timeimmortal

Not exactly a surprise: just the latest in a string of lawsuits directed at Mr. Levant. He feels that the suit will probably fail, but notes that it is only because of the generous support of the blogosphere that he is even able to afford to defend himself against all the ligitation and HRC filings directed at him.

One cannot help but get the feeling that Ezra is in the middle of a targeted, concerted effort to destroy him — financially, if in no other way. And one cannot help but get the sense that there is a certain inter-connectedness to the various legal filings against him — one notes that in the official notice of suit received by Mr. Levant, the barristers in question identify themselves as “Solicitors for Richard Warman.”

Conicidence?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Satirical brilliance from London, Ontario musicians Unprotected Group — a commentary on the current human rights fracas in Canada:

Here comes the Rights Commission, second time today
Everybody logs off and hopes they go away
How many folks they’ve framed now, only God could say
But if I had a royal commission, I’d make somebody pay

I don’t believe in Section 13 or investigators leaving bait
Cause if there ain’t no haters out there, Lord, they’re easy to create
And when I read on FreeDominion of Human Rights folks spreading hate
If I had a royal commission then I would set things straight

In the right wing blogosphere, one hundred thousand wait
To be sued by Richard Warman, or some less humane fate
It’s just like Charlie Manson suing Sharon Tate
If I had a royal commission I would not hesitate

You can get them on the stand, but they’re just gonna lie
Or say they don’t remember who wrote those words or why
Stealing people’s wireless — echoes of the victims’ wails –
If I had a royal commission, somebody’d go to jail

I almost like it better than Bruce Cockburn’s original.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Ezra Levant has the details on an alarming story involving Richard Warman and a teenaged girl he exposed to the possibility of violence.

Quite a shocking thing for a supposed human rights crusader to do, no?

But then, one suspects that Warman, in particular, and his associates at the CHRC, don’t actually care about human rights as much as they do about a) their own pocketbooks, and b) silencing those with whom they personally disagree.

And now, it seems, we must add another entry to that list: c) settling personal vendettas.

Warman spent a lot of time posing as a neo-Nazi on various websites trying to coax out the identity of a high school girl who was led into the movement by her then-boyfriend. She ultimately recanted and apologized for ever espousing racist views, realizing that she had been led astray in her infatuation, and the CHRC accepted her statement and closed the case without imposing a monetary fine.

Perhaps because he had been denied another paycheque, Warman decided to leak the girl’s letter of recantation onto the Internet, and specifically onto a neo-Nazi web forum. These are people Warman believes hold views that might cause someone to come to harm — but to settle a score, he thought nothing of singling out, by name, someone who had gotten away.

That’s tantamount to incitement.

This sort of crap doesn’t belong in Canada.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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!

I’ve been trying to maintain a more-or-less accurate count of visitors to the site since…well, for several years now. Of course, switching blogging software (twice!!) didn’t exactly make that easy for me to do, but where possible I’ve tried to carry forward the visitor counts from each successive software.

And while I realize that likely has introduced errors to the count along the way, according to Wordpress‘ built-in visitor counting utility, Time Immortal apparently logged its 500,000th visitor last weekend.

Which is pretty damn cool, actually. To be honest, I started the domain as kind of a personal clearing house for ideas and random thoughts, and somewhere along the line it kind of morphed into a lot of different things, and spun off into Aiera and my and Grace’s website as well.

And now it’s one of a number of conservative blogs at embroiled in the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s/Ezra Levant/Richard Warman/HRC brouhaha, fighting (in essence) to restore freedom of expression to Canada.

So let me just say a big “thank you” to everyone who has visited the site here and found something on it useful, controversial, inspiring, or distasteful. I don’t blog for anyone but me, but I find I am consistently amazed, and buoyed, by the myriad of people who seem to at least occasionally cast a glance this way.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Binks, you nutter…get your facts straight! I’m Irish/Ukrainian (mostly)!

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 »

RH Potfry, one of the comedic genuises behind The Nose on Your Face, writes in a quick note of thanks.

Thanks for the link to TNOYF.

First time I’ve been to your blog. Love your writing style. Effortless.

RH Potfry
The Nose On Your Face

Well, colour me…uhm…I guess I would be coloured kind of magenta-red, on account of the blushing. Thank you in turn, RHP, for the nod, and you are most welcome!

If you haven’t yet discovered TNOYF, O Reader, I can only encourage you to visit the site and enjoy their comic stylings. Also, do take a moment to buy some Canadian Bloggers swag from them; all proceeds raised go to the defense funds of Levant et. al. in their responses to Richard Warman’s frivolous lawsuit against them.

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!

One of the more amusing — and yet tragic — revelations of Marc Lemire’s cross-examination of Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) staffer Dean Steacy (among other people) in regard to the exact identities of the authors of certain racially-charged statements at the white supremacist forum that Mr. Lemire oversees has to be the tactics employed by Dean Steacy. Essentially, Mr. Steacy (and former HRC employee and current serial plaintiff thereof Richard Warman) engaged in tactics that would be called “entrapment” had bona-fide police officers committed them — dissatisfied with the quantity (or lack thereof) or specifically racist material to be found on Mr. Lemire’s forums, they created aliases for themselves, logged in to the forums, and posted their own racist statements. Those statements then were used to form the basis of Mr. Warman’s human rights complaint against Mr. Lemire.

This is all old news by now; I reiterate it here for the benefit of those readers who may have forgotten some of the finer points since last it came up for discussion on this blog.

What is new — and both comic and tragic — is exactly how Mr. Steacy went about “covering his tracks” when posting the aforementioned racist content.

When Mr. Steacy began posting messages on hate sites as “jadewarr,” he was sufficiently internet savvy not to leave any ISP information that could be traced back to the CHRC. He didn’t want Marc Lemire looking at his server logs and noticing any unusual interest from anything ending in “gc.ca.” So Mr. Steacy disconnected himself from the office Internet, and looked around for alternative wireless connections. He found one belonging to a young lady whose apartment is a block away from CHRC headquarters in Ottawa. Without obtaining a warrant, he connected to her server, and in effect used her as his cover for his “jadewarr” postings. Last week, a representative from Bell Canada named the lady in open court, since when her name has been reported in the newspapers. Let’s say in 10 years’ time, this woman applies for a job in, oh, Sarnia or Moose Jaw or Des Moines, and her prospective employer decides to Google her name, and what comes up is all very complicated and hard to follow but she seems to have something to do with some white supremacist investigation back in 2008.

Dean Steacy is on record as dismissing the right to freedom of speech as “an American concept” that he doesn’t put much stock in. Evidently, his attitude toward the right to private property is similar. And yes, I know that the lady whose wireless internet access he made use of should have done more to protect herself against his invasion of her privacy and usurpation of her identity. Wireless routers should be secured, preferably using the WPA security scheme, and any person intenting to use a wireless router in his or her home should both be made aware of this fact and, if necessary, taught how to do it.

But even though her wireless was unsecured, Mr. Steacy’s use of it to pursue — by way of entrapment-like tactics — the CHRC’s case against Mr. Lemire is unconscionable, and may have tarnished this lady’s reputation for years to come. Not that one expects the human rights kommisars to demonstrate the least bit of care toward the well-being of Canadian citizens, not while more pressing concerns — like the pursuit of the fictional Canadian Nazi Party, or the defence of a Newfoundlander’s right to act in a manner that lines up with ‘Newfie’ stereotypes, thus resulting in the termination of his employment for being a lazy slacker — are out there to be found.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Well, today is it — the big day when Marc Lemire gets his opportunity to cross-examine staff of the Canadian Human Rights Commission about the possibility that, during the course of “undercover” activities on the internet, they may have engaged in actions that, legally, could be described as entrapment (for example, posting racist diatribes on white supremacist forums and then using those diatribes as grounds for a hate crimes complaint). Former HRC staffer Richard Warman may find himself subject to a particularly detailed kind of scrutiny, if Lemire has his way.

Ezra Levant has an excellent primer published explaining what’s what about this hearing.

Lemire may be a racist, and despicable on that count, but his fight against the CHRC may just be the start of something larger that, in an ideal case, will lead to either the dissolution or severe limitation of scope of human rights commissions in Canada.

Be sure to check the websites of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn for what I’m sure will be up-to-the-minute details of any and all news that gets out pertaining to Mr. Lemire’s stand against the human-rights-violations-in-motion that are Canada’s human rights tribunals.

And while you’re at it, be sure to have a read of Five Feet of Fury and Blazing Cat Fur for all the colour commentary to go along with the news. The Morley Scott to Levant and Steyn’s Rod Phillips. Or…the Rod Phillips to their Morley Scott.

Either way, it’s funny.

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!

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal
160 Elgin Street
11th Floor
Ottawa, ON K1A 1J4
Tel: (613) 995-1707
Email: gcyr@chrt-tcdp.gc.ca

The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) is accepting public opinions on the closed hearings of Richard Warman and Dean Steacy as regards Marc Lemire’s allegations of entrapment committed by HRC officers. The reader is encouraged to (politely) express his or her discomfort with the idea of public employees not being subjected to public scrutiny over this issue.

These hearings, frankly, should be open to the public. Plain and simple.

Submissions must be in by March 17th.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

So they draw their paycheque from the public trough — that is, we taxpayers foot the bill for their employment — but human rights investigators suspected of posting racist materials on various websites in an attempt to entrap the site operators will be questioned about their actions free from our prying eyes.

Great. Just great.

Anyone who has been following the abuses of the Canadian Human Rights Commission knows that using fake names, infiltrating “enemy” websites and even planting bigoted messages is their modus operandi. We know this not because it is alleged by any of the CHRC’s critics, but because it is confessed under oath by CHRC staff themselves, including CHRC investigator Dean Steacy and former CHRC staffer and serial CHRC complainer, Richard Warman, who personally admitted under oath that he would regularly end his online comments with Nazi shorthand for “Heil Hitler”.

But most Canadians don’t know that — partly because the CHRC is doing everything it can to keep its questionable tactics hidden from public view, including insisting that the upcoming March 25th cross-examination of its staff on this very subject be done in secret.

Of course I stand by my statement. And whenever a bigoted comment is left on a website in Canada, the first reflex of any skeptical person ought to be: “is this another dirty trick by the CHRC or Richard Warman to entrap their next victim?” rather than to take the comment at face value, as an indicator of any real bigotry in Canada.

If I didn’t know anything about human rights commissions and I read that Globe article, I’d probably think that whoever thought there was a conspiracy by the government to plant racist comments on websites to entrap them was a nutbar on par with 9/11 “truthers”. I’d think whoever said that was slightly mad, because that’s just not how things work in the real world, at least not in a country like Canada.

“With glowing hearts, we see thee rise, the True North strong and free…”

Welcome, Steynians!

Not all of them, admittedly — just the ones with which he personally disagrees.

I’ve written about how Richard Warman, the former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who is now the CHRC’s biggest customer for thought crime complaints, has tried to censor Canadian libraries in British Columbia and Ontario.

But the largest libraries in the world now, of course, are online. And defamation suits and human rights complaints — Warman’s preferred tools of Censorship — don’t work as well if the libraries and other websites in question are based in the United States. Their robust First Amendment means that U.S. defamation law is not an effective censorship tool, and that country does not — yet, at least — have anything as pernicious as Canada’s various thought crimes laws.

Well, if a Canadian can’t censor U.S. websites, can he get Internet companies here in Canada to block those U.S. sites from Canadian internet users, like Communist China does with politically incorrect sites? That’s exactly what Warman sought to do in an application to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

I’m not an expert in telecommunications law, but from what I gather, Canada’s big Internet companies like Rogers and Bell are governed by the Telecommunications Act (apparently little ISP’s aren’t). Section 36 of that Act specifically bans communication companies from interfering with content without government approval — and that includes censoring websites:

Except where the Commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.

Well, that’s what Warman — and the censors at the Canadian Jewish Congress — asked the Commission to do. In the written application to the CRTC filed by his lawyers, Warman asks not only for the CRTC’s “permission” under section 36 to ban two particular U.S. websites, but he also asks for:

Directions on procedure… whereby Canadian carriers and other interested parties can present their views as to whether the blocking of these URLs should be made a final order of the Commission and whether the blocking of these websites should be mandatory for all Canadian ISPs.

Say…isn’t that what the Chinese do, more or less? Oh, wait…yeah, it is, as Ezra points out above. Censorship, plain and simple.

But remember, O Reader…Richard Warman prefers that you not call him a censor! Okay, fine, whatever. Were the CRTC to ban access, within some or all of Canada, to certain American websites, that would, by definition, be an act of censorship. By what name, then, shall we call someone who lobbies for just such an action to take place?