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“I laughed I guess because of how ridiculous it was,” Hagi-Yusuf told the National Post. “I knew job discrimination was a thing… I knew that it would be a thing, but I just didn’t expect to happen automatically. Then I just laughed and told myself I probably should have.”

“For a lot of black people, we know that job discrimination happens, but no one is foolish enough to write it in an email,” he said. “It made me angry.. I was dehumanized.”

In part, the email read, “Somalia has a culture of resistance to authority. Such a culture would be quite different than the Canadian culture.”

“He essentially called me part of an unemployable demographic,” said Hagi-Yusuf, who was born in Canada to refugees from the Somali civil war.

Hagi-Yusuf studied science at Waterloo and he has recently been volunteering in a lab at its school of pharmacy. This fall, he will begin a master’s degree in molecular biology at Concordia University in Montreal. He took almost a full year to file the complaint because he and his parents worried it might further affect his future job prospects, but in the end he decided it was too important to let go.

First and foremost he wants an apology and for the company at the heart of the matter — Integral Wealth Securities Limited, which has multiple locations — to adjust its hiring practices. He’s also seeking monetary compensation, he says, not because he needs it but because he wants to send a message to the company.

He shared the note from J Sandy Matheson, an investment advisor with Integral Wealth Securities Limited, with the Post. It reads in full: