Nanaimo must pay $643K to former CFO fired due to discrimination, B.C. court rules

Former Nanaimo chief financial officer Victor Mema is shown in an undated file photo. (CTV News)

A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has upheld a ruling by the province’s human rights tribunal ordering the City of Nanaimo to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a former chief financial officer who was fired due to racial discrimination.

Victor Mema was terminated by the municipality in May 2018 after an audit found he had racked up $14,000 in personal debt on a city-issued credit card, including a $1,200 charge from a resort in Cancun, Mexico.

A senior accountant with the city found Mema’s conduct “constituted a failure by him as a fiduciary,” the city told the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 2023, saying his termination was based solely on that misconduct.

Mema, a Black man from Zimbabwe, told the tribunal the city’s corporate credit card policy regarding what constituted a personal versus a professional expense was vague and open to interpretation. He said the use of municipal credit cards to cover personal expenses was widespread among city staff.

He also alleged the accountant’s complaint against him was part of “a pretext to get rid of all Black Africans employed at the city.”

Tribunal chair Emily Ohler found that while the former CFO “certainly made poor decisions regarding his use of the (credit card), understandably raising concerns, the city’s decisions to suspend and terminate his employment were discriminatory.”

Following 19 days of hearings, more than a dozen witnesses and hundreds of pages of evidence, the tribunal delivered its decision on Aug. 3, 2023, ordering the city to pay $643,653 to Mema, including $583,413 in lost wages, $50,000 for injury to his dignity, and $10,150 for his expenses.

“I am satisfied on a balance of probabilities that – however subconsciously – pernicious stereotypes of a Black man as less honest or trustworthy factored into the misconduct report,” Ohler concluded.

• Read more: Nanaimo ordered to pay $640,000 to former CFO in discrimination case

The city launched a legal challenge of the ruling, asking the B.C. Supreme Court to quash the tribunal’s findings on the basis that the three-member panel focused only on seeking facts that supported a theory of discrimination, instead of facts that would support both discriminatory and non-discriminatory interpretations of the events and then comparing which interpretation was the more likely of the two.

The city maintained that Mema’s race had no bearing on the complaint that led to his eventual termination, saying its suspicions about the employee were informed by the “number and value” of his credit card transactions alone.

It also accused the tribunal of relying on hearsay evidence and opinion, and inferring that racial discrimination occurred in the absence of direct evidence.

But B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Thomas rejected the city’s petition to review the case and upheld the tribunal’s finding that the city discriminated against the former employee.

“In my view, the tribunal’s findings were solidly grounded in the facts and flowed rationally and logically from these findings,” Thomas wrote in the court’s decision this week. Namely, those facts and findings established a “distinct underlying thread of racial bias” in the city accountant’s misconduct complaint against Mema, he affirmed.

In dismissing the city’s petition, Thomas concluded the city’s position contradicted “well-established principles of human rights law,” namely that “discrimination rarely occurs through open and direct expression of bias, prejudice, or hatred against a group of people.”

Instead, Thomas wrote, tribunals “must often infer and tease out discriminatory conduct through circumstantial evidence and viewing the matter holistically through a broader understanding of discrimination and how they insidiously occur in our society.”

The judge upheld the tribunal’s decision and ordered the city to pay Mema’s costs for the court hearing.

Mema’s designation as a chartered professional accountant was cancelled last year after he was found “guilty of unprofessional conduct” by a disciplinary tribunal of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Alberta.

The Alberta association, which originally certified Mema as a CPA, fined him $30,000 for his use of corporate credit cards to pay for personal expenses while employed by the City of Nanaimo and previously at the District of Sechelt.