By Michelle Gamage | The Tyee
A former Northern Health employee says she was removed from her position for being critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, which has now killed at least 41,000 Palestinians. At least 1,139 Israelis have died since the conflict began with a Hamas-led attack and hostage-taking exercise in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Wednesday Amy Blanding, former director of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility office at Northern Health, filed a lawsuit against Northern Health for being constructively terminated, defamation and breach of Charter Rights.
Constructively terminated, or constructive dismissal, is when an employer does not directly fire an employee but fails to comply with or changes a contract in a way that forces an employee to quit, according to the federal government.
“Northern Health had led Ms. Blanding to believe that, based on her excellent work, she would be appointed an executive director position in the IDEA field. It then suddenly dismissed her for articulating the very views expected of an IDEA professional: defence of human rights and support for peace,” the lawsuit reads in part.
Blanding was joined at the courts by her former supervisor, Vash Ebbadi-Cook, former executive director for workforce sustainability, quality and innovation at Northern Health, who quit in protest after Blanding’s termination. Ebbadi-Cook was there for support only; they are not participating in the lawsuit.
Blanding and Ebbadi-Cook say Blanding was removed after a group in Prince George complained that Blanding’s personal pro-Palestinian stance impacted Jewish people’s and other minority groups’ ability to access the IDEA office.
Blanding and Ebbadi-Cook allege that Northern Health removed Blanding without validating the claims made against her.
Blanding is asking for financial compensation for severance and damages and for an apology letter Northern Health sent to the complainants after she was removed from the position to be retracted.
The Tyee was shown this letter, which apologizes to the complainants and members of the Jewish community who were made to feel unsafe, and says the complaints against Blanding were “investigated” and that it “made changes” to who ran the IDEA office so that it “does not expect that the same or similar issues will arise.”
The Tyee sent a list of Blanding and Ebbadi-Cook’s allegations to Northern Health to give the Health Authority an opportunity to respond, but Northern Health declined to comment, noting that “matters related to past and present employees of Northern Health are private and confidential, therefore we cannot comment on the circumstances.”
Blanding and Ebbadi-Cook’s allegations have not yet been tested in court.
Blanding told The Tyee she was promoted to the role as director for the IDEA office in August 2023 because of her 20-year-history of professional and personal social justice advocacy and her success in previous roles at the health authority. She was hired in June 2018 as the health authority’s regional manager of organizational education and training, and moved to strategic lead for workforce sustainability in October 2022.
“I work in anti-oppression and anti-racism,” Blanding said. “I’m queer and disabled and often use that lived experience to speak to injustice around equity-denied groups.”
Blanding has also been working as a musician in Prince George for more than a decade and produces music “with a political bent that speaks to social justice work.”
Ebbadi-Cook says Blanding was a great candidate for director of the IDEA office because of her passion for social justice and long history of advocacy work speaking up for marginalized groups.
This advocacy work came under fire after a concert in April.
In December 2023 Blanding says she was contacted by the director of a local choir, the Prince George Cantata singers, who had been inspired by her “smash the patriarchy song” “Rise and Agitate” and wanted to put together a concert with Blanding. But a week before the April concert, Blanding says a couple choir board members asked her to remove songs from her setlist and to let them review her music before the show.
Blanding told The Tyee she declined and played the contested song, “Sunbirds,” anyway. Though Blanding acknowledges the song is about the war in Gaza, she says the song lyrics are about the violence inflicted against children during conflict and they do not specifically mention Palestine, Gaza, Israel or Jewish people.
“I do not think any of my music could be interpreted as antisemitic or against Jewish people,” she said.
But a clip of the concert Blanding posted to Instagram the next day was clearer about the song’s meaning and Blanding’s reasons for performing it. The caption accompanying the post explained how the board had said the song was “too divisive” and “highly contentious.” In response, Blanding wrote, “divisive is complacency as Israel murders 33,300 civilians, over 14,000 of them children,” and said Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. “Contentious is my government complicit in the crush of humanity we are witnessing every hour of every day,” she wrote.
“I have a responsibility as an artist to use my voice to amplify others and to shine a fierce light on injustice. I will not be censored. We are none of us free until all of us are free,” Blanding concluded. She tagged the post with the hashtags “ceasefirenow,” “freepalestine” and “landback.”
Backlash
On April 24, Northern Health received a letter complaining about Blanding’s concert and calling her social media post “outrageous.”
Ebbadi-Cook says when he was shown the letter he noticed it was signed by five to seven individuals, not organizations.
The copy of the complaint letter Blanding was given, which she shared with The Tyee, has the signatories redacted.
In the letter the complainants takes issue with Blanding wearing a watermelon shirt by Wear the Peace during a concert rehearsal. The letter contests Blanding’s claim of 33,000 civilian deaths, her assertion that starvation was being used as a weapon and her referring to the conflict as genocide. (Data and analysis from UN experts align more closely with Blanding’s assertions than the letter’s counterstatements.)
The watermelon symbol “is associated with the Jihadist movement to eradicate the country. This is a blatant, visual call for the genocide against the citizens of the only Jewish nation in the world,” the letter continued.
According to reporting by NPR, the watermelon symbol has been used to represent Palestinian resistance to occupation since the 1980s and is currently most commonly understood as a call to ceasefire. Blanding says she bought the T-shirt in a fundraiser for humanitarian aid for Gaza in support of Palestinian human rights.
The letter says Blanding’s actions amount to “hateful, ignorant rants.” It accuses her of being a bigot.
“If Ms. Blanding’s behaviour persists, we will not hesitate to take further action,” the letter signs off.
The health authority acts
Blanding says her opinions have been formed by reading the news and her intention was to be critical of the Israeli government, not Jewish people.
Blanding also says she did not break any Northern Health social media rules. She showed The Tyee the health authority’s policy, which says employees should be clear they are not speaking for Northern Health online, and should in general be respectful, avoid bullying and not spend time on social media while at work.
In early May Ebbadi-Cook, who uses both he and they pronouns, was shown a copy of the letter of complaint about Blanding.
Ebbadi-Cook said he was told by a senior HR representative at Northern Health that it would be “unacceptable” for Blanding to remain in her position.
Ebbadi-Cook said they felt some of the claims in the letter were inaccurate.
They told The Tyee there were two things about Northern Health’s response to the complaint that surprised them.
First, they said that following the health authority’s policies, in their experience, investigations into complaints about employees have generally taken about seven months.
“It was quite surprising that in a week’s time without talking with me or Amy and without speaking with the complainants, [Northern Health] had already made the decision to remove Amy,” he said. “They assumed impact to the Jewish community regardless of the accuracy of the complaint or what was said by Amy.”
Second, Ebbadi-Cook says they were told that due diligence wasn’t done to check if the complaint was made in good faith.
In a meeting, Ebbadi-Cook says a senior HR representative from Northern Health told him the director of Vancouver Coastal Health’s EDI office had also been fired after someone similarly complained about that director’s pro-Palestinian advocacy.
That director was Hayf Abichahine, a queer Lebanese-Palestinian trans man who was hired as the director of VCH’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion office in February 2024 and similarly let go after several complaints alleging antisemitism were made about him.
That information raised concerns that this was a “systematic approach by bad-faith actors,” Ebbadi-Cook said.
The Tyee spoke with Abichahine. He says a week after he was hired VCH received six formal letters, some signed by multiple people, alleging his social media posts falsely accused Israel of genocide and that his posts were derogatory, discriminatory, racist and promoted violence and hatred of Jewish people.
“I’m Palestinian-Lebanese and I have a deep empathy for the Jewish community and know there has been a rise in antisemitism,” Abichahine said. “I have a deep commitment in my personal life to support that community and really combat antisemitism.”
He said the accusations felt “so counter to what I have built my entire life’s work around, which is building spaces of safety and inclusion… it left me feeling shocked and bewildered.”
Abichahine said he believed the complaints against his social media posts conflated advocacy for Palestinian human rights and criticism of the Israeli military’s actions with antisemitism.
All the same, he said he wanted to ensure his Jewish colleagues felt safe and supported at work, so he says he agreed to delete his contested social media posts. Because he deleted the contested social media posts The Tyee has not been able to review them.
He says his direct superior at VCH told him they agreed he had not done anything wrong and worked with him to draft a letter apologizing for the impact of his posts.
Abichahine says at the same time he was advocating for the EDI office to take a stance against antisemitism and for the Health Authority’s leadership to say they stood in solidarity with their Jewish employees.
But before the letter was sent Abichahine says he was fired without cause, just under a month after he was hired.
Abichahine says since then he has reached a settlement with VCH that allows him to speak about what happened to him but not discuss the terms of the settlement.
The Tyee similarly contacted Vancouver Coastal Health and asked it to respond to these accusations. The health authority did not respond to The Tyee’s request by press time.
He says he is speaking out now because he wants people to know what happened to Blanding was not an isolated incident.
Blanding let go; Ebbadi-Cook resigns
In early May Blanding says she was shown the letter of complaint for the first time.
The lawsuit alleges, “Northern Health executives stated that the context and accuracy of the letter were irrelevant to their decision. Northern Health’s priority was risk management, not doing the right thing. Northern Health did not follow its own guidelines concerning complaints from the public.”
In that meeting Blanding says she was asked directly if she was antisemitic. She said she immediately denied that she was either antisemitic or pro-Hamas.
Blanding told The Tyee the accusations felt “ludicrous.”
“I wasn’t even given an opportunity to talk about whether or not the accusations were true, even though the majority were not true and incredibly discriminatory, offensive and dangerous,” she said.
Instead she says she was asked how she was going to “rehabilitate” the IDEA office given how she had made community members feel unsafe.
After that Ebbadi-Cook says he was told he had to remove Blanding. He refused. He argued a restorative justice approach would be better. Ebbadi-Cook says Northern Health was initially willing to take that approach.
Blanding said she then asked for a meeting with Northern Health to talk about her safety because of the complainants’ assertion that they would “not hesitate to take further action,” if she “persisted.”
When she walked into what she thought was the meeting about her safety, Blanding says she was instead given a pre-written apology addressed to the entire Jewish community and told she had to post it to her personal social media accounts.
The letter was, “essentially apologizing for the accusations that were lobbied against me, saying I was sorry and I intended to change and do better,” she said.
Blanding told The Tyee this felt like Northern Health was asking her to say she had done something wrong and to admit that wrongdoing on her personal social media accounts, which were not about her job at Northern Health but were about her family and music.
She asked Northern Health if she could think about it. She says she was told that this request was considered a refusal and that she was immediately removed from her position.
Ebbadi-Cook says they resigned a week later in protest.
“The strategy [of Northern Health] was there was a complaint therefore you did something wrong, rather than try to understand what happened and what the corrective response should be,” they said. Assuming the guilt of your employees is “deeply problematic,” and the institution should have been better prepared for Israel-Palestine-related complaints, he added.
Ebbadi-Cook didn’t provide details to coworkers at the time about why they had quit because they wanted Blanding to be able to tell her own story and pursue legal action, they said.
He says he has now submitted a public complaint and spoken with the Office of the Ombudsperson to submit a public interest disclosure about wrongdoing witnessed on the job.
Blanding said she is filing the lawsuit for personal justice but also because she sees the complaints against her as part of a troubling trend of people being censured for advocating for Palestinian human rights.
“I can use what happened to me as a catalyst for change,” she said. “I feel like I have an obligation to do that.”
