Silly Little Country

The Right to be Fat

Is this a great country or what?

A five-year-long feud over a parking spot has ended with a human-rights victory and $10,000 settlement for a morbidly obese Quebec woman.
Marise Myrand won a favourable ruling from the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, which said her condo association discriminated against her by denying her a parking spot closer to her building entrance. She not only won the preferred spot, but all 35 of her neighbours will have to contribute to her $10,000 award.

Personally I think this is insane but public choice theory will help explain it all.

"When you live in condo co-ownership, you live in a micro-society. You have obligations," said Pierre-Yves Bourdeau, a lawyer with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, who represented Ms. Myrand. "You're obliged to help people with physical disabilities."
The lawyer representing the condo association, Gaétan Mathieu, said he may appeal the ruling. He said that Ms. Nolet, is in her 60s and has a dislocated shoulder, so the tribunal was setting up a hierarchy of handicaps by favouring Ms. Myrand.

One outcome is that there will need to be a lot of future work by the Quebec Human Rights Industry to start ranking those handicaps in a hierarchy. And my guess is that this will be done by very expensive time-consuming analyses trading one handicap against another, and maybe, even better, occasionally inconsistent rulings so we can also have many rounds of appeals and piss away a ton of money on these idiotic debates.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:00 PM