Discrimination in employment has traditionally been understood through the lens of single protected grounds. An employer might be found to have discriminated against an employee because of their race, or because of their sex, or because of their disability. Human rights frameworks across Canada enumerate these grounds in legislation, and tribunals and courts have developed substantial jurisprudence around how discrimination on each ground operates. Yet this single-ground approach, while foundational, fails to capture the full complexity of how discrimination actually manifests in Canadian workplaces. Many individuals do not experience disadvantage because of one isolated characteristic but rather because of the unique way multiple aspects of their identity combine and interact. This reality has given rise to the concept of intersectional discrimination, a framework that recognizes how overlapping grounds of discrimination can create distinct forms of disadvantage that cannot be understood by examining each ground in isolation.
The theoretical foundation for intersectionality emerged from critical legal scholarship that observed how traditional anti-discrimination frameworks often failed women of colour, Indigenous peoples, disabled racialized individuals, and others whose experiences of discrimination could not be neatly categorized under a single heading. A Black woman facing discrimination in hiring, for example, might find that her experience differs both from that of white women and from that of Black men. Her disadvantage is not simply the sum of race discrimination plus sex discrimination but rather something qualitatively different that arises from the particular intersection of being both Black and female in a workplace context. Canadian human rights law has increasingly recognized this insight, moving beyond the additive model that would treat multiple grounds as separate claims to be stacked together and toward an intersectional model that treats the combination itself as the proper unit of analysis.