It is easy, after a quick read of the Sonja Denobrega affair, to treat TD Bank as the villain of the piece. A senior insurance VP at the bank, Denobrega was shown the door after she added “I am HIS” and a cross to her e-mail signature. But it's Ottawa, not the bank, that's the problem here.Bank policy gave employees the option of adding pronouns indicating their sexuality; with the bank’s blessing, some used it. Trying to indicate one’s faith did not go over so well, however. To put it rather bluntly, indicating a sexual preference was fine; saying you were a Christian was not. The contrast is ugly; one identity is licenced and another is not.A reasonable conclusion is that as a Christian, Ms. Denobrega doesn’t care for the priority that the bank places on catering to the self-esteem of sexual minorities. As a customer myself, I share her irritation. There is a time and a place for everything, and I go to the branch to do banking, not to be sensitized. .TD vice-president sues after firing over Christian email line.However, while not excluding the possibility that banks — it's not just the TD — have enthusiasts pushing this along, it’s the federal government that is responsible.Look at what the bank actually told the court. TD’s defence does not say it invented the pronoun line out of zeal for gender recognition, as though this were its corporate mission. It says the field is optional, that signatures are treated as company business cards, and that it cannot drop the pronoun option because doing so “would be a breach of its obligations under the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA).”Ah, there it is. .Whether enthusiasts inside the bank pushed the policy further than the statute required doesn't matter. Banks are federally regulated employers, which means that to a far greater degree than unregulated employers, they must be responsive to what Ottawa demands.In particular, they live under the CHRA as amended by Bill C-16, which in 2017 added “gender identity or expression” to the purpose clause and to the prohibited grounds of discrimination.The Act itself never mentions email signatures. Human rights commissions and tribunals have nevertheless treated persistent refusal to use a person’s chosen pronouns as a form of discrimination or harassment.A bank’s lawyers, reading those decisions, will advise that an optional, standardized field is cheaper than a complaint. That is a matter of interpretation. It may be a timid interpretation, but businesses are usually focused on the bottom line, not doctrinal purity.The roots of this dispute then are to be found in Ottawa. Parliament added “gender identity or expression” to the federal statute and then left the commissions and tribunals to fill in the practical meaning. Federally regulated businesses — banks, airlines, and telecoms — must then guess how far “accommodation” runs.Some managers, anxious not to be the test case, treat one set of identifiers as almost mandatory while treating every other personal statement as branding contamination. That is overreading. But it is also predictable once the statute is written that way.There is a difference between accommodating someone’s private life and making a contested theory of sex the only personal fact the company will display. If the signature block is going to carry identifiers at all, consistency would require that a cross, a regiment, a university, or a plain “he/him” stand on the same footing.Better still, however: how about none of them?.Name, title, telephone, and disclaimer. The customer is there to move money, not to join a seminar.People on the other side will say that an optional pronoun line is a small courtesy that costs nothing and reduces the chance a colleague is misgendered; that the bank must still police religious slogans because they can be read as a rebuke; and that the CHRA already protects creed, so the two cases are not the same.Those arguments have force inside the present legal frame. But they do not answer the prior question: whether Parliament and the commissions should have turned a workplace courtesy into a compliance item that banks feel they cannot touch.TD can be faulted for the rigidity of its template and for the speed with which it fired a senior person.It should not, however, be treated as the author of what the bank interprets as an obligation. That wording was written in Ottawa, by people who have decided that Canadians need to have their opinion altered. They behave as though they do not think they are there merely to administer good government, but to make us all better people, according to their definition of 'better.'A quick review of federal appointments and hiring policies will give you a clue as to who the better people they want to promote are, and who they are not.I wish Ms. Denobrega luck in her suit against the bank. (Although I wouldn't give her good odds of landing a job in the federal civil service.)But here's the bottom line: Until the statute and the guidance that grew around it are narrowed, federally regulated firms will keep producing the same lopsided signatures — and the same lawsuits — and the public will keep blaming them.They shouldn't. It's the social engineers in Ottawa who are the problem. That's a job for politicians — and for constitutional lawyers. They should go to it.
