Canadian Chat → Re: Man denied subsidised housing because he's not Muslim

They can work, they simply work in an place where everyone shares the common language, and they aren't customer facing.

Which extremely limits not only their potential employment, but also their potential income. Say I owned a restaurant in a primarily Muslim area, where everyone spoke Arabic (which is moot given the extremely specific dialects Arabic has based on region), I still wouldn't hire that person if they couldn't speak English because not only would no Canadian customers be able to be served by this employee, but even 2nd and 3rd generation canadian customers who are of Muslim recent may not necessarily speak Arabic any more.

Thus my statement about customer facing.

I could see by hiring someone who didn't speak & read english could be a liability when dealing with WHIMS. I'm thinking about a incident that happened many years ago. A woman from either Toronto or Mississauga, I couldn't find the news story on line, who was a cleaner in an office building. She mixed bleach with some chemical that caused toxic fumes and ended up dead because of it.

I remember her son spoke out about the fact she shouldn't have been allowed to use the chemicals because she couldn't read english. She wouldn't been able to read the warning labels, she wouldn't been able to pass a WHIMS test.

I worked at a department store as a cashier, I had to take the WHIMS training and pass the test to get the job.