January 2008 Archives

I was delighted that CTV invited me to appear today to talk about my human rights commission interrogation. You can see the short clip here.

The interviewee who followed me was Khurrum Awan, one of the four students who are the front-men for Mohamed Elmasry's human rights complaint against Mark Steyn, since Elmasry himself isn't exactly, uh, suitable for media appearances. (Read Jason Kenney's gorgeous smack down of Awan and Elmasry here).

Most of Awan's comments were the same ones he and the rest of Elmo's Kids have been offering for months. But Awan said something bizarre, for the first time that I've heard. He claims that human rights commissions "are not government bodies" and that "it's completely false... to say [their penalties] amount to government censorship."

Huh?

Every human rights commission in Canada is part of the government. They were each created by a government law, directed by government appointees, funded by government budgets, staffed by government bureaucrats, and their orders have the force of the government behind them.

There are two possibilities here: Khurrum Awan is really that bad a lawyer, or he's lying through his teeth. It's hard to believe that, even with its affirmative action programs, Osgoode Hall Law School would admit someone so thick as to support the first possibility, or if they did, to graduate him. I believe the second possibility is more likely true: that, like his boss Mohamed Elmasry, Khurrum Awan will say anything and do anything to promote the cause of radical Islam and to undermine our Western freedoms. If that means lying to CTV and its viewers about the nature of a human rights commission, why, that's just a little bit of taqiyya.

Or maybe it's both option one and option two: because anyone who would utter such an easily checkable fib isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. When I first heard Awan was going to be on TV after me, I groaned. Not anymore: as far as I'm concerned, the more Canada hears from him and the rest of Elmo's Kids, the more damage they do to their credibility -- and, hopefully, to the human rights commissions themselves.

Keith Martin, a Liberal MP from Victoria, has introduced a private member's bill motion that is as groundbreaking as it is concise:

That, in the opinion of the House, subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act should be deleted from the Act.

This is important for several reasons:

1. It's evidence that the "undernews" of the abusive, unaccountable conduct of the human rights commissions has caught the attention of at least one MP (we can assume Sen. Anne Cools is watching things, too).

2. That MP is a socially progressive Liberal (formerly a red Reformer), whose human rights credentials with the Left are impeccable. Not only has he made international human rights one of his causes in Parliament, but he has personally walked the talk, serving on various Doctors Without Borders missions.

3. If a progressive, young, hip Liberal MP from an urban seat feels comfortable proposing this motion, it is a sign that reforming these commissions is politically safe, even for a Conservative government still worried about being tagged as "anti-human rights". Martin is a political entrepreneur who goes for winning opportunities. He once ran for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance; he crossed the floor to the Liberals and was rewarded by them; he has a very friendly relationship with the press. The man picks political winners. That alone is a signal to other MPs that it's safe to stand and be counted on this fight.

4. By taking the initiative -- and beating other MPs, especially Conseratives, to the punch -- Martin will get some well-deserved credit for leadership. But he'll also make it easy for Conservative MPs, even the Conservative government itself, to "follow" his example, rather than to lead. In a way, Martin takes the political risk; by supporting him, the Tories are merely sensible and bi-partisan followers. He's the point-man. 

5. The fact that Martin is a "visible minority" is irrelevant to most normal Canadians, but to the identity politics Left, it's a sign of his moral virtue, and thus makes him even more politically safe. 

Congratulations to Martin for doing the right thing. But more than that: he has given the government itself a political opening to amend this awful law. The Conservatives should ensure that Motion M-446 goes to a vote, and every one of them -- as well as other MPs of good faith from every party that cares about freedom -- should join with Martin to make his amendment law. 

I published a blog entry at this link today that had way too much fun describing a recent set-back suffered by Warren Kinsella. But I'm taking that post down now. Not out of compunction -- I'm sure that Kinsella, as the author of "Kicking Ass" and "The War Room" wouldn't want any -- but out of respect for a bystander who was inadvertently embarrassed when the details of Kinsella's private political set-back were made public. Not a lot of people could inveigle me into pulling a punch against Kinsella, but one friend did.

This morning I was interviewed on the "Mancow" show out of Chicago. It's the second-highest-rated morning show in American radio. When I was on hold waiting for my interview, I listened to the show for a few minutes. I've never heard radio like that before, ever -- extremely fast paced; fun; musical; smart; interactive; hilarious. It was like a mix between Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Rick Dees. I loved listening to it, and wish he was on air in Canada, too. You can catch my clip here at 2 hours and 27 minutes into the show. (I was caught off guard by his amazing invitation to join him in Toronto, and it was a bit of a clunker for me to decline on air, but other than that, I think it was a hit.)

I have a few more interesting things coming up regarding the human rights commission, including an interview with the BBC. But I think things are winding down now -- at least until the commission renders its decision on what to do with me: prosecute before a tribunal, or acquit.

I think the commission is in a bit of a pickle: if they prosecute me, they will precipitate another storm of public derision, and perhaps even political action. But if they acquit me -- in the face of my bald-faced contempt for them, and my de facto plea of "guilty!" -- they consent to their own abuse, and set a precedent for others called before them. Had I not videotaped my interrogation, that precedent would not have been known; now it's the most well-known thing about the commission (other than Richard Warman's serial complaints). I really don't know what they'll do. Judging by their molasses pace so far, I should expect to hear back from them some time before 2009.

Now that things have calmed down, I hope to attend to some of the very supportive e-mails that I've received these past weeks. I apologize to my well-wishers that I haven't had time to acknowledge their letters yet, nor to thank the many generous donors to my legal defence fund. I was truly touched by the moral -- and financial -- support I received. It's staggering to me that my Facebook "solidarity group" has over 900 members willing to stand by me. Thank you for that.

I have enjoyed blogging about my ordeal, and hope to keep up with it, at least one entry a day if possible. I'll still continue to write about the human rights commissions as news presents itself, but I plan to start writing about other subjects again, as I did before this deluge. There is a lot going on, with a provincial election imminent in Alberta, a federal election always a possibility, and fascinating developments around the world from the U.S. primaries to new successes in Iraq, to new challenges in places like China and Russia. I hope to talk about all of that -- and to continue to be an advocate for our fundamental freedoms and our western, classical liberal traditions.

I have given more thought to my idea, bruited here a few days ago, of setting up a bloggers' defence fund to protect against both spurious defamation lawsuits (such as those filed by, you guessed it, Richard Warman) and even to human rights commission attacks on political and religious speech, such as those faced by Free Dominion. I spoke with my corporate lawyer today, and if things go well, I hope to incorporate a not-for-profit corporation for that purpose within a month. I have already had two private requests for legal help, but I want to build a proper structure, including proper financial governance and compliance with issues like insurance law, before firing the starting gun. I invite advice on this subject, either in the comments section or privately.

Thanks again to my many friends in the blogosphere who have helped make a difference in the fight for freedom. I'm awed by the power of blogs -- many small voices (and a few big ones) -- united for a common, noble purpose. In the case of illiberal human rights commissions, we have started rolling the big boulder of change, and it's picking up momentum. I can hardly wait to see what happens next. 

The past three weeks have taught me about the power of the blogosphere to fill in the gaps left by the mainstream media. (Mickey Kaus calls these sorts of stories, the ones that the big media ignore but that talk radio and the Internet explore, the "undernews".) While I have yet to be interviewed by any of the three main Canadian TV networks since my interrogation, more than 5,000 bloggers have weighed in on the subject. Canadian news reporters have been AWOL, but Canadian talk radio interest has been strong, and many op-ed columnists have weighed in, too. My favourite has to be Rex Murphy's column, so beautiful it should be called a poem.)

I haven't read all of the blogs, but I'm pleased that most are supportive of free speech and oppose the human rights commissions. And most of those that are critical of me are merely critical for personal or partisan reasons. Even Warren Kinsella acknowledged today that he doesn't actually support the human rights commission's prosecution of me or Mark Steyn; his criticisms are merely personal.

I've already given too much ink -- and web traffic -- to him, but he is a symbol, I think, of the human rights commission's "constituency": partisan political activists who have a personal stake in the commissions, usually a financial one. Kinsella's first book, Web of Hate, is a kind of diary of these human rights commissions and their battles against powerless kooks and eccentrics who don't actually pose a threat to anyone. So of course Kinsella must weigh in to magnify the threat the commissions tackle, to defend the commissions' importance, and to defend their chief customer, his friend Richard Warman. In a way, that's all Kinsella is doing here: running a one-man political war-room for his buddy Warman, who has had the tar kicked out of his reputation in the blogosphere these past weeks.

It's usually good counsel to ignore folks like Kinsella, but sometimes they say things that ought to be corrected, at least for the record. I've generally ignored his weird biographies of me; I acknowledge that I'm a defamation lawyer, and that I have represented both plaintiffs and defendants, and have been a litigant myself. To compare defamation law with government-prosecuted political censorship in kangaroo courts, as Kinsella does, is simply a tactic of distration, not a real argument. (I'm also against counterfeit currency, forgery and fraud, but Kinsella is sensible enough not to call my support of those abridgements of free speech "hypocrisy".) But it's just plain weird to read things like his accusation that I've sued "Calgary Conservative riding associations".

I haven't, actually, and it's odd that the National Post, which is usually pretty good at fact-checking things (they are at least when I write for them) lets Kinsella's more partisan nose-stretchers onto their web pages.

In fact, before I helped found the Western Standard, I was a lawyer at Chipeur Advocates, which was then counsel of record for the Conservative Party (known as the Canadian Alliance back then). I didn't sue the party or its riding associations; I protected them from suits, including in several interesting defamation cases. After the 2000 election, I had the privilege of representing both Stockwell Day and Rod Love against a frivolous suit brought by a Liberal candidate who was tossed out of the Liberal Party because of his connections to the Taliban and his anti-Semitic TV broadcasts on a Calgary cable channel. (The suit was abandoned after the plaintiff had a, uh, difficult examination for discovery.) I even billed a small amount of time for Stephen Harper after he became leader and before I left the firm to start the magazine. This isn't just name-dropping (though it is a bit of that!); it's my way of saying (to my readers, and to the protectors of the Post's reputation for accuracy) that Kinsella's political fog ought not to be taken at face value. 

On his personal blog, Kinsella reminds me of a column I wrote for the Sun in 2004, and calls it hypocrisy.

I was writing about a Vancouver imam who didn't just lace his weekly sermons with "hate speech"; he went further, calling for violent action -- the killing of infidels. At least one of his congregants seems to have taken his message to heart:

Like Keegstra, Kathrada called Jews names -- "we are dealing with a people ... the brothers of the monkeys and the swine ... whose treachery is well known." Calling Jews brothers of monkeys and swine sounds like a schoolyard taunt more than high argument, but his point was clear. And just in case it wasn't, Kathrada made it clearer still: His sermons repeatedly called for the killing of Jews.

Poor old Keegstra. All he ever did was call the Jews power-hungry money-grubbers, and he was convicted of a crime. Kathrada whips up his congregants into a Jew-baiting frenzy -- and tells them to go and actually kill someone -- and he remains free.

There's some evidence that his Muslim acolytes actually followed his instructions, too. Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, who attended Kathrada's mosque, was in a fire-fight with Russian troops in Chechnya earlier this year. At least he took his violence outside of Vancouver.

The question remains: Why was Keegstra's offensive but non-violent anti-Semitism taken to the Supreme Court, but Kathrada's is tolerated with impunity?

That's not hypocrisy; that's my whole point. Hate speech laws, both in the criminal code and the human rights commissions, are applied arbitrarily and don't deal with real threats to real rights. We know about their arbitrariness; otherwise, Richard Warman, Kinsella's friend, would be charged by now for calling Sen. Anne Cools a c*nt and a n*gger. A consistent application of "human rights law" would probably have Kinsella charged with both illegal sexism and religious bigotry. It's not just interesting to ask why Keegstra was charged with a hate crime and Kathrada wasn't, it's legally important: a law that is applied irregularly loses both its moral and legal force. It's really the difference between rule of law and rule of men. Another way of saying it would be "equal justice under law".

My column was not a call for the laying of "hate speech" charges, though it expressed my curiousity (and offered my own explanation) for why the government didn't lay those charges. It was a public question about why someone who called for murder -- and seems to have got it from one congregant -- wasn't even charged with real crimes. That crucial distinction was conveniently redacted by this these partisans, too.

I re-read that column, and I like it. I'll reprint it here in its entirety. I think I made a fairly clear distinction between "inciting hate" and actually "inciting violence". And after it, I'll reprint my column on another case, that of David Ahenakew. 

I write this to correct the record; I've been a pretty consistent advocate of free speech since I was young -- I even arranged a debate at my law school between Doug Christie, a free speech lawyer for the likes of Keegstra and Zundel, versus Tom Kuttner, a human rights/hate speech advocate from New Brunswick. Every professor but one boycotted the debate -- but not the students. On a Friday afternoon, the biggest hall in the law school was packed for what I think was the best debate I've ever seen in my life. Of course the professors boycotted it; far easier than engaging in debate.

(A Jewish law student asked Christie why we couldn't simply outlaw hate; Christie patiently pointed out that "hate" is a feeling, and it usually stems from some grievance, either legitimate or not. Outlawing "hate" is as impossible as outlawing any other feeling, he argued, and, if anything, such a law would likely only deepen the feeling of grievance. That's pretty clear thinking and tight logic; I haven't yet heard a refutation of it, and I doubt our school's professors could have done so even if they had deigned to attend the biggest extra-curricular event of the year.) 

In closing, here is the full text of my Sun columns on Younus Kathrada, and David Ahenakew.  

Years ago, Jim Keegstra was charged with and convicted of the crime of spreading hatred. It was a seemingly endless case, working its way up to the Supreme Court.

It cost millions of tax dollars, and more than that, was an energetic expression of the government's opposition to racial and religious discord. Libertarians were rightly upset that speech -- no matter how vile -- could be criminalized. But a precedent was set, along with a message.

Fast forward to the present: News out of Vancouver is the imam of the major mosque there, one Younus Kathrada, has been whipping up his congregants each week with anti-Semitic hatred that would make Keegstra sound positively like a Zionist.

Like Keegstra, Kathrada called Jews names -- "we are dealing with a people ... the brothers of the monkeys and the swine ... whose treachery is well known." Calling Jews brothers of monkeys and swine sounds like a schoolyard taunt more than high argument, but his point was clear. And just in case it wasn't, Kathrada made it clearer still: His sermons repeatedly called for the killing of Jews.

Poor old Keegstra. All he ever did was call the Jews power-hungry money-grubbers, and he was convicted of a crime. Kathrada whips up his congregants into a Jew-baiting frenzy -- and tells them to go and actually kill someone -- and he remains free.

There's some evidence that his Muslim acolytes actually followed his instructions, too. Rudwan Khalil Abubaker, who attended Kathrada's mosque, was in a fire-fight with Russian troops in Chechnya earlier this year. At least he took his violence outside of Vancouver.

The question remains: Why was Keegstra's offensive but non-violent anti-Semitism taken to the Supreme Court, but Kathrada's is tolerated with impunity?

Kathrada doesn't just call for the death of Jews. He slams Muslims who dare to believe in peaceful co-existence -- you know, Ottawa's dream of multiculturalism. Kathrada claims such Muslims aren't real Muslims, and no truce with Jews can ever be had.

Kathrada also uses his tax-exempt mosque to trumpet the cause of Hamas, a notorious terrorist group responsible for countless suicide bombings.

Why hasn't Kathrada been charged with a hate crime? Why haven't he and his mosque been charged under Canada's new anti-terrorism laws for promoting and aiding terrorist groups like Hamas? (To date, not a single charge has been laid under this law.)

The answer is obvious. It's easy to pick on a politically incorrect country bumpkin like Jim Keegstra. Some dumb white guy making dumb remarks about Jews -- go get 'em. There's not a well-funded, politically correct Dumb Guy Defence Committee ready to roll for his defence.

But ever since 9/11, liberals throughout the West have decided an anti-Arab backlash would be worse than Arab terrorism itself. So true risks like Kathrada are ignored, in the name of not making a fuss. The liberal thinking is that charging someone like Kathrada would only give a bad name to all Muslims.

Of course, it would do the opposite -- it would point out that not all Muslims are in league with such terror tactics, and that the few who are will be rooted out.

Not charging the handful of Muslims who are haters is like not charging the handful of Italians who are part of the Mafia -- it is a misguided act of political correctness. The majority of Muslims -- we hope -- do not support Kathrada. He should be made an example of, not have excuses made for him. Justice calls for it.

:::

I just watched a British documentary about David Icke, the British alien-conspiracy theorist, and the "anti-racist" group that opposed his visit to Vancouver, led by Richard Warman.

This segment of the documentary showed Icke doing a media tour of the city, and expressing his frustration at interviews being cancelled because of political pressure from Warman's group. That's how political disagreements ought to be done -- no state censorship, just moral persuasion. If protesters can bring peaceful pressure to bear on a radio show to cancel an interview, good for them. Judging by the surprisingly warm reception Icke received in Vancouver, it certainly hasn't stopped him from getting his strange theories out there.

There are so many surprising details that I did not expect:

• Icke comes across as a very charming and well-meaning man who truly believes that he must share his alien theories with the world; it's the street punks in Warman's "anti-racist coalition" who come across as the uncivil ones.
• It's clear that Icke's theories are large and weird; anti-Semitism is just one ingredient in his sci-fi stew. The importance given by the "anti-racists" to combating such a non-threat is likely explained by the fact that they're just some trouble-making kids hamming it up for a foreign cameraman. Vancouver, with its warm weather, easy drugs, fat welfare cheques and big labour unions fomenting protests, has a lot of these "activists". But what's the excuse of the once-credible Canadian Jewish Congress? It's clear as the video progresses that while the "coalition" does successfully scotch some media appearances for Icke, they -- and the disproportionate attention spent on him by the CJC -- actual provide Icke with a tremendous amount of press and credibility, the documentary included. As I've said before, the CJC has a knack of taking weird nobodies (like Ernst Zundel) and turning them into big somebodies.
• All in all, it looks more like a fun afternoon's "work" for some Vancouver street urchins, with lots of booze involved. Richard Warman is the odd man out: he's not a street kid just having fun with his fellow nose-pierced left-coasters; he's a lawyer, who has found a way of turning this sort of thing into a money-making career. It feels out of joint because it is out of joint. That's the stuff for kids, not grown men.

But the next video clip in the documentary turns a shade darker. It's clear that no-one else cares about censoring an alien-conspiracy theorist -- more people find the prospect entertaining than worrying. The smartest line in the segment comes from an older lady in line to see Icke who, when challenged with his foolish theories, says "so what. Let him make a fool of himself if that's what he's doing." That's what grown-ups say -- and grown-up societies too. They are tolerant of eccentrics like Icke, and tolerant the motley crew that harasses him.

But Warman and his young "activists" are upset that no-one cares. So they decide to do what one of Warman's wards calls "the ultimate expression of free speech": they're going to physically attack Icke in public, by throwing a pie in his face, to "humiliate" him. Uh, that ain't free speech fellas, that's assault. Warman himself proposes the idea, and does a lot of nodding and winking to the camera, as if he would never counsel the commission of a crime.

The finale of the video is the attack -- and a lamer spectacle is hard to find. The crowd at the bookstore is large and engrossed in Icke's talk. The rag-tag "coalition" -- now just down to the handful of professional protesters -- walk in slowly and labouriously, one wearing the standard issue paper mache outfit, disrupting his event, and shouting out a few stunted heckles that, despite days of planning, manage neither to inform nor entertain. I suppose the kids in charge of the rhyming chants were seconded to some other rally that day.

Warman's kids are roundly booed by the crowd -- another flop. Before they all bravely run away, one of Warman's wards lobs the pie at Icke, grazing his arm, but falling to the bookstore floor below, hitting a children's book stand, ruining some of the books. Icke again comes across as the bigger man; he doesn't call for police to press assault charges -- as was his right, and as others have done. He recovers his composure immediately (actually, unlike his timid assaulters, he never lost it), cracks a joke, licks some of the cake off his sleeve and continues. The "coalition" retreats to crow about their great victory.

Until this video, I only knew Warman as a collection of facts and figures -- as a serial complainer-of-fortune at the Canadian human rights commission, and someone who conned the Canadian Jewish Congress into supporting his "anti-racist" antics, to their deep discredit. Now I have a much better picture of the man: a jumped-up, self-righteous student politician who is no longer a student, a political activist who can't connect with or persuade real people in the court of public opinion, a petty squabbler who hasn't yet outgrown the childish antics of leftist street theatre and pie-throwing.

It's not just the weirdness of his choice of racist dragons to slay (kooky David Icke? Unknown Internet bloggers?) or his hypocrisy (a lawyer counselling an illegal assault; a "human rights activist" posting bigoted comments about Canada's first Black, female Senator). It's that he's taken this childish game to an agency of the Canadian government, and they've agreed to let him continue his stunts in their tax-funded court.

David Icke is not a danger. He's an amusing eccentric. Icke has an optimistic desperation in him -- he simply must reveal his Truth to the world, and does so earnestly no matter what obstacles are thrown at him -- combined with an obvious flair for the dramatic. I don't think anyone who watches these clips would disagree that dinner with Icke would be a much more passable evening than spending an hour with Richard Warman and his semi-literate street urchins.

Richard Warman is the greater danger. Not in and of himself -- except to those against whom he organizes pie-assaults. But when his childish, petty, malicious, abusive antics jump from a band of minor hoodlums into human rights commissions, then it moves from poor street theatre to worrisome abuse of a government office.

I don't think anyone can watch these videos and genuinely think that Richard Warman is a genuine human rights activist. The fact that he generates nearly half of all section 13 complaints at the CHRC is prima facie proof that they are little more than a group of voyeurs enabling Warman's political fantasies at taxpayer expense -- to the detriment of civil rights, and to the disrepute of the administration of justice.

UPDATE: After thinking about this for a bit longer, I know what it is that stood out the most: the glee of "humiliating" Icke. Real human rights activists don't set out to humiliate anyone. With Warman, it's one of his driving motives. That video clip, where he counsels the pie assault, shows what makes him tick. It's repellant -- far more than some kook who think Jews are alien reptiles. 

Richard Warman -- the former human rights commissioner who went on to become the commission's most avid complainant -- is at it again.

Warman, and his allies at the Canadian Jewish Congress, have issued a jubilant press release. They've managed to convince Regina's police to lay criminal hate speech charges against a nobody with no following who they're about to turn into a somebody with a huge audience. The Canadian Jewish Congress, and its executive director, Bernie Farber, are the super-agents who turned Ernst Zundel into an international figure. They're about to work their magic again.

(I'm surprised; if I understand the news correctly, this charge will require the approval of the Attorney General. Will he really go along with this -- especially on the heels of the courts tossing a similar case in the same province?)

But that's not what's interesting. After all, the CJC has become increasingly politically irrelevant, as the country and the Jewish community move away from their dyed in the wool leftism. Their decision to stand by Warman, despite recent revelations of his own anti-Black, anti-women bigotry, has only hastened their spiral into irrelevance.

What's interesting is how foolish the CJC's figurehead co-presidents, Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, are willing to allow themselves to look. Their press release on these new hate charges was issued on exactly the same day that Bulka and Abitbol published an Op-Ed in the Canadian Jewish News trying to distance themselves from the excesses of human rights commissions.

I've spoken before on this blog about the proper legal limits on speech -- ranging from laws against forgery and fraud, to laws against defamation.

How out of synch must the CJC be with Canadians and Jews before its name crosses over into "false advertising"? Or, in the words of the human rights commissions, before the CJC, because of the bullying censorship committed in its name, causes Jews to be held in "hatred and contempt"?

The Alberta Human Rights Commission has responded to the wave of criticism that has pummelled them since news of my interrogation has spread. Here is a letter to the Edmonton Journal by Charlach Mackintosh, the commission's chief; a version of it ran in the Calgary Herald, too.

Mackintosh and his drones aren't the quickest draws in the West; their rapid response took two weeks to get out the door, but that's pretty good for a bureaucracy that has taken two years simply to get me into interrogation, and took five full years to issue a ruling in the Boissoin case.

Of course, the commission's tone-deaf, weeks-late response isn't the point. It's that what Mackintosh wrote simply isn't true.

In his letter, Mackintosh implied that the commission was an easy-going, voluntary process. I was merely "invited" to participate. No bullying here. But look at what sections 23 and 24 of the Alberta Human Rights Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act actually says:

an investigator may do any or all of the following:

                                 (a)    subject to subsection (2), enter any place at any reasonable time and examine it;

                                 (b)    make inquiries orally or in writing of any person who has or may have information relevant to the subject‑matter of the investigation;

                                 (c)    demand the production for examination of records and documents, including electronic records and documents, that are or may be relevant to the subject‑matter of the investigation;

                                 (d)    on giving a receipt for them, remove any of the things referred to in clause (c) for the purpose of making copies of or extracts from them.

(2)  An investigator may enter and examine a room or place actually used as a dwelling only if

                                 (a)    the owner or person in possession of it consents to the entry and examination, or

                                 (b)    the entry and examination is authorized by a judge under section 24.

• I was interviewed on the XM satellite radio channel "POTUS '08". Click here to hear it. I'm not sure how a radio channel dedicated to the 2008 U.S. presidential election found a way to dedicate 15 minutes to a case of Canadian censorship, where the CBC's several radio channels have been silent on the subject.

• One of Canada's great journalists, Peter Worthington, weighs in.

• My TVO interview is now posted to the Internet, here. I've seen some blog commentary that Steve Paikin was too tough in his questioning of me. I don't think so; if anything, he made a generous allocation of airtime to me, and restated my views where necessary to the panel that followed. I do think Paikin was too focused on the subject matter of the cartoons. To publish or not to publish them was a news story two years ago; today's news is that a government agency is interrogating a journalist for thought crimes. It's not really important what the particular thought crime is -- although my particular thought crime, offending radical Muslims, may explain the CBC's silence on the subject.

• I watched a few minutes of the discussion panel that followed, and Ziyaad Mia said something strange -- that I had tried to ban cartoons once, myself. At first, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what he was talking about. I think I know: When I was a university student in the 1990s, the campus newspaper ran a cartoon that I regarded as anti-Semitic. I don't remember the details of it -- I think it compared the State of Israel to the Nazis.

But I didn't call the police, or the human rights commission. I didn't sue -- or riot or commit arson. I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper, and tried to organize others to do the same. Without digging up that old letter to refresh my memory, I'd like to think that I would have complained that the newspaper was published with the mandatory dues collected from students -- a tax -- and that they should publish that crap with their own money, not mine. If anyone can dig up my letter -- if anyone cares -- I'll happily publish it here.

The fact that Mia can't distinguish between my liberal approach to political disagreement -- using peaceful, non-coercive methods, writing letters and calling for political accountability of a student newspaper funded by student money -- as opposed to the illiberal approach of state censorship of private media and private citizens, was a pretty weak rebuttal. Besides being factually wrong, it's a personal attack, an attempt to paint me as a hypocrite. Even if I were, what does that have to do with the principles at stake?

Paikin's final question to me posed the same sort of query: am I being intellectually consistent? After all, as the great legal scholar and intellectual, Warren Kinsella, has written, I am a defamation lawyer, and have represented both plaintiffs and defendants, and I have occasionally been a litigant myself. Kinsella says I'm a "fraud" and "full of crap" because I believe defamation law is legitimate law, but believe that government censorship through human rights commissions isn't legitimate.

That's not a real argument, of course. Like Mia's, it's an attempt to discredit me personally -- not my ideas. As I told Paikin, I support laws against other forms of speech, like fraud, forgery or copyright violation. Kinsella sets up a false dichotomy: I must either support all legal restrictions on speech, or none; I must either support both real courts and kangaroo courts, or neither.

Defamation law has evolved through 400 years of legislation and litigation, and is an essential part of our British legal tradition. It strikes a balance between the rights of plaintiffs to protect their reputations and the rights of defendants to criticize those reputations (and the rights of the public to hear different points of view). There are a dozen lawful defences to such a lawsuit, including truth and fair comment. And, of course, it is heard by real courts of law, with even older traditions of natural justice.

I've sued and been sued under defamation law. I believe some cases are valid, and some aren't -- just as some cases of fraud are upheld, and some aren't. I just don't believe that government censorship, as a newfangled, politically correct species of law, is either legitimate or comparable to other centuries-old jurisprudence.

• The above is far too substantial a rebuttal to Kinsella, who is merely engaging in some spin -- his specialty -- for his friend, Richard Warman. That's actually what surprised me the most about Paikin's interview: that he quoted a turbo-partisan dirty-trickster in what was actually a debate about ideas.

I don't think Kinsella is a thinker; he's a doer, or more accurately an undoer. And his goal here was to confuse and chill the growing media scrutiny of human rights commissions generally, and Warman in particular. In a series of over-the-top blog posts (here, here, here, etc.), he has threatened a number of Warman's critics with defamation lawsuits if they didn't stop. It was classic war room style: stampede your opponents with enough threats and half-truths to panic them into a hasty over-reaction. To my regret, that happened to one of my favourite bloggers.

That's not defamation law, by the way. Defamation law is conducted through court filings and sworn testimony. Kinsella was clearly trying to avoid defamation law, by dressing up a hyperventilated blog entry as something legal and serious, rather than his regular partisan pap.

Kinsella and Warman are lawyers by profession, but they try to avoid real lawsuits -- better to win by the mere threat of one. Compare their high school braggadocio towards little bloggers, with this rather meek demand letter sent to the Post in response to a column I had written about him. It was properly ignored; Warman didn't dare sue a monied defendant with real lawyers, and Kinsella chose his paycheque over speaking up for his principles. Unlike spurious human rights suits, a defamation action here would neither be a sure thing nor a cash jackpot.

I get defamation threats all the time, like this one, just this week from Syed Soharwardy. (Here is my reply.)

That reply is not just me being lippy; it's knowing the difference between empty, blustering, Kinsella-ish threats made as a political tactic, and a real legal problem. (I'm pleased to say that, in nearly four years of publishing, the Western Standard was never once served with a defamation lawsuit, despite receiving 50 or so Kinsella specials. Getting your facts straight is the best defence, of course. But far fewer lawsuits are settled because of the facts and law of a case than because of the fight itself.)

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 Kinsellian 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 correct 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, Catholic Insight 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 are details to work out, but the concept is sound. If I were a leftist, I'd call it a blogger's union. It's really a mutual aid society, where bloggers pool their resources to afford together what they cannot get on their own: competent legal advisors who aren't easily bamboozled by the Kinsellas and Warmans of this world.

I look forward to reader comments on this idea. 

• The Glenn Beck show on CNN went well. Ms. Underestimated links to a video clip of it here. I'll keep you posted on when Mark Steyn and I are rescheduled for Bill O'Reilly's show, and if a tentative invitation to CTV's The Verdict firms up.

• Great new columns by Calgary's Barry Cooper and Vancouver's Terry O'Neill.

• Somehow, Iowahawk managed to get a copy of the notes taken by Shirlene McGovern, the "human rights officer" who interrogated me. Check it out here.

• My lawyer has received two upset calls from the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The first, from Shirlene McGovern herself, complained about the publicity she is receiving. I'm surprised at her reaction -- you'd think someone who regularly interrogates citizens about their private political views would be comfortable with the concept of public scrutiny. Imagine if she actually had to expose her private thoughts, not just her public actions as a government officer.

• A few days later, another commission officer called my lawyer, complaining about this blog. I told my lawyer to invite them to write a letter to the editor to me. I haven't received it yet, so I presume they're just going to file another human rights complaint against me.

• My YouTube videos have crested 400,000 views. A week ago, I installed a statistics program to track the number of visits to this site. It won't surprise you that employees at the human rights commission have been very frequent visitors. At first, as a taxpayer, I was upset that Officer McGovern was surfing the net during business hours, looking for her name. But I realized that every minute she was Googling herself -- ego-surfing, it's called -- was a minute she wasn't interrogating some other poor shmoe. 

• Officer McGovern isn't the only one upset. The left-wing Canadian Jewish Congress, the special-interest lobby group most responsible for criminalizing speech in Canada, is obviously feeling some political heat because of what they have wrought. Their figurehead co-presidents, Rabbi Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol, wrote a muddled column called "Some human rights complaints are frivolous". That's actually less mealy-mouthed than it sounds, given that the commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crime hearings. But what is the standard for acquittal that the CJC proposes?

"Human rights commissions must constantly recalibrate where the balance lies between free expression and its abridgement, but the determination of where to place the fulcrum must always be based on the statutory standard that such expression is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

and

"the appropriate application of statutory criteria is our best defence against those who would eliminate the law to protect their interests, and against those who would use the law to promote a narrow political agenda."

In other words, the concept of a "pre-crime" is still fine by them. No-one has to be exposed to hatred or contempt for someone to be found guilty. It just has to be "likely" that could happen. And hatred or contempt -- emotional feelings -- are enough. The CJC doesn't even think that a discriminatory act is necessary for a conviction. They support the notion of thought crimes.

If the human rights commissions apply the standards in this fuzzy-headed op-ed, Mark Steyn and I will still be convicted.

What an embarrassment the CJC has become. Essentially they are pleading for Steyn and I as special cases. Is it because I'm a Jew and Steyn sounds like he might be, too? Is it because we're being sued by Muslim fanatics? Or is it because the CJC is taking some political heat for their support of these illiberal, anti-intellectual commissions, and the CJC's alliance with Richard Warman, the serial human rights complainant and foul-mouthed, anti-Black, misogynist bigot?

The CJC's op-ed will be seen as nothing but more proof for anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who claim -- with historical and statistical validity -- that the hate speech provisions are a tool used mainly by secular, leftist Jews to punish their anti-Semitic critics. But now that those same precedents are being used against Jews and philo-Semites by Islamic fascists, the CJC wants to change the rules.

I know these two men. I attended Bulka's synagogue when I lived in Ottawa, and I served on a board with Abitbol. They're reasonable enough fellows who always seemed to me to be open to debate and disagreement. But they're not the ones running the CJC; they're the political window dressing. The engine behind the CJC's censorship campaign is Bernie Farber, the CJC's full-time executive director.

I first met Farber in the 1990s when I was a student. I remember him opening a speech in Calgary with the phrase, "those of us in the business of fighting hate know that..." It was the most honest thing I've ever heard him say: "fighting hate" was Farber's business. And if fighting hate is your business, you need to have hate to fight. Bernie knows how to develop his market. Agents provocateurs like Warman help drum up that business when it doesn't occur naturally.

I've always laughed at the fact that Mohamed Elmasry, the anti-Semite suing Mark Steyn, and Syed Soharwardy, the misogynist radical suing me, each claimed to represent all Muslims. Elmasry calls his organization the "Canadian Islamic Congress" and Soharwardy calls his the "Islamic Supreme Council". Neither represents more than a handful of Muslims -- and in Soharwardy's case, even that is in question.

Does the impressively named Canadian Jewish Congress really represent Canadian Jews today?

Three generations ago, the CJC's purpose was to help assimilate Jewish immigrants to Canada, and to help recruit Jews to join the Canadian army during the Second World War. I'd call that "conservative". A quick read of their website today shows that they're basically the Liberal Party at prayer -- feting Justin Trudeau when they're not calling for the construction of government housing projects. At least they dropped their environmental and Aboriginal policies, which kept them busy ten year ago.

Offensive and anti-Semitic free speech didn't kill the Jews during the Holocaust. Murderous men did, and they only did when real rights and freedoms were destroyed -- the right to property; the right to life; the right to equality before the law; mobility rights; freedom of religion; freedom of association. Violent acts killed the Jews, not "feelings" of "contempt". How revolting that the official Jews now propose limiting real rights and freedoms in the vain hope that will stop people from feeling "hatred" for them. I'm no anti-Semite, but if I'm anything to go by, the CJC, and the other supporters of these unconstitutional laws are the ones engendering feelings of contempt. 

For readers tuning in for the first time, here's a quick summary of what's going on.

1. Two years ago, the now-defunct Western Standard magazine reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. I was the publisher.

2. In response, a radical Muslim imam named Syed Soharwardy asked the Calgary Police Service to arrest me. They didn't, of course. So Soharwardy complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, a government agency. Here's his hand-scrawled complaint; here's my reply. For two years, using government lawyers and taxpayers money, they have been pursuing me, infringing on my natural rights of free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

3. On January 11th, a government "human rights officer" interrogated me for 90 minutes. Instead of bowing my head, I used the opportunity to challenge the moral and legal basis of the complaint, and the human rights commission itself.

4. I recorded the interrogation and posted video clips to YouTube. In the past week, they have been viewed nearly 400,000 times and were at one point the fifth most watched videos on all of YouTube. Though Canadian talk radio shows and op-ed columnists have covered the story well, I have seen only one newspaper report on the subject. I can't understand why mainstream reporters and editors do not think it's newsworthy that a publisher can be summoned by a government bureaucrat, and grilled as to his political thoughts. I'm pleased, though, that the support from pundits has come not just from the right, but from the enlightened left.

5. I've got some ideas of what people can do. Although my case is being prosecuted by the hapless, lame-duck provincial government of Alberta, it is politically more likely that change will come first to the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission. That commission is currently hounding columnist Mark Steyn on similar thought crime charges.

6. The blog posts below expand on various details of the case. If you are interested in the videos, they are all posted below, with commentary. Here are three of the more popular clips:

my opening statement:

me being asked about possible thoughtcrimes:

and a slip of the tongue by my interrogator.

I just finished reading Glenn Beck's book, An Inconvenient Book, so I'm particularly looking forward to being on his TV show tonight. It's on CNN across Canada, and the transcript should show up here.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has postponed his show with Mark Steyn and me until another day -- I'll let you know when that will be.

• Tonight I appeared on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. I'm told the video will be uploaded tomorrow, so I'll link to it then. (Here's producer Alan Echenberg's blog.)

• My Globe and Mail commentary yesterday was the "most read" and "most e-mailed" story in the newspaper, and attracted nearly 500 reader comments in the twelve or so hours that comment thread was open. Perhaps the Globe's readers are more interested in the government interrogation of a Canadian publisher than the paper's news editors, who have ignored the story so far.

• The Nose on Your Face guys have come up with some funny chotchkes for sale, with my battle as their theme. I predict that the "Ezra Akhbar" bib

and the "It's my bloody right to do so" baby

jumper

will be particularly brisk sellers with politically aware infants.

• Speaking of which, that same space I had on the Globe's website yesterday was given today to the four law students who have been promoting the complaints against Mark Steyn. The actual legal complainant in those cases is Mohamed Elmasry, as you can see here and here. But the CIC has made the public relations decision not to make Elmasry their front man -- probably a good idea, given his public approval for terrorist attacks. His four surrogates are slightly more polite company, but only slightly.

What's interesting about today's essay by the four students (I'll call them Elmasry's Kids) is that they have substantially changed their arguments over the past months.

Their original argument was a blatant call for state control of Canadian media -- what I call bringing Saudi values to Canada. That didn't really go over well -- it merely reinforced the CIC's well-deserved image of grievance-mongering. Here's Peggy Wente's brilliant take-down.

Elmasry's Kids soon took a second approach. Although their formal complaints remain unchanged -- they still demand government punishment of Maclean's -- they changed their talking points to argue for media "balance" and downplayed their earlier demand for cash from Maclean's. This tack didn't go over too well, either, earning scorching rebukes even from fellow Muslims.

Last week, Elmasry's Kids slouched back to a third line of defence -- that Canada is awash in anti-Muslim bigotry, and that human rights commissions were their only hope. It was less the rhetoric of radical Islam, Elmasry-style, and more the boring old mush of professional complainers -- not surprising, considering their new and official allegiance with the Marxist Canadian Federation of Students and other labour unions.

Today's piece in the Globe tries out yet a new argument: that human rights commissions are the only accessible form of justice for poor people -- poor, like four lawyers are poor. It's an absurd comparison because these commissions do not deal with the kind of law that normal people, especially poor people, need -- contract law, divorce law, labour law, real estate law, small claims court, etc. It deals with political grievances. It's not poverty law; it's the opposite in fact -- the legal playground for the rich and malicious.

But what I found most interesting about the letter is that it has switched to the defensive. It still makes the perfunctory grievances of the cliche left. But I think Elmasry's Kids are realizing what I think is the truth: that their frontal assault on Canadian values like free speech, freedom of the press and the separation of mosque and state has kicked a beehive. Canadians who hadn't even heard of human rights commissions were woken up to the threat they pose to our liberties. Even the Canadian left has started to speak out against them. Federal cabinet ministers -- including the one in charge of multiculturalism -- are pushing back, too.

I've written before that I was astounded that the videos of my own human rights interrogation have been viewed 400,000 times now. I believe that's a sign of a pent-up and growing backlash against illiberal values being injected into Canada. That injection was slow and quiet until recently. Elmasry's Kids changed that with their noisy assault on Maclean's. I think it's backfiring on them, and I think their latest essay acknowledges it. I hope they're right. This morning I was woken up with a phone call from yet another federal cabinet minister -- the fifth to call me so far -- cheering my battle against these commissions. As always, I pressed my caller to make reforms to the commissions.

I saw on one of the many blogs discussing this issue a quote from Winston Churchill, when he was fighting fascists:

we will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best. Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.

I'm beginning to think that Elmasry's Kids will lose their battle, and I'm beginning to think they know it.

Here is my commentary, published today on the Globe and Mail's website. Some excerpts:

One of the complainants against me is someone I would describe as a radical Muslim imam, Syed Soharwardy. He grew up in the madrassas of Pakistan and he lectures on the Saudi circuit. He advocates sharia law for all countries, including Canada. His website is rife with Islamic supremacism — offensive to many Canadian Jews, gentiles, women and gays. But his sensitivities — his Saudi-Pakistani values — have been offended by me.

And so now the secular government of Alberta is enforcing his fatwa against the cartoons.

...How did it come to be that rough and, I would say, bigoted men such as Mr. Soharwardy and Mr. Elmasry could, by simply claiming that their tender feelings were hurt, sic a government bureaucracy on a magazine, or anyone for that matter?

...What a strange place Canada is in 2008, where the police care more about human rights than the human rights commissions do, where fundamentalist Muslims use hate-speech laws drafted by secular Jews, and where a government bureaucrat can interrogate a publisher for 90 minutes, and be shocked when he won't shake her hand in greeting.

The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren sums it up concisely:

That's why you go to an HRC: because your case is not good enough to stand up in a legitimate court of law. And because you don't want to invest your own time and money, but would rather the taxpayer provide officers to do the paperwork, and pick up the tab. Instead, you want a slam-dunk way in which you can victimize someone you don't like, by playing the victim yourself, without any financial or legal consequences, except to him. "Human rights" commissions were designed to provide just this service, for the use of persons who are both litigious, and lazy.

The commissions are set up to attract complaints from people who don't like free debates, who don't like the rigors of a real court, or who simply see a punitive government process in which they'd like to entangle their enemies.

Is it any surprise that such a system appeals to foreign-born radical jihadis like Mohamed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy, and domestic litigators of fortune like Richard Warman?

My criticisms of Canada's so-called human rights commissions have been on two grounds: their goal is the unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and their methods are procedurally unsound and arbitrary.

To those I would add a third critique: the commissions themselves have become corrupted. They have been turned into tax-funded machines for the personal vendettas of some very angry men, who now resort to planting "evidence" of racism on suspects. It's not entrapment; it's positively framing people. Read on.

The unconstitutional substance and arbitrary procedures of these commissions make them improper to begin with -- which is one reason why the federal (and Alberta) commissions have a 100% conviction rate for thought crimes cases. But the personal corruption of the commissions makes them a disgrace, even on their own terms. As Woody Allen joked in Bananas, "this trial is a travesty. A travesty of a mockery of a sham!"

In real court systems, travesties of mockeries of shams can be taken to the Judicial Council, where rogue judges can be held to account. But human rights commissions aren't run by judges, and there is no ethical oversight, other than from legislatures. That's my earlier argument: the insanity of these commissions has to be brought to the attention of the commissions' only masters -- politically accountable legislators.

Ten years ago, I worked in the Canadian Parliament as the question period co-ordinator for the Official Opposition. (For American readers, question period is a daily, 45-minute question and answer session where government cabinet ministers are peppered with questions by opposition legislators. It's like a press conference, but with other politicians asking the questions, not reporters.) It's probably the quickest and easiest venue for accountability on a specific problem like this.

If I were writing QP questions for the opposition Liberal Party today, I'd hang the antics of the human rights commission around the neck of the man who is ultimately responsible for it -- and in the case of the federal HRC, that would be Rob Nicholson.

I'd probably start off like this:

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Justice Minister. One of his staff, Dean Steacy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, has admitted under oath that, as part of his job, he joined a neo-Nazi website called the "Stormfront", and posted racist remarks there. Can the Minister please explain why taxpayers' dollars are paying someone in his department to join neo-Nazi groups to spread bigotry?

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister tell us: was this a rogue act by a single hate-monger who infiltrated the human rights commission? Or did others at the commission approve of this race-baiting strategy, too? Did the minister himself know? Or did he turn a blind eye to state-sponsored bigotry in his own department?  

Mr. Speaker, it's not just Dean Steacy who spreads hate in the name of human rights, using taxpayers' money. Richard Warman does it, too. He used to work for the CHRC, but then he left to work with them, filing dozens of complaints at the CHRC about hateful words. But now it turns out that Warman himself writes many of those hateful words, including calling Senator Anne Cools a "n*gger" and a "c*nt", and then complaining about it. Will the Minister immediately intervene to stay all of Richard Warman's complaints, and launch an internal investigation to see whether the evidence he planted was done with the collusion of his old friends at the CHRC?

Mr. Speaker, given the confession of the Minister's employee, Dean Steacy, that the CHRC plants racist evidence that the CHRC then uses to investigate and convict others, and given the proof that the CHRC's most prolific complainant has planted racist, sexist remarks, will the Minister launch an independent review of all so-called "hate message" cases that the CHRC has ever conducted to see if they were all corrupted by planted evidence?

Criticism of the human rights commissions has generally come from conservatives. But isn't a government-funded campaign to spread racist remarks precisely the sort of thing that should outrage lefties, too?

It might also be the sort of question that someone should put to the far-left Canadian Jewish Congress, which awarded Warman a human rights award last year. Did they know that Warman called Canada's first Black, female Senator a c*nt and a n*gger? Now that they do know it, will they rescind their award? Or -- and this is my unhappy guess -- are they part of this whole scam?

UPDATE: Of course, those are the questions I would write for the Liberal Party -- but I am sympathetic to the Conservative government. The real Liberal Party or NDP would probably not give the government the benefit of the doubt. Their questions would sound like:

Mr. Speaker, even though it has been public knowledge for weeks that the CHRC employs racist provocateurs like Dean Steacy, who spread bigotry on the Internet, the Justice Minister still hasn't done anything about it. Is that because he has no idea what's going on in his own department? Or is it because he agrees with this bigotry? Is the Minister a bigot, or is he clueless?

I know Nicholson enough to know he's neither bigoted nor clueless -- he's likely facing resistance from bureaucrats and civil service lawyers giving him a dozen "yes minister" reasons why the CHRC can't be reformed or abolished. But they're not the ones who are ultimately politically accountable -- he is.

I have three upcoming interviews:

On Sunday, I'll be on the John Batchelor show, out of Los Angeles, at 7:20 p.m. Pacific Time. You can listen online, here.

On Monday, I'll be on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Details here.

On Tuesday, I'll join Mark Steyn on The O'Reilly Factor. Website here.

Let me know what you think of them.

Eye Weekly, Toronto's left-wing freebie magazine, gets it. They disagree with me and the late, great Western Standard on just about everything. But they know that if a conservative publisher can be hauled before the government today, it will be a leftist publisher tomorrow. Here's an excerpt from their latest editorial:

"...there are things on which civilized people from across the political spectrum agree, basic assumptions that are necessary prerequisites to the functioning of a democracy: that only open debate and the airing of conflicting opinions produces progress, and that everyone is entitled to due process before the court system. The things that keep us safe from totalitarianism are free speech and due process. That the human rights commissions of BC, Alberta and the federal government are even hearing these complaints endangers both.

...Human Rights Commissions, who may still serve some purpose as an informal way for victims of employment and housing discrimination to find redress, need to be reined in. They should have no jurisdiction to restrict or stand in judgment of freedom of speech and of the press."

Eye Weekly knows this isn't a battle between the left and the right on the spectrum of ideas. It's a battle between everyone in the spectrum of ideas, against those who would attack the very notion of a spectrum of ideas.

If a conservative, Calgary publisher and a leftist, Toronto arts magazine can agree that it's high time to amend the human rights acts to protect freedom of speech and the press, surely it's safe for legislators to attempt at least that minimal correction.