B.C. Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender speaks during a press conference in Vancouver on March 7, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

VANCOUVER — British Columbia's human rights commissioner says her office has been "re-energized" to push the provincial government to act upon dozens of recommendations to improve human rights made in her first five-year term.

Kasari Govender's office released a report Tuesday into the progress made by the government to act upon recommendations made between 2019 and 2024.

The "Where We Stand" report details the office's work since it was established in 2019.

The report notes how "the world — and the human rights of people in B.C. — was thrown into chaos" by the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit seven months later.

The commissioner's office has made 159 recommendations to public bodies in B.C. since 2019, in 18 letters to the government and three "major" reports.

It found the B.C. government had "fully implemented" 18 of its recommendations and partially implemented 74, while 67 had not been acted upon.

It said overall that there had been progress on 58 per cent of the commissioner's recommendations.

"Some of the partial implementation is really, really important," Govender said Tuesday.

Govender said the office's first report about demographic data collected by the province "saw really strong compliance with most of our recommendations," but the government opted to only collect race-based data rather than other information about age, disability and gender.

"We wanted it to be about discrimination more generally," she said.

The provincial government fully implemented only one of 37 recommendations in the commissioner's report into hate incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic, released in 2023.

That saw the Attorney General's Ministry implement a recommendation to reform Crown policy "to emphasize the strong public interest in prosecuting hate crimes," by pursuing "a broader range of prosecutions of hate-related incidents."

But the ministry didn't implement a call for a high-level position to prevent and respond to hate incidents, or commit to producing a "whole-of-government strategy and action plan on addressing hate."

Nor did the Ministry of Education act upon the commissioner's plea to "significantly expand" school curriculums to empower students in kindergarten through Grade 12 to "identify and combat hate and extremism."

The commissioner's 2021 report titled "Equity is safer: Human rights considerations for policing reform in British Columbia" made 29 recommendations, of which the government fully implemented one, partially implemented 15 and didn't act upon 13.

Among the policing report's unimplemented recommendations were empowering the privacy commissioner to investigate complaints about police data collection, and calls for an "unbiased policing standard" focused on traffic stops to eliminate bias.

The report also recommended an end to police school liaison programs, which was partially implemented.

The policing reform report also urged the immediate expansion of the civilian-led Independent Investigations Office's mandate to include sexual assault investigations. This was not implemented.

Govender said there was low implementation because "the momentum around police reform has really slowed," adding that the killing of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement had spurred "a lot of conversation about police violence and systemic racism in policing."

"Since then, there's far less political momentum around these issues," she said.

The human rights commissioner's report said there were "no statistically significant trends" around which recommendations were implemented and which were not.

The report said "simpler" requests involving single actions and "fewer duty holders" had better uptake, while noting that "unsurprisingly, recommendations on topics that align with ongoing government priorities seem to receive more attention."

The report said the commissioner made 33 recommendations to the government that were covered by non-disclosure agreements, seven of which were fully implemented.

Govender said producing the report was "re-energizing" for her office, and she said the office is continuing to make inquiries about policing, specifically use of force and whether the Vancouver Police Department employed a so-called media exclusion zone during a sweep of Hastings Street in 2023.

"It's given governments the clear sense that we are continuing to watch, that we are not letting these go, and it's also re-energized us to ensure that we are pushing hard for the continued implementation of recommendations that we've already made," Govender said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2025.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2025