Time Immortal

I’m reminded of a Ron White joke when I read this. Talking about some reform to death penalty law in Texas, White quipped: “Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty. My states’ puttin’ in an express lane.”

*sigh*

Learning that the is going to skip the vetting process for complaints entirely, which means that all complaints will now be referred directly to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal instead, is not happy news to hear in the wake of Canada’s 141st year.

Until now, the Ontario Human Rights Commission acted as a gatekeeper. It would vet complaints, and decide whether or not to send them on for a hearing at the Human Rights Tribunal.

The commission only dismissed about 7 per cent of complaints, referring 93 per cent for a hearing. That was a rather low bar to jump, but somehow this arrangement caused delays. With the processing of cases through the commission bureaucracy and a shortage of adjudicators, a large backlog accumulated. A typical case took about five years to be heard and decided.

Henceforth, the commission will have nothing to do with specific complaints. It will be “proactive,” that is, it will be rather like a free-floating royal commission or public inquiry, choosing its own assignments, armed with daunting powers of search and seizure. Earlier this year, the commission anticipated this role in two separate episodes, showing itself too ready to attribute racism both to rural Ontarian anglers and to Maclean’s magazine (and its contributor Mark Steyn), without evidence that went through the test of a hearing.

Complaints will now go directly to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The government is adding to the number of adjudicators. Moreover, where once the commission’s staff shepherded complaints, in their stead the new legislation has established the Human Rights Legal Support Centre. Though the estimable Raj Anand (a former head of the commission) will be its chair, this amounts to a firm of lawyers provided free to human rights complainants by the public purse.

Yeah, I’m sure that will improve things.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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All kudos to the Cat for getting a mention in the National Post. And such praising words, too!

[Wahida Valiante] compared Mark Steyn, the author of the Maclean’s article in question, titled The Future Belongs to Islam, to James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher who taught and tested his students on how Jews “created the Holocaust to gain sympathy.”

“They basically talk about the same theories,” she said. “This is not a civil dialogue.”

This isn’t BCF’s honourable mention, but it’s worth pausing here to reflect on what Wahida Valiante has to say: Mark Steyn’s quotations of Islamic community leaders saying — openly! — that Islam will dominate Europe are entirely the same thing as skepticism about the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

I can totally see the similarity.

She said that, in Germany, long before the Holocaust, “it was the words that set the stage for what happened later on…. We may end up with the same fate, and that is at the heart of why [the complainants] wanted to take this on.”

Yes, words were what really caused things to happen in Nazi Germany. Not the fact that Jews were legally denied property rights. Not the fact that Jews were denied the legal right to self-defence. Not the fact that the Jews were denied the right to move about freely, and ultimately to live and thrive as persons in the Reich. None of those things really caused problems — it was words.

Would the Reader be surprised to learn that, just prior to the Nazis taking power, the Weimar Republic had a very comprehensive body of anti-hate legislation? Is it perhaps possible that the Nazi reality became possible in part because the Weimar Republic muzzled freedom of expression?

Anyhow, on to BCF’s mention.

Both she and Ms. [Pearl Eliadis] had harsh words for the growing contingent of bloggers who lambaste the commissions, and have been invigorated by the prominence of the Maclean’s complaints.

Ms. Eliadis singled out one in particular, blazingcatfur.blogspot.com, as “poisonous” for referring to her panel at the conference as a “Texas cage match.”

She said it was evidence of the “appalling tone” that is “illustrative of how badly this debate has gone.”

Yeah, that’s poisonous talk, all right. A “Texas cage match” indeed…of course, perhaps for a lefty, any mention of Texas can be considered “poisonous”?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Canada’s road to polygamous immigration:

Well, we’ve been here once before. For the last couple of years, polygamy has been taking the first tentative steps toward normalization in Canada.

In May 2006 a Government funded study recommended that polygamy be legalized and [suggested that] criminalizing polygamy (?) could lead to damage to the women and children in such relationships. Also in May of 2006 it was discovered that the former governing Liberal Party “recognized polygamous relationships for limited purposes to enforce the financial obligations of husbands”…

Of course, how we in Canada can continue to object to polygamy — when we have already shot ourselves in the foot several times over (i.e. if the gender of the participants in a marriage doesn’t matter, why does the quantity of participants matter? Also, if we tolerate swingers, why not extend the same openness to multiple marriages?) — is something of a mystery, and I imagine that before too long we’ll see the legal proscriptions against it struck down by a Canadian court.

Chances are the plaintiff in the relevant case will be a Muslim, methinks.

It’s just getting better all the time:

It seems that the reforms to the will actually make the OHRC even worse than it already is — maximum awardable damages are being increased (or the limitations are being removed entirely), and the new “direct access model” for the tribunal will actually speed up the time it takes for the show trials to begin.

Like a raging, staggering drunk, the HRCs are simply spiralling out of control. No grip on reality. Incoherent. Completely lost.

What a bloody scam. It reminds me of that Ron White joke about the reforms to death penalty law in Texas: “Other states are getting rid of the death penalty; mah states puttin’ in an express lane!”

The error that dare not speak its name

Michael Coren takes home the “Best Title of an Arbitrary Long Period of Time” aware for his play on the colloquial phrase for lesbianism as he puts down his vote for what Canada’s biggest mistake was: allowing gay marriage.

What makes the national mistake of legalizing same-sex marriage unique in Canadian history is that to even discuss the issue is considered by many, particularly our elites, to be at the very least in extraordinarily bad taste. Although this is a valid and vital debate about social policy, anyone critiquing the status quo is likely to be marginalized as hateful, extreme or simply mad. Social conservatives aren’t just wrong, they’re evil.

The discussion, we are told, is over. Which is what triumphalist bullies have said for centuries after they win a battle. In this case, the intention is to marginalize anyone who dares to still speak out. In other words, to silence them.

…

Indeed, the deconstruction of marriage began not with the gay community asking for the right to marry but with the heterosexual world rejecting it. The term “common-law marriage” said it all. Marriage is many things, but it is never common. Yet with this semantic and legal revolution, desire and convenience replaced commitment and dedication. The qualifications, so to speak, were lowered.

And one does indeed have to qualify for marriage; just as one has, for example, to qualify for a pension or a military medal. People who have not reached the age of retirement don’t qualify for a pension, people who don’t serve in the Armed Forces don’t qualify for a military medal. It’s not a question of equality but requirement. A human right is intrinsic, a social institution is not.

The four great and historic qualifications for marriage always have been number, gender, age and blood. Two people, male and female, over a certain age and not closely related. Mainstream and responsible societies have sometimes changed the age of maturity, but incest has always been condemned and, by its nature, died out because of retardation.

As for polygamy, it’s making something of a comeback…

And in other parts of the world, incest is slowly becoming “normalized.” sex, sex, sex…it’s like all our post-Christian society cares to worry its head about is sex. And yet, strangely, the birthrate in most Western nations is staggeringly low.

History of Airplanes

Interesting initiative to provide “historical sketches of every aircraft ever built.” Might as well try to end on a lighter note, O Reader!

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