timeimmortal

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dropped the complaint against Maclean’s magazine. This is a good and welcome development in the debate over freedom of expression in Canada, although one is left to wonder at why Jennifer Lynch and her CHRC actually went about dropping the case in the first place.

Mark Steyn notes the official reasoning that was given:

The Steyn article discusses changing global demographics and other factors that the author describes as contributing to an eventual ascendancy of Muslims in the ‘developed world’, a prospect that the author fears for various reasons described in the article. The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision. Considering the purpose and scope of Section 13 (1), and taking into account that an interpretation of s. 13 (1) must be consistent with the minimal impairment of free speech, there is no reasonable basis in the evidence to warrant the appointment of a Tribunal.

For these reasons, this complaint is dismissed.

And Maclean’s official statement in reaction to this dismissal (linked to above), notes:

Maclean’s magazine is pleased that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed the complaint brought against it by the Canadian Islamic Congress. The decision is in keeping with our long-standing position that the article in question, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s best-selling book America Alone, was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice.

The Maclean’s statement, however, also continues the indictment against the HRCs:

Though gratified by the decision, Maclean’s continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation’s media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. We enthusiastically support those parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues.

The question could be raised as to why the CHRC decided to back down on this issue. Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that the RCMP are investigating the Commission (in regard to, among other things, hacking into a private citizen’s wireless network in order to surf white supremacist websites)? Could it be the brutal beating the Commission has taken in the media, and on the blogs? Could the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation have had anything to do with it? Could the attention being given to e.g. Bill M-446 have played a role?

The CHRC has been under a lot of pressure, and one kind of begins to suspect that they may have issued this dismissal in an effort to appear magnanimous. Personally, I don’t buy it for a second — I think they are looking to regroup, but not to fundamentally change anything about the way they operate. This is little more than skin-saving.

Still, a victory is a victory, and good news is good news. This is both, I think.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Angelweb posted a copy of a letter received from Rob Nicholson, the Canadian Minister of Justice, over at FreeMarkSteyn.com. The text of the letter is, frankly, damn promising.

Dear [name removed] :

The office of the Prime Minister has forwarded to me a copy of your correspondence concerning the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). I regret the delay in responding.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental freedom enshrined in the Canadian , which, in a free and democratic society, may be limited only when such an action is justified.

The Government of Canada is committed to the protection and promotion of human rights. To that end, the Government has introduced in Parliament Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act, which calls for the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) to apply equally to all Canadians. Bill C-21 would repeal section 67 of the CHRA, which currently shields some actions of the federal government or First Nations entities from the application of the CHRA. The repeal of Section 67 would extend the rights of First Nations people, primarily those living on reserve, to file complaints with the CHRC.

Canada’s record on human rights is second to none; it is a record of which all Canadians can be proud.

As you may be aware, the CHRC, which administers the CHRA, operates at arm’s length from the Government of Canada and reports to Parliament independently.

However, I would like to inform you that my caucus colleague Mr. Rick Dykstra has tabled a motion that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights examine and make recommendations with respect to the CHRC, including its mandate, operations, and interpretation and application of provisions relating to Section 13 of the CHRA, which addresses hate messages. I look forward to that review.

Please be assured that your concerns have been given proper consideration. I appreciate having had your comments brought to my attention.

Yours truly,

The Honourable Rob Nicholson

This is, as I said, damn promising — it re-affirms that the Canadian government is coming on-side against the HRCs and their flagrant abuse of (and transgressions against) a fundamental human right that is a cornerstone of every free society: freedom of expression.

Also, I think it’s time to put out a new banner:

(I direct the Reader to the media page)

About bloody time!

The Conservative government has introduced a motion to Parliament’s Justice Committee proposing an investigation into the abusive, corrupt practises of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The motion specifically refers to public “concerns” about the CHRC’s “investigative techniques” and their “interpretation and application” of the Section 13 thought crimes provision.

The resolution, which you can read here in both official languages, was put forward by Rick Dykstra (pictured at left), the Conservative MP from St. Catherines, Ontario, with the knowledge and approval of the Justice Minister, Rob Nicholson. Here is an e-mail from Nicholson, sent to a voter just today, in which you can read his change of approach. An excerpt from Nicholson’s letter:

I would like to inform you that my caucus colleague Mr. Rick Dykstra has tabled a motion that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights examine and make recommendations with respect to the CHRC, including its mandate, operations, and interpretation and application of provisions relating to section 13 of the CHRA, which addresses hate messages. I look forward to that review.

Smashing news. A little late to the party, but smashing news all the same. This is a much-needed, very welcome reversal on the part of the government.

So that would be the Privacy Commissioner, the RCMP, and now the government of Canada who will be launching investigations into the human rights commissions.

There’s hope.

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 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!

Mark Mercier, in the Nova Scotia Chronicle-Herald, gives a brief historical refresher on Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

It’s…rather shameful to have to admit that Canadians should have seen the present HRC fracas coming almost twenty years ago.

Canadians heard a long time ago, at least as long ago as 1990, that they are not free to speak their minds as they see fit. 1990 was the year the Supreme Court of Canada ruled constitutional Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Section 13 says that it is “a discriminatory practice” to communicate “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

…

A person of sense in 1990 could easily have predicted that s. 13 would soon be used, as it has indeed come to be used, to bully people away from saying what sitting commissioners happen not to want to hear.

The Supreme Court had three people of sense on it in 1990. The Court upheld the constitutionality of s. 13 by a mere 4-3 majority.

The Justices who got their way discounted their colleague’s fears. As long as authorities remember that hatred and contempt are extreme feelings, they said, and keep in mind that the purpose of the Act is to overcome discrimination, and not to censor speech, Canadians have no reason to fear that a chilly climate for opinion will descend on the country or that s. 13 will be used to control the expression of opinion and emotion. These Justices neglected the sage advice never to make a law that requires intelligence or goodwill on the part of those who administer it.

Happily, Keith Martin, the member of parliament for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, a riding on Vancouver Island, has introduced into the House of Commons a private member’s motion, M-446, to delete s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Unhappily, the matter of s. 13 hasn’t yet become a political issue. Unless a political party takes it up, M-446 will languish, and unless Canadians make s. 13 a political issue, no party will take up M-446. We need to communicate to politicians our support for M-446.

I don’t think it can be said any clearer than that. If, as Canadians, we value freedom — which means valuing freedom even for those we perhaps find distasteful — then the only option is to support Bill M-446. If we fail to do so, we knowingly abdicate any future claim to be free people.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

That’s Liberal MP Dr. Keith Martin’s description for the Canadian government’s lame-duck attempt to justify the legality and necessity of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. That’s the same section of the act which, through the human rights commissions, is used as an instrument of Censorship and a weapon against the fundamental human right to freedom of expression in Canada.

Deborah Gyapong has the details:

“Well, there were a lot of things in the Justice Department’s missive which I find absolutely shocking,” said Martin. “Not only that but about blithely talking about restrictions on freedom of expression. That has absolutely nothing to do with hate crimes, nothing to do with hate crimes and nothing to do with hate speech whatsoever. So the Justice Department’s missive really was a trampling of basic human rights, human rights that are enshrined in our Charter and I was very disturbed by their intervention. So I’m hoping that our Justice Committee actually reviews the Commission and hopefully they’ll be able to — that we’ll be able to bring in members from the Justice Department to be able to account for their statements.”

…

“I think Mr. Harper has told Mr. Nicholson, our Justice Minister, to put a muzzle on their MPs. But the Conservative MPs, as many members in my caucus, have expressed deep concerns about where the Canada Human Rights Commission has gone. They have expressed a great deal of support for my motion to remove Section 13-1 from the Act. And I think that’s a fair thing to do would be to have this out and open. Have a public hearing through the Justice Committee and televise it so that Canadians coast to coast can hear those who believe that the status quo is acceptable and those of us who believe that the Human Rights Act has to be amended to ensure that we have freedom of speech because in my view freedom of speech is being trampled in Canada right now.“

I don’t think it can be stressed enough what an important ally in the fight for freedom of expression in Canada Dr. Martin really is. Do be sure to send him a note of thanks, O Reader.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Deborah Gyapong has an excellent report published in the latest edition of the Western Catholic Reporter concerning, of course, Canada’s human rights commissions, this time in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the UN.

Pope Benedict’s speech to the United Nations last month serves as a reminder to Canada that human rights discourse stems from a world view based on universal truths and an objective notion of right and wrong.

“Either we recover some of these assumptions and make a serious course correction,” McGill University professor Douglas Farrow said, “or we begin to encounter quite rapidly the consequences.”

Farrow sees Canada’s human rights commissions as a sign the country is in a transitional phase, because increasingly the Canadians are seeing human rights as what we say they are.

“Thus laws can be written concerning human rights that have nothing to do with universal standards.”

…

Increasingly, various individuals and groups are using human rights commissions to “generate traction” for that group’s particular construct of rights, he said. This method has often been used to suppress religious freedom, especially that of Christians.

Farrow said the real basis for human rights springs from a world view like that the pope outlined in his speech - a theistic world view that sees a benevolent Creator and human beings made in God’s image, with a capacity to distinguish between good and evil.

The pope exhorted the world body to return to its founding principles as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

The declaration is based on “the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations,” Benedict told the UN.

Human rights should mean the fundamental freedoms to which all human beings are entitled, exercised within a framework of obligations and responsibilities, the burden of which all human beings must bear. The notion of human rights, however, has been abgorated and, I would say, abducted by those whose view of rights is that they are a series of entitlements which are accompanied by no reciprocal responsibility whatsoever. Whereas there should be a natural “give and take,” the view of the HRCs and their “clients” increasingly is that rights is all “take” with no “give” reciprocal to it.

To call that immoral, to call it unethical, and to call it a violation of natural law would at once be accurate and an understatement.

I’m no fan of the UN, as the regular Reader will know, but at least the UDHR recognizes that the right to freedom of expression is one of the bedrock principles of human freedom. Yes, there are responsibilities that go along with that right, and yes we do have some legal protections in place in Canada to make sure that freedom of expression does not cross the line to incitement to violence.

But in regard to freedom of expression, it is worth noting two things:

1. it is nowhere written that, included among the responsibilities that accompany the right to freely express one’s opinion, we have a responsibility to avoid hurting people’s feelings or offending people’s sensibilities. Social convention encourages us to be polite even when expressing disagreement, but some ideas cannot easily be expressed in a manner that pays good observance to social convention.
2. it is nowhere written that any of us has the right to not be offended, nor is it anywhere written that any of us has the right to not have our beliefs and views challenged

Perhaps the word “yet” should affixed to the end of both of those points; I don’t know.

The plain fact of the matter is that, through the existence and operation of human rights commissions, specifically in regard to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Canada is going far beyond where it needs to go in order to ensure that so-called “reasonable limits” on freedom of expression exist. There is only one real “reasonable” limit on freedom of expression anyhow, and that is making incitement illegal. Limiting freedom of expression because some things are e.g. hurtful or offensive to others is not a “reasonable” limitation at all — such limitation is, in fact, the antithesis of freedom of expression: it is Censorship.

And as such, it has no business in Canada.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I’m a day or two behind in writing about Rob Nicholson — the Minister of Justice in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government — and the legal brief his office released in favour of keeping Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act intact. Ezra Levant has a pretty handy fisking of the document itself, which is rife with all manner of historical errors and poor logic.

My favourite example:

…history teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech…

Read that again. The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we’ve seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?

Setting that aside for a moment, though, what has emerged as the big controversy concerning the brief is that it draws heavily upon the scholarship of one man:

So who is this nut the government keeps quoting?

His name is Alexander Tsesis, a professor at a middling U.S. law school. Tsesis has two political clients: the Canadian Justice Department, and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachussets, tied with [Barack Hussein Obama] as the most left-wing senator in America. Tsesis is a left wing kook — but the Canadian government hangs on his every word.

On that basis alone, it’s not much of a surprise that the government, acting on Tsesis’ scholarship, has come out in favour of Censorship. Most left-wing types seem to be in favour of censoring those with whom they disagree, as I am sure that Tsiesis certainly is, without ever realizing it that once those powers have been granted to government agencies, they cannot reliably be expected to remain…shall we say…pointed in the same direction. The laws that today are being used against the likes of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant may tomorrow be used against the likes of David Suzuki.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Steyn links to an article that explains, in brief, the full implications of what a “guilty” ruling by either of the human rights commissions that Maclean’s magazine has yet to face:

Take a look at s. 37(2) of the BC Human Rights Code, where it says:

(2)If the member or panel determines that the complaint is justified, the member or panel
(a) must order the person that contravened this Code to cease the contravention and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention,

That is a mandatory injunction. An obligatory ‘cease and desist’ order. If the complainants win, the Tribunal has to order Maclean’s to stop running ‘Islamophobic’ articles. Not just articles by Mark Steyn, mind you; they have to stop running those articles period. Goodbye Barbara Amiel. Now, you might respond that Steyn wouldn’t be silenced, he would just have to pick his words more carefully. But think about it; the CIC is not just complaining about the excerpt from America Alone, but about a whole sheaf of Steyn’s articles. It’s pretty safe to assume that whatever Steyn has written about Islam in the last seven or so years would be considered offensive by the CIC. In the face of an injunction, then, he would either have to stop writing about Islam or stop obeying the dictates of his conscience as a writer.

The students may say they don’t want to silence Mark Steyn or anyone else. Their complaint, if successful, will do just that. It can do no other.

Just so. I’ve tried to make that point in interviews. The BC tribunal’s ruling will mean that I can no longer write for Maclean’s, and that Maclean’s itself will be highly circumscribed in what it can publish about the relationship between Islam and the west. In other words, on one of the central questions facing the world today, the editorial decisions of Canada’s largest news weekly will be determined by a British Columbia “court”.

My career in Canada will be formally ended next month.

These human rights complaints — in fact, virtually every human rights complaint filed under Section 13 of human rights law in Canada (and its provincial equivalents) — are about censorship, and nothing more. They can have no other outcome (and given the nearly 100% conviction rate of the HRCs, one could almost surely say that they will have no other outcome).

And in this great debate, that’s the line in the sand, on one (and only one) side of which each of us must fall. Either we oppose censorship in any and every circumstance, or we acknowledge that it is sometimes/often/commonly necessary. If we place ourselves with the former camp, we are on the side of freedom (which, unfortunately but necessarily, we must share with some less-than-savoury characters; but who said freedom was free from being, occasionally, ugly?). If we place ourselves with the latter camp, we abdicate any and all moral authority with which to complain, in the future, should someone else end up facing the prospect of being legally silenced by the CHRC or one of its provincial parallels.

Perhaps it will be a rock star whose music is much loved. Perhaps it will be, as someone else I read this morning suggested, a public figure such as David Suzuki. Whomever it is, let it be understood that the power of the HRCs, and their continued corruption and abuse of power, will not end when the Mark Steyns, Marc Lemires, and Ezra Levants of the world have been duly dispatched — the field of targets will not have been narrowed then; it will only find need to shift leftward.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

This just arrived in my inbox:

The result of Marc Lemire’s Constitutional Challenge could literally make or break our fight against Section 13. It is IMPERATIVE that you email these people, and get EVERYONE YOU KNOW to do it, too!

We can put an end to Section 13 without having to wait for Parliament to wake up…but we have to act today!

I’m going to make this simple for everyone. Here is the list of emails:

THE CANADIAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ASSOCIATION
A. ALAN BOROVOY, GENERAL COUNSEL
e-mail: mail@ccla.org

British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
Jim Braunagel
e-mail: jim@bccla.org

PEN Canada
email: info@pencanada.ca

The Canadian Association of Journalists
Algonquin College
John Dickens, Executive Director

email: canadianjour@magma.ca

Your letter just has to ask them to “intervene as an interested party” in the Warman vs Lemire Constitutional Challenge of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Have at it, O Reader! Freedom of expression is a cornerstone right of free societies everywhere, and this right is being eroded in Canada in part because we are letting it be eroded. Speak out about this issue, and the in no uncertain terms, or you will lose the right to do so (under the guise of it being for your own good, no less!).

I think it goes without saying that all emails sent should be polite, concise, and spell-checked thoroughly. Be nice, and be articulate, and your message will go a lot further.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The Canadian Islamic Congress will be making a public settlement offer to Maclean’s and Mark Steyn.

CANADIAN ISLAMIC CONGRESS PRESS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

April 29, 2008

ISLAMIC CONGRESS AND LAW STUDENTS TO MAKE PUBLIC SETTLEMENT OFFER TO MACLEAN’S ON HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINTS

TORONTO - The Canadian Islamic Congress and a group of law students who recently filed human rights complaints against Maclean’s magazine for publishing Islamophobic content, are planning to present a public offer to the magazine’s management to settle the matter.

Details of this offer and more information regarding the background of the above-mentioned complaints will be provided to those in attendance.

When:
10:00 a.m.: Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Where:
Fairmont Royal York Hotel, The Quebec Room, 100 Front Street West,
Toronto ON

Present at the media conference will be:

- Faisal Joseph: CIC legal counsel, former Federal and Provincial Crown Attorney, and former Chair of the Criminal Section of the Canadian Bar Association (Nova Scotia).

- Muneeza Sheikh, Naseem Mithoowani and Khurrum Awan: Three of the law
  students/graduates who were original complainants against Maclean’s magazine.

For more information contact:
Faisal Joseph: (519) 672-4510

I agree with Deb Gyapong: Ken Whyte (editor of Maclean’s) and Mark Steyn shouldn’t accept the settlement.

Well, it’s gone too far. Unless the CIC and the Muslim law students are willing to ante up the magazine’s and Steyn’s legal bills for subjecting them to an abusive process; unless they are willing to admit they were wrong to file complaints; and unless they acknowledge the importance of freedom of speech and Religion, then on principle there should be no settlement.

This struggle against the HRCs can end when and if the HRCs themselves are either dissolved or stripped of their power through the removal of Section 13 from the Canadian Human Rights Act. Apart from that, there should be no deal possible.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

BCF writes in with what I presume is a comment on this article.

They can’t possibly hope to win this case, can they? They aren an affront to society.

I shall answer in reverse order, O Reader: they are, yes, and yes, they can and do.

That the CHRC is an affront to Canadian society is beyond doubt. When an HRC staffer like Dean Steacy can openly opine, in all seriousness, that he doesn’t put much stock in “an American concept” like freedom of speech, it becomes very obvious that human rights commissions openly spit on the rights of the people of Canada in pursuit of a collection of activist agendas. When EGALE member Richard Warman can abuse the system to the point that a) he is the only plaintiff of note in all Section 13 cases heard by the CHRC so far in this century, and that b) he has won all but one* such case, it becomes very obvious that the HRCs aren’t even about human rights at all.

So yes, they are an affront to society. Or, at least, to a free society. They’d be right at home in Soviet Russia, China, or North Korea.

But can they expect to win their case against Marc Lemire? Of course they can…why shouldn’t they? When both the plaintiff against Marc Lemire and one of the lead investigators of the government agency which is supposed to hear the complaint and, in an ideal world, render a non-biased judgement thereupon, are both engaging in acts of online entrapment to make the charge of racism against Marc Lemire seem more solid, what other outcome can there possibly be?

* and in the case he lost, the Canadian Nazi Party, his target, only “won” its case because it did not, in fact, exist

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!

On Monday, counsel will file a motion requiring that Charlie Gillis, yours truly and other Maclean’s staff be admitted to cover the proceedings on the grounds that the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal are subject to the same rules of openness as any other Canadian court.

Is the secretive, self-protective “human rights” apparatus part of the Canadian legal system and its Common Law inheritance? Or is it, in fact, above the law, and a law unto itself?

Meanwhile, I note that Keith Martin, MP, seems to be moving from proposing a fairly narrow repeal of Section 13 (i) to something closer to a full-scale review of the “human rights” system. Many of us have made the same journey in recent months: the more you look into this racket, the more you repelled you are by its modus operandi.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!