Amaruk Wilderness Fined $8,500 for Brutal Rejection of Christian Intern; Says Christianity Destroyed Norway's Culture
A Canadian adventure company has been ordered to pay over $8,000 after it was found guilty of discriminating against a Christian job applicant.
British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal ruled this week that the Norway-based Amaruk Wilderness company must pay $8,500 to Bethany Paquette after offending her "dignity and self respect" when she applied for a job with the business, which previously provided adventure tours out of Vancouver, Canada.
Paquette, a graduate of Trinity Western University, a Christian college, applied to be an assistant guide with the company in 2014.
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She then received an email from Olaf Amundsen, an employee at Amaruk, who said that Paquette's faith made her incompatible with company values.
"Unlike Trinity Western University, we embrace diversity, and the right of people to sleep with or marry whoever they want, and this is reflected within some of our staff and management," he wrote in the email, referencing the college's stance on traditional marriage.
"In addition, the Norse background of most of the guys at the management level means that we are not a Christian organization, and most of us actually see Christianity as having destroyed our culture, tradition and way of life," Amundsen added.
According to the National Post, Norman Trerise, a member of the human rights tribunal involved in the ruling, determined this week that Amaruk and its CEO, Christophe Fragassi-Bjornsen, had allowed for Paquette to be discriminated against due to her faith.
"[…] both Amaruk, through its employee's actions, and Mr. Fragassi-Bjornsen have discriminated against Ms. Paquette on the ground of religion by harassing her for presumed religious beliefs and declining to accept her application for an internship, in part because of those beliefs," the ruling stated.
Along with being rewarded $8,500 for discrimination damages, Paquette also received $661.08 for reimbursement in legal fees.
Geoffrey Trotter, the attorney representing Paquette, told CBC News that the ruling is a victory for religious freedom everywhere.
"[This] is a victory for Bethany and for equal treatment for everyone, regardless of their beliefs or background," Trotter said, adding that Paquette has now secured a job leading dogsled races in northern Canada, doing "the very kind of work that Amaruk rejected her from."
In another Christian discrimination case, which ended up losing, Celestina Mba, a Christian childcare worker based in London, filed a discrimination complaint against her employer, the borough of Merton, in 2010 after she was forced to work Sundays, even though she told her employer that she could not work that day given her Baptist Christian faith.
Although Mba lost her discrimination case with the country's employment tribunal and appeals court, she still described the incident as a "victory" because one appeals court determined that refusing to work on Sundays can be seen as a "core component of the Christian faith."
"It is clear […] that for some Christians, working on a Sundays is unacceptable," Lord Justice Kay wrote in the appeals court's decision in 2013.
Ultimately, the court determined that Mba had not been discriminated against because her written, formal contract required her to work weekends, even though she claimed to have made a verbal agreement with her employer to not work Sundays.
