Delwin Vriend

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Delwin Vriend is a Canadian educator, who was involved in a landmark legal case on lesbian and gay rights in Canada.

Vriend, a chemistry lab instructor at King's University College in Edmonton, Alberta, was fired in 1991 because his sexual orientation was deemed incompatible with the religious beliefs of the Christian Reformed Church, who owned and operated the school.

He attempted to file a discrimination complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, but was refused on the grounds that sexual orientation was not protected under the province's human rights code. Vriend subsequently sued the Human Rights Commission.

In 1992, an Alberta court ruled that sexual orientation must be treated as a protected class under human rights legislation. The provincial government subsequently appealed, and in 1994, the decision was overruled by the Alberta Court of Appeal. This decision was then appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Vriend v. Alberta, who finally ruled in 1998 that provincial governments could not exclude LGBT individuals from human rights legislation.

Despite popular misunderstanding, the Vriend case was not against King's College, and Vriend never subsequently pursued a human rights complaint against the institution. The case strictly involved whether LGBTs should have the right to have discrimination claims investigated by provincial human rights commissions, and did not set any legal precedent for the resolution of such claims. Canadian human rights legislation does exempt religious institutions, and the Supreme Court ruling did not change that. However, some religious groups have lobbied the provincial and federal governments to invoke Canada's notwithstanding clause to overrule the decision.