"Calling someone a monkey is always pejorative and derogatory," Judge Magali Lewis ruled last week.

A Montreal businessman has been ordered to pay $10,000 to a Nigerian tenant after the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ruled he repeatedly called him a “monkey.”

George Kyres had argued before the Tribunal he didn’t use the term in a discriminatory way but rather as a way of calling someone incompetent.

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The Tribunal rejected his argument.

“Calling someone a monkey is always pejorative and derogatory,” Judge Magali Lewis ruled last week, “and for historical reasons, it is even more so when the term is used to designate a person with black skin.”

The case stems from a dispute between Kyres and the tenant, Kutuojo Guzoraky.

In 2014, Guzoraky, 38, started operating a Thai Express restaurant on the first floor of a St-Denis St. building Kyres’s company owns.

According to the ruling, the situation deteriorated when Guzoraky started being late on his rent. The relationship grew contentious, with both parties sending each other legal notices: Kyres wanted to have his rent paid, and Guzoraky wanted Kyres ordered to stop coming by the restaurant, where he argued he frequently insulted him and his employees.

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In the summer of 2016, Guzoraky recorded Kyres during one of his visits. In the recording, Kyres can be heard swearing and uttering the word “monkey.” Guzoraky brought his complaint to the Quebec Human Rights Commission that fall.

Guzoraky, his father, brother and a friend all later testified they heard Kyres often using the word “monkey” when referring to Guzoraky or other black employees.

“Where is this black monkey, where is this fool,” one witness said they heard Kyres say.

Arguing before the Tribunal, Kyres denied having used the word “monkey” to speak of or to Guzoraky. He said he isn’t racist and that, as the owner of the building, he had the right to visit the restaurant.

He claimed when he said the word “monkey” in the recording, it was in reference to someone Guzoraky had hired to fix the air conditioning system but didn’t know how to.

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He said he meant it in the same sense as the word “clown” and was only used in the heat of the moment after getting carried away.

But Lewis ruled Guzoraky’s version of events were corroborated and “more credible and reliable” than Kyres’s account.

“An analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that Mr. Kyres used the words “monkey”, “black monkey” and “imbecile” to designate Mr. Guzoraky and the black workers with whom he did business in connection with the operation of his restaurant,” the decision says.

Guzoraky had argued the situation forced him to close down his restaurant. To make up for it, he sought to be awarded $300,000.

The Tribunal decided the amount was excessive, but awarded Guzoraky $5,000 in moral damages to compensate for the humiliation he was subjected to and another $5,000 in punitive damages.

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Reached for comment on Wednesday, Guzoraky said he was disappointed with the financial outcome, but was glad the Tribunal found Kyres at fault.

“To be degraded, to be put down and insulted in front of your employees and clients,” he said. “It took a lot out of me. It made me feel like I was nothing.”

Kyres did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, nor did the lawyer who represented him before the Tribunal. Reached by telephone, Kyres’s son told the Montreal Gazette he doubted his father wanted to comment on the decision.

One of Kyres’s lawyer, Marie-Helene Desaunettes, then sent the Montreal Gazette a letter.

“Take note that, in the present court case, the Court accepted one version and not the other,” the letter said.

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In her decision, Lewis ruled that any reasonable person would understand Kyres’s remarks were discriminatory and that it didn’t matter whether or not the person saying them is racist.

“The effect of racist insults on the people they target,” the decision says, “is never well understood by those who have not experienced it first-hand: the person is stripped of their dignity and flouted of their self-esteem, sometimes irreparably.”

The decision says Kyres refused to accept he should stop using the word “monkey” when addressing racialized people and didn’t apologize for using pejorative or vulgar terms when he gets carried away, saying it’s part of who he is.