Summary of the Case:
Pandori, a Khalsa Sikh and teacher with the Peel Board of Education is now not permitted to wear his religiously significant kirpan due to a new no-weapons policy in his school district. The Peel Board made this policy in a response to the uncomfortably increasing number of knife incidents and violence in its schools. Pandori took this case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission which set up an inquiry under the Human Rights Code to investigate. The Board in Inquiry ruled that the school boards policy discriminated against Khalsa Sikhs and allowed Pandori to continue to wear his kirpan if the kirpan could not be easily removed from it sheath. They also found that there were little no incidents of a kirpan being used as a weapon let alone in any Peel school and that other Toronto-area schools allowed students and faculty to …show more content…
The school board appealed this order and the Board of Inquiry found that the school boards policy went against Ontario’s Human Rights Code which states that outlawing the carrying of weapons in school is not in itself a prohibited ground of discrimination and the ban restricts the Khalsa Sikhs in their free expression of their religion. Is this infringement reasonable and necessary given the circumstances? Pandori and the Human Rights Commission argued that there are close to no incidents of a kirpan being used as a weapon in Toronto and that none of these happened at school and that more importantly that no kirpan has ever been used as a weapon in any Peel school. They found that two other Toronto-area schools allowed their students to wear kirpans to school and there is no concrete evidence that kirpans caused any violence in other schools. They ruled that the Peel school boards policy amounted to religious