Wayne Stevens says a trip to Yarmouth, N.S., earlier this month didn’t turn out the way he thought it would.
He says that an interaction with a local hotel left him feeling uncomfortable and thinks that a policy the hotel used to deny him a room was the result of his race.
Stevens, who is Black, is no stranger to discrimination in Nova Scotia or Yarmouth. He’s from the area and still lives there.
On the weekend of Jan. 10, he picked his girlfriend up from the Halifax area and travelled back down to Yarmouth to have a weekend together.
They chose to stay at the Best Western Mermaid Yarmouth and Stevens went to the front desk to book a room.
The clerk said there were plenty of rooms available as the winter season is a typically slow time for tourists on the south shore of the province.
“Everything started to go, and then he asked me for my address. I gave it to him,” Stevens said in a phone interview.
“He said, ‘Well, we can’t. We don’t rent to (anybody) from Yarmouth.'”
When asked why, Stevens says the clerk at the front desk told him that it was the manager’s policy, and that it came about after the hotel had too many problems with people from the Yarmouth area.
Steven said the front desk clerk told him that the Mounties had said not to rent to residents of the Yarmouth area as the result of police being called to the hotel.
However, the RCMP denied that they gave a business those instructions.
“It is not the role of the RCMP to direct or advise a business not to take or serve customers,” said Corp. Mark Skinner, a spokesperson for the RCMP.
Before Stevens left, he asked whether he could’ve sent his girlfriend, who is from Halifax, to book the room.
“He said, … ‘If you had sent her in first, we wouldn’t have had no problem with it,’ but he said, ‘Now that I know that you (have) been in here and you gave me your address, your primary residence, I can’t do it.'”
Stevens said he wound up booking a room at another hotel but later called the Best Western to try and get more information from the manager about the policy.
He says he was told that it had been in place for years.
But it’s something Stevens has a hard time believing as he was able to successfully rent a room at the hotel months earlier.
“I just found it kind of strange, you know, very strange,” he said.
He says that a written copy of the policy wasn’t provided to him and that he doesn’t understand how a hotel could operate if it didn’t rent to people from the surrounding area, especially during the downturn as a result of COVID-19.
Global News was unable to reach Shaun DeRos, the manager of the hotel by phone. However, DeRos provided a statement in response to an email.
“The Best Western Mermaid Yarmouth has a long tradition of being a well-respected member of the community. The hotel treats all guests with dignity and respect,” DeRos wrote.
“The hotel has a reasonable policy regarding not renting to guests who have in the past put at risk the health, welfare and safety of its guests and staff. The policy is applied fairly, rationally and in a nondiscriminatory manner.”
The statement did not address questions about the content of the policy and whether a copy could be provided to Global News.
After this story was published, DeRos sent a follow-up email saying he declined to provide a copy of the policy.
A request for comment with the Best Western corporate office was not returned.
Stevens says he doesn’t want any financial compensation but wants to ensure that the policy isn’t used to discriminate against anyone.
If the policy is just for Black people, the hotel has got to change the policy, he says. “You know, you can’t leave that policy like that,” he said.
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