ONTARIO HUMAN RIGHTS LEGAL SUPPORT CENTER CHAIR PATRICK CASE TO SPEAK ON RACIAL PROFILING AND THE LAW

Montreal, March 13, 2015 — To celebrate March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimation, CRARR will co-host with different partners two activities on Friday March 20, featuring Mr. Patrick Case, Chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Legal Support Center.

Mr. Case will speak on recent developments on racial discrimination and racial profiling in Ontario, and challenges for victims and advocates in combating racism.

Patrick Case was appointed as Chair of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre in October, 2010. He currently teaches in the department of Political Science at the University of Guelph.He teaches human rights and Charter related courses and is an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Mr. Case is also a member of the board of Facing History and Ourselves, an organization that helps educators worldwide link the past to moral choices today.

From 2006 to 2010 Mr. Case held an appointment as a Commissioner at the Ontario Human Rights Commission. He has been a trade unionist, a school trustee and a practitioner whose chief focus was serving women who were victims of male violence. Mr. Case has served as a staff lawyer in the Family Law Division at Parkdale Community Legal Services. He is the past Chair of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, which was created as a part of the federal government's redress agreement with Japanese Canadians and has been a Co-Chair of the Equality Rights Panel of the Court Challenges Program of Canada.

On Friday, March 20, Mr. Case will speak at a forum at the Chancellor Day Hall of McGill University's Faculty of Law, 3644 Peel St., from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, in Room 200. The Forum is co-hosted by the Black Law Students Association of Montreal and RadLaw.

He will then speak to the Observatoire sur les profilages, a network of researchers, academics and community groups actively involved against racial, social and political profiling, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

The Ontario Government created the Ontario Human Rights Legal Support Center to provide advice, support and representation to individuals who file cases directly with the Human Rights Tribunal. In 2008, the Government withdrew from the Ontario Human Rights Commission the function of investigating complaints of discrimination, due to its serious problems in handling these complaints, and created the Legal Support Center to improve discrimination victims' access to the human rights system.

Mr. Case will be available for media interviews in the morning of March 20.

Both activities are co-hosted by the Institute for Research and Education on Race Relations.