A taxpayer-funded office set up to help vulnerable Canadians has an anti-white bias and hired a non-binary lawyer who helped bully one of its employees, it is alleged.
Nick Osmond-Jones had worked for the British Columbia Ombudsman for eleven years but was fired after leaking slides from a progressive conference claiming Canada had inspired the Holocaust.
In an extensive article for QuilletteOsmond-Jones, a married father of four, details how he thought he saw the service changing before his very eyes. It was set up to help address the grievances of ordinary Canadians who felt mistreated by public services, but ended up falling into an Orwellian nightmare obsessed with “fairness,” Osmond-Jones says.
“When I started my career, a commitment to impartiality and nonpartisanship seemed universal. At work, personal politics were generally avoided. I could collaborate with people on long projects without ever knowing their personal ideological views,” Osmond-Jones begins.
Nick Osmond-Jones, an investigator with the British Columbia Ombudsman’s Office, described how he was fired from the taxpayer-funded helpline after confronting a non-binary lawyer who worked there.
Osmond-Jones had worked for the service for eleven years at the British Columbia Parliament Buildings in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
‘But as the years went on, things began to change. While the goal had been to treat British Columbians equally and impartially, a wave of policy changes and training sessions channeling questionable ramifications of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) began to promote the idea that people should be treated differently based on their identities.’
Osmond-Jones is not a right-winger. He started his career as a welder and enjoyed his work, but says he left because he feared it was making climate change worse.
She says she was working at Health Canada in Victoria when the department suddenly expanded access for patients with gender dysphoria.
She had assumed such treatments were reserved for adults and subject to the most rigorous safeguards before being approved, but quickly realized that, in fact, there were no restrictions.
Genital surgeries were being performed on adults with little or no screening, including “gender-affirming” mastectomies, along with the administration of puberty-blocking drugs to children despite little evidence that they were safe or effective.
“There was growing evidence that the civil service was no longer making decisions based on the available evidence, but was increasingly acting on the basis of ideological considerations or for fear of running afoul of ideological puritans,” Osmond-Jones said.
But it was when he began his work as Ombudsman that things took a turn.
Adrienne Smith, who is a woman and identifies as non-binary, explained that in her opinion, “sex is not binary and affirming it is a form of colonial thinking.”
Osmond-Jones had hoped the job would allow her to examine Canadians’ grievances without any ideological bias, but that turned out not to be the case.
Complaints moved to the top of the pile if they came from a member of a “fairness-deserving group.”
It was explained that anyone who was not white or who had checked a box identifying them as one of the many sub-varieties of LGBT would automatically skip the line, regardless of the nature or urgency of their grievances.
“When one of my coworkers pointed out that this would increase wait times for other whistleblowers who might be raising equally (or even more) urgent issues, this concern was denounced as a form of ‘binary thinking,'” Osmond-Jones writes.
During a training session attended by more than 100 workers, a well-known Vancouver-area trans activist, Adrienne Smith, who is a woman and identifies as nonbinary, explained that in her view, “sex is not binary and affirming it is a colonial way of thinking.”
British Columbia Ombudsman Jay Chalke, pictured, fired Osmond-Jones, saying he was suspected of leaking information publicly to embarrass the organization.
Smith told listeners on the Zoom call that public servants should make decisions based on complainants’ self-declared gender identity, rather than sex.
Osmond-Jones disagreed with what Smith had suggested and attempted to refute his comments.
“I noticed that many people believe that some policies should be based on sex, not gender, but they are afraid to say so. I wanted to ask her how we can have the difficult conversations we need to make progress on these issues,” she explained.
But the loyal government worker was not given a chance to explain himself and instead received a lecture from Smith, who compared his comments to those of a racist and said he was “turning a blind eye to those seeking the genocide of trans people.”
After being humiliated, Osmond-Jones found himself in more trouble and was summoned to meet with the Deputy Ombudsman, who explained that he must commit to respecting the human rights of people who lodged complaints with the office.
Despite insisting she had not said anything hateful or even offensive, Osmond-Jones was told her comments had nonetheless been “interpreted” as hateful and she 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 odds with the spirit of objectivity that was supposed to inform our work,” he wrote.
Osmond-Jones was accused of leaking slides from a presentation that had been posted on the office intranet, suggesting that “capitalism was a system of oppression that could be compared to a disease.”
Another slide made outrageous claims, including how the Nazi Holocaust and South Africa’s apartheid system were inspired by the Canadian constitution.
Another slide showed a list of terms that were banned with suggested replacement words along with their acceptable substitutes.
One slide suggested that white supremacy had several distinguishing characteristics, including being well-mannered, punctual and neutral.
The final straw came when Osmond-Jones was accused of leaking slides from a presentation that had been posted on the office intranet.
He suggested that ‘capitalism was a system of oppression that could be compared to a disease; and Western cultures are based on ego and domination, while indigenous cultures are based on unity and cooperation.’
There was a list of banned terms with suggested replacement words along with their acceptable substitutes.
Among other things, the slide suggested that the word “pristine” should be replaced with “beautiful,” that “tribal” should be called “community,” while “artifacts” should be called “belongings and relics.”
He also suggested that white supremacists had several distinctive characteristics, including being well-mannered, punctual and neutral.
After leaving his job in the public sector, Osmond-Jones took a job that was completely opposite to what he had been doing and began working for a tree service company where he shaped hedges and pruned trees with chainsaws.
The work was rewarding in some ways, but offered few benefits or time off, so since January 2023 he has been running his own business, free from the shackles of government bureaucracy or any ascribed dogma.
“Suffice it to say I’m making good money, maintaining my self-esteem and leaving plenty of time and energy to look after my family. I’m living life my way and enjoying it too, partly because I’m now free to speak my mind according to my conscience,” writes a relieved Osmond-Jones.
