Where I think you have to be careful is in allowing discrimination where the characteristic is “directly related”. Remember in Law the court did NOT import the “irrelevant personal characteristic” test from Egan. The danger of stereotypes of stereotypes is not that they are necessarily false, but that differential treatment results from being a member of a group, rather than one’s personal identity. While certain stereotypes may be rooted in truth; i.e. certain ethnic groups statistically commit more crimes, or one gender may in the aggregate be weaker in certain criteria, society has recognized the fallacious reasoning in judging an individual upon those merits. It follows that if one is denied tenancy on basis of their association or inclusion of a group, and judged upon those group’s characteristics, they are unjustly being judges not on their personal merits. My apologies if the example failed to vividly illustrate the above point.

If on the other hand the individual in question personally, on their own merits, fails to be able to show means of affording the rent, I concur that the landlord may deny the tenant on his own inadequacies. The difficulty with poverty as illustrated in a previous post and in the court’s decision in Boulter is that that it is hard to identify as a discrete group. Nonetheless, there are certain common characteristics that unite the group. If we proceed on the assumption that a two parent family with one dependent earning less than $25,000 annually is “impoverished”, such a family may nonetheless still be able to pay for rent, albeit with some difficulty. To deny them the opportunity to rent simply because they are “impoverished” or drawing welfare payments would be discriminatory and unjust.

If tenancy was being denied because landlords think that “poor people won’t take care of the apartment” then your analogy would make sense, and your example would be a perfect fit with the rest of your post; the poor would be suffering discrimination because of stereotypical ideas about what I would be more than willing to entertain is an essentially immutable characteristic.

But tenancy is, in my estimation, denied because “poor people won’t be able to pay their rent”. The probably your example presents, then, is that the presumption being drawn is directly related to the characteristic. By definition, the impoverished don’t have a lot of money. It seems obvious to me that they will, in fact, be less likely to pay their rent on time.

Thus, it seems to me that the solution to the problem you raise that really makes sense is to guarantee an income, or guarantee housing to the poor. Doesn’t this just seem like an attempt to wring a positive right out of the Charter? If you want a positive right out of the Charter, then either a) explicitly argue for it or b) hit up the political, not legal, realm, and try to get an amendment.

Unless you have a better example, or perhaps an example of a group other than the impoverished who are discriminated against by stereotypes, but are not an immutable analogous ground, I’m unconvinced.