'YOU ARE ALL TERRORISTS': Bell Canada customer to pay $4Gs for 'intolerable racist conduct'
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A Bell Canada customer has been ordered to pay $4,000 by the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal for “discriminatory language” he used in a 2016 phone call with a customer service agent, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
The customer called to cancel his Bell service. The customer service representative, Mohamed Jied, told the customer his first name, causing the conversation to “degenerate significantly,” according to a Tribunal account of the recording.
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“Take your bags, take your turban and get out of Quebec,” the caller says in one part of the recorded conversation, to which Jied replies: “I am Canadian.”
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The two individuals started hurling insults at one another.
“Get f—ed, okay? Young man, f— you …,” Jied is heard saying. The caller replies: “You are all terrorists. That is guaranteed.”
Jied was fired six days after the conversation but successfully appealed the decision at a Feb 5. labour board hearing and the case went before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal.
“Discriminatory language, because of its hostility and intensity, constitutes intolerable racist conduct in a free and democratic society with such fundamental values as those underlying the Charter Of Rights,” wrote judge Mario Gervais.
“The words spoken cross the high threshold required in case law to constitute a discriminatory infringement of Mr. Jied’s right to dignity,” the Tribunal continued.
The judge also wrote the caller’s words sought to deliberately “denigrate and humiliate” Jied by “attacking his personal characteristics.”
Despite the ruling, Gervais did place some accountability on Jied’s shoulders. At one point in the conversation, Jied is heard saying: “Suck my d—.”
“Anger does not constitute a valid defence,” wrote Gervais, adding, “Provocation by the victim is not a defence.”
However, Jied’s “shock, feelings of humiliation, anxiety and self-deprecation,” affected his state of mind at the time, Gervais wrote.
Jied, originally from Tunisia, immigrated to Quebec in 2006 with his wife and children.
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