Time Immortal

Ezra Levant has a couple of good articles up on his blog. The first is the inauguration of a new feature on his site that will hopefully become a regular thing: the CHRC bigoted comment of the day.

It sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t. In their ongoing investigations, members of the Canadian Human Rights Commission have written all manner of racist, misogynistic, and hateful things on various web forums. Certain employees of the CHRC are even registered members of Stormfront, a white supremacist organization.

The italicized text below is the words of Richard Warman, the man who has filed almost every Section 13 complaint on record.

I think Louis has hit the nail on the head. but why couldn’t we get Whiteville off the ground? I think it was a good idea and held somepromise for those of us who want to be among our own kind - but isnt Alberta too cold in the winter???

Did you get that? The conversation is about visible minorities. A Stormfront member calls them a “mud flood”, and laments the disappearance of “White nation”.

Warman agrees, and goes further — calling for a whites-only city, which he names Whiteville. He suggests transforming Louis’s comments from passive racist complaining into action. He thinks it would be a good idea for “those of us” who don’t like minorities. And that leads to a whole stream of comments discussing the merits of creating an Apartheid city in Canada. The site was racist before Warman’s post. But he helped shape their discussion, he focussed it, he encouraged it, he added to it, and he suggested action, not mere words.

In other words, he spread hate.

You can read the whole thing right here.

Were Warman a cop, his actions would be called entrapment. And while Warman is not an employee of the CHRC anymore, he was at one point — and, at any rate, this same illegal technique of entrapment is used by other CHRC investigators.

Ezra also brings news that the operators of Free Dominion — Connie and Mike Fournier, two of the defendants in Richard Warman’s lawsuit against several prominent Canadian conservative website operators — have filed their statement of defence against Warman’s claim.

You can see a copy of that defence here.

…

The Free Dominion defence is a fascinating read. It’s obviously a document written for the court of law, but it’s also a powerful weapon in the court of public opinion. It’s quite readable — not too leaden with legalese — and it tells a hell of a story. As I predicted when Warman first sued us, we might well be the nominal defendants in this case, but it’s Warman who’s really going to be on trial.

I don’t propose to go through the entire defence here; I really do recommend that you read it.

It is worth a read, O Reader. The document is very solid, and every bit as accessible as Ezra notes. What is more, it is one statement only — Ezra himself, Kate MacMillan, and Kathy Shaidle have yet to file their respective statements.

Warman is, I suspect, going to get his ass kicked around the courthouse — repeatedly. He’s used to playing by CHRC rules, and it’s doubtful, especially against such an array of skilled orators and debaters, that he will last long in a proper courtroom.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Today only!

That’s right — any Mark Steyn merchandise or books purchased today will mean money donated to the legal defence funds of Canadian bloggers Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, Kate MacMillan, Mark and Connie of Free Dominion, and National Post columnist Johnathan Kay against the lawsuit filed by Richard Warman. These men and women have been vocal, vital advocates in the cause of freedom of expression rights in Canada, and both need and deserve our support, O Reader.

Read the rest of this entry »

BCF dropped me a note this morning to announce that this rather hilarious graphic:

…is now available as a t-shirt. Proceeds from any sales will be donated to the defense funds of Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, Kate MacMillan, Johnathan Kay, and the operators of Free Dominion.

Buy it here!

This one is a re-run: Richard Warman and Warren Kinsella have filed suit against Free Dominion.

Didn’t we see this episode last season?

Richard Warman has sued several conservative bloggers and website operators, including Ezra Levant (ezralevant.com), Kate MacMillan (smalldeadanimals.com), Kathy Shaidle (fivefeetoffury.com), and Free Dominion (freedominion.ca). The intent and aim of the lawsuit appears to be an attempt to muzzle and censor, en masse, the conservative blogosphere.

Warman’s goal is breathtaking in its chutzpah: he wants to muzzle the Canadian conservative internet. It’s not just his goal — it’s the goal of the CHRC itself, and its friends at the Canadian Jewish Congress, who have stated their goal is to “tame” the Internet — or at least those voices they disagree with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the CJC was bankrolling Warman’s lawsuit — they’ve done joint legal work together before, and Warman’s number one defender is on the CJC’s legal committee. The CJC hates conservatives, and this would be a way for them to do damage to the conservative blogosphere without taking the political flak for it.

Ezra has a list of ways that one can help out in fighting this latest assault on freedom of speech and conservative opinion, and it basically involves two things: financial contributions and spreading the word. Obviously, fighting a legal battle is a costly ordeal, and Ezra et. al. could use all the donations they can get, either directly or through purchase of various bits of merchandise that they offer. Equally, though, the Reader is encouraged to keep spreading the word about the travesty that are the human rights commissions in Canada, and is likewise encouraged to contact his or her Member of Parliament ( always in a civil tone, and not to a level — quantity, that is — that might be deemed as spamming) to voice concerns about, and objections to, the abuses of the HRCs.

This is a winnable fight. But war is always costly.

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.