Time Immortal

This is something I missed when I noted, yesterday, that Rob Wells is evidently moving to appeal the rejection of his complaint against magazine by the CHRC.

It would appear that Catholic Insight has been placed on the Heritage Canada ‘watch list’ — that is, the magazine has been flagged as potentially having “questionable content”, and must submit each issue to a Heritage Canada panel for approval and “screening” prior to publishing.

Now, I’m on record elsewhere saying that I don’t much like it when people align themselves with Caesar and then complain that he’s acting too Roman for their tastes. And since Catholic Insight does accept Heritage Canada money, they have unfortunately opened themselves to this state of affairs — one never gets to lead when one takes Caesar as a dance partner.

That’s not to say that I think Heritage Canada is justified in supporting a course of action that amounts to little more than Censorship, of course. The government is not in the right here, and I completely agree with BCF’s observation that the whole situation reeks of a kind of “cultural Marxism.” There would appear to be an implied threat that Catholic Insight could find its funding cut off if it publishes something that the censors object to.

Ultimately, it’s the fact that we even have censors working to limit the expression of opinion in this country that is the really terrible thing, and the thing which most needs to change. It would be nice if Catholic Insight could find an alternative source of funding, as well, so that it wouldn’t be so beholden to the whims of others, but…well…who ever said the world was perfect?

Update: Welcome, 5FoF and BCF readers, and Steynians!

It would appear that homosexual activist and anti-Catholic bigot Rob Wells is filing a motion for judicial review of the CHRC’s dismissal of his complaint against Catholic Insight magazine.

I don’t know how far he’ll get with this; if the CHRC decides your complaint doesn’t have merit, you probably don’t have much of a chance in court. But some people are persistent…

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Mark Steyn:

We now have the counter-argument* from the Canadian Human Rights Commission. There is no appeal to precedent or legal principle. There is no legal argument at all. Instead, there is an emotional whine that “a great deal of anger has been expressed on various websites” against the CHRC’s employees. A “great deal of anger”? This is the usual “human rights” arithmetic, as Orwellian in its way as Orwell’s 1984 line about 2+2=5. At the CHRC, 1+0=”a great deal”. The only evidence of “a great deal of anger” is one poster at one website. So the CHRC’s proposition that there is “a great deal of anger” out there is true in the same sense that there are a great deal of neo-Nazis out there, and a great deal of human rights victims bringing legitimate Section 13 complaints, as opposed to just one — Richard Warman — using this provision of the law as his personal payback machine.

So, on the one hand, we have legal arguments consistent with Canadian law. On the other, we have an emotive whine unsupported by any evidence. In a sense, this is the logical reductio of Section 13: now it’s not just the “human rights victims” but the Commission itself complaining that all that matters is that their feelings have been hurt. Reading this “legal response”, you’d think the CHRC had seceded entirely from the Canadian justice system. Which they have, more or less. That’s why they’re so determined to resist attempts to get them to conform to the norms of Canadian law. If the CHRC gets away with this, they will have established an important benchmark in confirming that the Star Chamber is now a law unto itself, in which the principles and precedents of Canada’s legal inheritance are entirely irrelevant.

On the other hand, notice the offers to compromise in the final paragraphs. Those would not have been made had Maclean’s not filed its motion, and other parties, from to The National Post, from Free Dominion and other bloggers to (as I still quaintly think of us) free-born Canadian citizens, not weighed in on the issue. That’s why it’s important to keep the pressure up.

March 25th, everyone. After the Easter Triduum, it’s the most important day of the month.

Update: the March 25th hearing will now be open to the public. Athanasios D. Hadjis has withdrawn the prior ruling that the hearings would be closed, noting that “it appears that a few weeks before the January 15, 2008, Federal Court hearing into these objections, the Commission disclosed to Mr. Lemire the information that was the subject of the s. 37 application. The Court therefore determined that since the information had been disclosed, it could no longer “properly” consider the s. 37 application, which the disclosure had effectively rendered moot. In effect, the Commission disclosed the very information that it had previously claimed could not be disclosed pursuant to s. 37. I note that the Commission also withdrew, before the Federal Court, its s. 37 objection to the issuance of a subpoena of Bell Canada (see the Federal Court’s ruling, January 15, 2008, Docket no. T-860-07).

The outcome of the s. 37 matter gives me pause to question the soundness of the Commission’s invocation of public security concerns with respect to the testimony of these witnesses.”

In essence, the information that the CHRC wanted to keep secret had been previously revealed by the CHRC. Oops.

Score one for the good guys. This ruling is so important: it means that there will be transparency in an HRC tribunal, and confirms that the commissions are subject to public scrutiny, not the other way around.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

All of this is a lengthy preamble to something I’ve been thinking about these past weeks: a legal defence fund for people who are vulnerable to being blown over by Kinsellan huffing and puffing. The National Post and Maclean’s don’t need help, but most bloggers do. My observation is that bloggers make defamation law errors very frequently — not that they engage in real defamation often, but that they overreact to the first whiff of gunpowder, and cower before any schmuck with a lawyer’s letter, because they do not know their defences under defamation law, and even if they did, they feel they can’t afford to exercise them.

The point here is not to oppose all defamation suits against bloggers; on occasion, bloggers will be in the wrong, and the right response is to clarify or apologize. Unlike human rights inquisitions — which are always immoral — some complaints against bloggers will have merit. The point, rather, will be to protect bloggers against political attacks masquerading as defamation threats. And that’s what should make this task less enormous than it might sound: if my experience at the Western Standard is any guide, almost all of the work will be merely fending off folks who were angry enough to spend $500 to get a lawyer to draft a demand letter, but have neither the legal case nor the financial resources to file a proper statement of claim, let alone run a trial.

It is my anecdotal observation that the preponderance of such threats come from the domestic left or Islamic fascists, and I imagine that most of the bloggers who will need to be protected will come from the conservative side of the spectrum. But not all; at the magazine, we received demand letters from provincial Tories upset with our coverage of a scandal. And I can think of at least one Liberal blogger whose case — not defamation, but media law nonetheless — I’d love to take.

I would imagine that such a defence fund would be financed partly through the pro bono contributions of defamation lawyers like myself, and partly through dues paid by bloggers into a fund — say, a dollar a month. I imagine it would be a non-profit corporation, overseen by a board scrutinizing revenues and expenses. There would have to be clear rules of when to take an engagement — a written “insurance policy”, including rules to avoid the moral hazard that insurance creates.

Of course, the larger threat is not nuisance defamation suits, for which the legal system has built-in suppresants ranging from the plaintiff’s own legal fees and disbursements to the commendable Canadian rule that the loser pays a portion of the winner’s costs. The larger threat is human rights commissions of the sort that have gone after Mark Steyn, Free Dominion, and others. These are rarer than defamation threats, so far, but they are far more worrisome. I think we need to wait a few more months to see how the current media blowback against commission bullying plays out.

There’s not much more to say that Mr. Levant doesn’t already say here. It’s a good idea, methinks, especially in these uncertain times when the typical response of progressives to reasonable criticism of their ideas is to accuse one of being a bigot.

This is a man who knows that of which he speaks, having faced the star chamber kangaroo court Alberta Human Rights Commission himself.

“Human rights laws, designed as a shield, are now being used as a sword,” [Bishop Fred Henry] wrote in a December 31 email from Calgary, in what he described as an increasingly “bizarre” series of events.

The recent filing of human rights complaints against magazine for an excerpt of Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone, and against Catholic Insight magazine for articles outlining Catholic teaching on homosexuality, are only the latest in a series of cases that have highlighted freedom of speech and religious freedom.

The Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) described the Steyn and Catholic Insight cases as part of an “ongoing pattern in the use of human rights commissions to penalize the expression of unpopular opinions,” in a December 31 alert to members entitled, ‘Stop the use of human rights commissions in free speech cases.’

“The League is concerned about this disturbing trend, since it often involves opinions based on religious beliefs,” said CCRL executive director Joanne McGarry.

Henry agrees, stating: “The issue is rarely true Discrimination but rather censorship and enshrinement of a particular ideology through threats, sanctions and punitive measures.”

In 2005, Henry faced two separate complaints to the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for allegedly discriminatory comments in a pastoral letter on marriage. “I challenged one by one the standard arguments used to support same sex unions as the equivalent of traditional marriage,” Henry stated.

Though the complaints were eventually dropped, Henry described the process as “fundamentally flawed,” and closely resembling “kangaroo courts.” Among those flaws, he maintained, were the “presumption of guilt until you can prove your innocence; the open ended time lines for dealing with a complaint; and unjust incurring of financial expenditures for the defendant in the simple event of a complaint being lodged.”

The AHRC covers the complainants’ costs.

Human rights commissions (HRCs) were set up to protect people against discrimination when it came to housing, employment or services. Henry contended that existing human rights legislation needed to be interpreted very broadly to allow the complaints against him.

“It was surprising that the Commission accepted the complaints on the basis of ‘goods/services refused and terms of goods/services,’ as there was no explanation as to what constituted goods or services refused, or their terms,” Henry said. “Nor did the complainants set out the manner of discrimination in other areas.”

He added: “I believe these complaints were an attempt to intimidate and silence me.”

As is becoming increasingly clear, the various advocates for the establishment of Canada’s human rights commissions — at a national and provincial level — must have either been absolutely daft to not realize that such bodies would become instruments for censorship and the regulation/elimination of in Canada, or must have had that censorship and jackbooting of freedom as their goal. Out of charity, one desires to assume they were merely daft, but in the end the outcome is the same either way.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)