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Traveller wins
Customs fight
  By JOHN SAUNDERS Wednesday, February 6, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A1
TORONTO --
In an unprecedented settlement with an indignant black traveller, Canada
Customs has pledged to hire an antiracism expert to train its officers and to
collect race-based statistics on those chosen for luggage searches or other
special attention.
The
deal, which heads off what could have been a five-week Canadian Human Rights
Tribunal hearing, also includes an apology and undisclosed cash payment to
Selwyn Pieters, the Toronto man who launched the case after a student Customs
officer decided to search his bags as he returned by train from a weekend in
New York in May of 1999.
Mr.
Pieters, a federal employee and part-time law student who has more than once
complained of official racism, ended up in a tense exchange on the train with
a Customs supervisor. The supervisor called him "Billy Jack," the
title of a 1971 movie in which a half-white, half-native karate expert
avenges bigotry with his feet.
Although
Customs admitted the name-calling was wrong, Mr. Pieters pressed for a public
hearing, asserting that he was picked for the search because of the colour of
his skin. After an investigation, the Canadian Human Rights Commission
decided last spring that a hearing was warranted.
The settlement, signed on Jan. 18 and approved by the commission last week, was not made public until now.
In it,
Canada Customs pledges to:
Order
its officers to tell everyone picked for secondary inspection (luggage searches,
body searches and other steps beyond initial questioning) the reason for the
inspection.
Ensure
that decision-making criteria used by the officers do not unlawfully
discriminate on racial or other grounds.
Hire an
outside expert by March 1 to provide antiracism and cultural diversity
training to student Customs officers during their orientation, new officers
within 180 days of hire and all others as regular refreshers.
Hire an
outside contractor for a pilot project to collect statistics by race, colour,
national or ethic origin and gender on travellers chosen for secondary
inspections and to analyze the criteria used in choosing them.
Consider
making the statistical project permanent, with a public report each year to
the human-rights commission.
Meet
with representatives of minority groups each year to hear what they think
about Customs practices.
Mr.
Pieters, now 34, is a refugee claim officer with the Immigration and Refugee
Board of Canada and volunteer operator of an antiracism Web site.
He has also
pursued racial-harassment complaints at the provincial level against the
Toronto Police and the former Toronto board of education.
He had
set out to make the federal hearing a public examination of racial profiling
-- the use of race, consciously or otherwise, in official guesses about which
individuals are likely to break the law.
Even so,
he is happy with the settlement, he said last night.
"Now
we have something saying that Customs isn't going to target people based on
irrelevant characteristics such as race. . . . We now have antiracism
training that each and every officer is going to get within 180 days of their
hiring, and they're going to be continually upgraded.
"We
now have Customs [promising] to provide an explanation to each and every
person as to why they're being referred to secondary search.
"I
mean, that's significant, because at least it's going to cure the
arbitrariness."
Michel
Proulx, a Customs media-relations officer, said the agency admits no
wrongdoing but decided it was best to settle without a hearing.
Customs
employees already undergo what is called sensitivity training, he said, but
"to ensure that we don't have any problems, additional training will be
given to our Customs officers."
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