filipina-Canadian Maria Theresa Gallardo-Cagadoc, who helped launch the complaint with the CRARR.
“The commission simply did not get it, and failed to show competence in investigating a complaint of racially biased treatment in a school that led a seven-year-old child to be discriminated against and ashamed of his own cultural background,” Gallardo said at a news conference.
The boy said the lunchtime supervisor told him he was “eating like a pig” and should not have been using both a fork and spoon.
His mother said Luc was just eating like other Filipinos. She claimed the school principal later said the boy should “eat like a Canadian.”
The school said the boy was reprimanded because of his unruly behaviour.
The Filipino community is still pressing the case and wants to bypass the human rights commission and head straight to court with a discrimination suit. Gallardo-Cagadoc said she may appeal the decision before the province’s Human Rights Tribunal.
The Filipino community says the commission ignored a newspaper article in which the respondent, school principal Normand Bergeron, was reported to have made comments to Luc Cagadoc that, “you are here in Canada … you should eat the way Canadians eat.”
“I can’t understand how the human rights commission expects to provide a fair investigation when it chose to interview representatives of the school board, but not even me, my son or my husband, at all,” said Gallardo-Cagadoc, who sought the help of CRARR to represent her before the commission.
Luc was born in The Philippines but came to Canada at the age of eight months.
CRARR said it found several procedural anomalies, which may have affected the decision of the commission.
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