A taxpayer-funded office set up to help vulnerable Canadians has an anti-white bias and hired a non-binary lawyer who helped bully out one of its staffers, it is claimed.
Nick Osmond-Jones had worked for the British Columbia Ombudsperson for eleven years but was fired after he leaked slides from a woke lecture claiming Canada had inspired the Holocaust.
In a lengthy article for Quillette, Osmond-Jones, a married father to four children, details how he believed saw the service changing before his eyes. It was set up to help tackle complaints from ordinary Canadians who felt mistreated by public services, but ended up descending into an Orwellian ‘equity’-obsessed nightmare, Osmond-Jones claims.
‘When I started my career, the commitment to impartiality and non-partisanship seemed universal. Talk of personal politics was generally avoided at work. I could collaborate with people on extended projects without ever learning their personally held ideological views,’ Osmond-Jones begins.
‘But as the years crept by, things started to shift. While the goal had once been to deal with British Columbians on an equal and unbiased basis, a wave of policy changes and training sessions channeling questionable offshoots of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) began promoting the idea that people should be treated differently based on their identities.’
Osmond-Jones is no right-winger. He began his career as a welder and enjoyed his job, but says he gave it up over fears it was worsening climate change.
He says he worked at Canada’s Ministry of Health in Victoria when the division suddenly expanded access for patients with gender dysphoria.
He had assumed that such treatments were reserved for adults, and subject to the most rigorous safeguards before being approved, but he quickly learned that any guardrails were in fact non-existent.
Genital surgeries for adults were being performed with little to no assessment, including ‘gender-affirming’ mastectomies, together with the issuing of puberty-blocking drugs to children despite little evidence of them being safe or effective.
‘The evidence kept mounting that the public service was no longer making decisions based on the available evidence, but rather was increasingly acting on either ideological considerations, or a fear of running afoul of the ideological puritans,’ Osmond-Jones, stated.
But it was when he began his job as an Ombudsperson Officer that things took a turn.
Osmond-Jones had hoped the job would allow him to look into complaints from Canadians free from any kind of ideological bias, but that turned out not to be the case.
Complaints were moved to the top of the pile if they had come from a member of an. ‘equity-deserving group.’
It was explained that anyone who wasn’t white or had ticked a box that saw them identify as one of the many sub varieties of LGBT, they would automatically jump the line, no matter the nature or urgency of their complaints.
‘When one of my coworkers pointed out that this would raise wait times for other complainants who may be raising equally (or even more) pressing issues, this concern was denounced as a form of “binary thinking”‘, Osmond-Jones writes.
During a training session involving more than 100 other workers, a well-known Vancouver-area trans activist, Adrienne Smith, who is female and identifies as non-binary, explained how in her view ‘sex isn’t binary and that claiming so is a form of colonial thinking.’
Smith told those listening on the Zoom call that public servants need to make decisions based on complainants’ self-declared gender identity rather than sex.
Osmond-Jones disagreed with what Smith had suggested and attempted to push back on her remarks.
‘I noted that many people believe some policies should be based on sex, not gender, but they are scared to say so. I wanted to ask her how we can have the difficult conversations we need to have so we can move forward on these issues,’ he explained.
But the loyal government worker didn’t get the chance to explain and was instead lectured by Smith who equated his remarks as being racists and how he was ‘blowing a dog whistle to those seeking the genocide of trans people.’
After being humiliated, Osmond-Jones found himself to be in further trouble and was summoned to meet with the Deputy Ombudsperson, who explained to him that he needed to pledge to respect the human rights of people complaining to the office.
Despite insisting that he had not said anything hateful, or even offensive, Osmond-Jones was told nevertheless his comments had been ‘interpreted’ as hateful and that he would need to undergo training on how to communicate respectfully.
‘By now, it was clear that I was trapped in a workplace whose values I no longer respected, and, perhaps more importantly, were at variance with the spirit of objectivity that was supposed to inform our work,’ he wrote.
The final straw came after Osmond-Jones was accused of leaking slides from a presentation that had been posted on the office intranet.
It suggested ‘capitalism was a system of oppression that may be likened to a disease; and western cultures are based on ego and domination, while Indigenous cultures are based on unity and co-operation.’
There was a list of terms that were banned with suggested replacement words alongside their acceptable substitutes.
Among others the slide suggested the word ‘pristine’ should be replaced with ‘beautiful’, ‘tribal’ should be termed ‘community’ while ‘artifacts’ should be termed ‘belongings & heirlooms’
It also suggested white supremacy had several hallmarks including having manners, being on time, and neutrality.
After leaving his job the public sector, Osmond-Jones took on a job that was the polar opposite of what he’d been doing and began working for a tree-service company in which he’s shape hedges and prune trees using chainsaws.
The job was rewarding in a sense but offered little in the way of benefits or time off and so since January 2023, he has been running his own business, free from the trappings of government bureaucracy or any ascribed dogma.
‘Suffice it to say, I’m making good money while retaining my self-respect and leaving plenty of time and energy to take care of my family. I’m living life on my own terms, and enjoying it as well—in part because I’m now free to speak my mind in accordance with my conscience,’ Osmond-Jones writes, brimming with relief.