The timing was awkward.Ontario firefighter Adam Knauff had launched a human rights complaint against his employer, alleging he was not provided with adequate vegan food while fighting a forest fire in B.C. two years ago, and — worse, in his view — that he was sent home and suspended without pay after speaking up.On the very morning Knauff and his legal team went public with his allegations, he was tapped to fly across the country with his crew to fight a fire in Alberta — his first out-of-province deployment since the 2017 experience that he says left him humiliated.Knauff travelled to Alberta in May as his story made international headlines, wondering how colleagues might react. But aside from a few curious looks on the journey in, Knauff says, there was no fuss. No one in Alberta asked about the lawsuit and he didn’t bring it up. Despite what people may think, he says he’s not looking for attention.“I just went there to fight fire with my crew. I didn’t go there to stand on a soap box or put anybody to a test or anything,” Knauff says, speaking on the phone from his home in Kenora, Ont., in his first interview about the case.In his complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, Knauff alleges that his employer, the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, discriminated against him by failing to provide food that accommodated his “personal commitment to ethical veganism” while he risked his life fighting the massive 2017 wildfire in B.C. In one meal, his only source of protein was a single black bean, he says in the complaint. The lone bean was sitting atop a bell pepper stuffed with rice, like a garnish, Knauff recalls by phone. If the cooks were able to get one bean, he wondered, where were the rest?Though Knauff, 40, calls himself a “very private person” — the kind of guy who prefers to be in the middle of the forest, not in the middle of controversy — ...
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