My exclusive club

As a young reporter, I once walked up to the door of the Hell's Angels' Halifax clubhouse. The front yard was a paved square, framed by a tall fence. And a touch pad ensured that the reinforced steel door could only be opened by those with the proper entrance code.

I wanted to ask about the sign that had recently disappeared from the front of the building (we're talking September 1987). It featured, in silhouette, an afro, nose and giant lips, with a big line thought it: No blacks here.

There was talk of perhaps rehanging the portrait: "Maybe yes, maybe no. We haven't really had time [to get another sign]," said the very stoned guy whose T-shirt featured a skeleton on a motorbike. "But you can buy them anywhere."

The sign, it turned out, was perfectly legal. Nova Scotia's Human Rights Act provided protection in areas such as housing and employment. But the Hell's were simply identifying who could be a member and who could not. "If you put a swastika outside your house, there's nothing we can do," said the commission's chief human rights officer: The anti-discrimination law didn't regulate private clubs.

Another commission official told me: "You can discriminate privately. The prohibition deals with institutions, with the state. It doesn't deal with personal prejudice." And hate literature rules were also useless: a single sign identifying membership requirements wasn't enough to qualify as the intentional promotion of hatred towards an identifiable group.

Fast forward to the present. "So I saw an ad that's going to be printed in our next issue, in proof stage, that took me aback. After a general description of the sorts of services offered by the advertiser, the last line reads, 'White customers preferred.' Actually, it's spelled more idiosyncratically in the ad, but that's the gist," blogs an Eye magazine staffer. Eye is a Toronto alt weekly (though owned by the mega Torstar corp).

"I wondered about the simple legality of us printing something like this. So I called our handy dandy lawyers and to my surprise, and possibly to yours, it's perfectly legal to discriminate on whatever grounds you like when the transaction in question is of a highly personal nature.

"If, say, you're looking for a tenant to share your 2-bedroom apartment, apparently you can just up and say 'No Jews.' Or if you’re hiring a nurse to help you while you're housebound, your ad can say 'No fags.' Apparently, it's in the same category as personal ads that say things like 'No fats, no femmes.' Funny, huh?"

So a big landlord can't refuse a homo seeking an apartment because of their sexual orientation. But if I want to rent a room in my house to a student, then yeah, I can refuse a black or a Jew or a homosexual. That person's going to be using my toaster and stepping into my bath tub, and I'm allowed to decide who I want to share such personal space with.