Law360 Canada ( May 22, 2018, 8:55 AM EDT) -- Appeal by the Business Improvement Association from a decision setting aside a decision of a Human Rights Tribunal dismissing a discrimination complaint. The appellant had sponsored a Program to prevent people from loitering or sleeping in front of businesses and in a Vancouver park. The Program workers were trained to press people to move on from those places. Most of the people adversely affected by this effort were homeless people. The respondent Network of Drug Users, an organization aimed at assisting active and former drug users, brought a complaint before the Tribunal on behalf of the street homeless, alleging that impugned aspects of the Program violated s. 8(1) of the Human Rights Code. The Network argued that the over-representation of persons with mental and physical disabilities and of Aboriginal persons among the street homeless population meant that a program that negatively affects homeless persons discriminated on the basis of race and physical and mental disability. The Tribunal acknowledged that protected groups were disproportionately represented among the street homeless population but found that the evidence did not establish a “connection or link” between the adverse treatment complained of and membership in a group protected under the Code. The Tribunal found that many of the allegations made by the complainant were not established on the evidence. It did find that certain features of the Program improperly interfered with the rights of street homeless people to loiter or sleep in public areas and that these interferences amounted to discrimination regarding facilities customarily available to the public. It was not convinced, however, that the discrimination was connected to prohibited grounds under the statute. On judicial review, the application judge held that the Tribunal erred in looking for a “connection or link”. She considered that the Tribunal ought to have adopted a more contextual and nuanced approach in which discrimination could be proven simply by showing that the group adversely affected by the Program included members of protected groups in numbers that were disproportional to their percentage of the general population. She found that the Tribunal erred by requiring the complainant to provide something beyond the statistical evidence that it adduced. She held that, if the proper test had been applied, the Tribunal would have found that prima facie discrimination had been established....