I’m straight as a cosmic string. But if I were gay, I’d be gay for Justin Trudeau.
Canada, please send some of that quality statesman south to your benighted neighbor. You kind of owe us for burning down our capital (Yeah, I know, not really, we torched a Port Dover, but we’re desperate!).
I’m sorry, but if you elect Trump we’re not letting Justin anywhere near you guys for four years! It won’t be safe! You’ll keep him in a cage or something!
As if we needed another reason to be jealous of the Canadians!
I have to say I’m baffled. A human rights investigation against the employer? I could understand if they condoned or even permitted a hostile work environment. But how can an employer monitor every card I send in my free time? New horizons in surveillance?
EDIT: Who would have thought a BoingBoing post could be inaccurate? An anonymous work-colleague didn’t actually sent’s Degas Sikorski a homophobic “Valentine”. The boss posted valentines for all on a board; somebody defaced Sikorski’s. So it happened right there in the store. I wonder if they trained a security camera on the valentines?
What I kinda gathered from the brief synopsis there ist hat this letter was awful but there was more to it than that… I don’t think someone would leave their job over one note like that. The employer must not have taken this guy’s concerns seriously.
No, if you click through, it sounds like the Starbucks job showed up at just the right time to make the guy say fuck it, I’m out. No word if there was a pattern of harassment, but I wouldn’t call a single graffiti “hounding.”
“Last month, an anonymous work-colleague at Alberta’s Party City sent’s Degas Sikorski a homophobic “Valentine” that he posted last week.”
Last month, an anonymous work-colleague at Alberta’s Party City sent Degas Sikorski a homophobic “Valentine”. Sikorski’s mother posted it on Facebook last week.
C’mon guys, was that really so hard?
Of note; in the click-through, the defaced piece reads “[expletive] you’re not getting shifts for a reason”.
If it’s true, then yes it’s a hostile workplace - someone far enough above that they’re dictating the shifts is part of the problem. And (again, if it’s true,) he’s actually taking a monetary loss from the discrimination.
(and yes; if it’s true, that would be just cause against the workplace, not just the individual.)
But even if it’s not, I’d jump ship from “not getting shifts” to “getting shifts”. Who wouldn’t.
At least with Stephen Harper, we in the antipodes didn’t feel quite so alone in the “embarrassing nutjob as PM” club. Now we’re alone in our shame.
Oh well, at least there’s always President Trump to look forward to!
“graffito” 
It’s good to see this be the news out of Canada’s leadership and not whatever mischief Harper was (or still is) up to. Gives me hope! Maybe after seeing this election cycle, Americans can be done with idiots for a little while, too.
I don’t mean this to sound at all snarky: if people wondered what would happen to a generation brought up on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, the reaction from Justin Trudeau is a perfect illustration. People his age (and my age) who were fed a healthy diet of PBS as kids definitely seem to have had the concepts of tolerance, kindness, and an appreciation for “being special” instilled into us, and I appreciate that.
I wish I could find it again but many years ago I read a story by John Waters about a job he was fired from. The woman responsible for firing him also doled out shifts but she was terrified of him so rather than telling him he was fired she just drew up a shift chart without his name on it. He showed up for work, looked at the chart and said, “What’s this?” Rather than explaining the woman just started shouting, “He’s insane!”
It was about as funny as a story about being fired can get.
Any photoshop ninjas out there with a sudden urge to make an image of Trudeau with force-spirit Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson on either side should know that their work would not go unappreciated…
Alberta is our Texas… so I’m going to go with yes.
Agreed. Just happened to hear NPR’s story on Francios Clemmons (aka Officer Clemmons from “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood”) and thought the bit about Mr. Rogers washing his feet was pretty awesome.
More like being raised in Montreal - they haven’t given much of a shit about people being gay since I was a young man there (which was in the early '70s). I recall Michel Girouard “marrying” his boyfriend back then: some of us might have raised an eyebrow about it… maybe.
The only reason I use scare quotes is that the laws didn’t change until the start of the millennium. Michel might have actually started the ball rolling in Quebec. Trudeau père repatriating and beefing up the Constitution certainly helped.
Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized until the start of the millennium, but the big changes that legalized homosexuality came around 1970. Thanks largely in part to Trudeau Sr. who earlier as Justice Minister introduced the bill decriminalizing it, telling reporters “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
