A human rights director fights back!

I think I've read just about every editorial and Op-Ed in Canada about human rights commissions this past month, and I've been pleasantly surprised that every one of them, from the Toronto Star and Eye Weekly on the left, to the National Post and Calgary Herald on the right, have been critical of the commissions' abuses. So when an Op-Ed is published that supports the commissions, as in today's Montreal Gazette by "human rights lawyer" Pearl Eliadis, it's worth a look.

Let's look at it three ways: facts, arguments, and through the lens of "cui bono".

Facts

Eliadis's Op-Ed is littered with factual errors. Small, sloppy ones, like calling the Danish cartoons "Dutch" or calling Keith Martin's private member's motion a private member's bill. And bigger ones, like Eliadis's bizarre claim that these commissions "have no power to make orders, except to dismiss a complaint." That is incorrect, of course -- here are eleven huge pages of orders by Alberta's human rights commission; the federal commission has a 100% conviction rate under section 13. That's a gross error, and it doesn't even make any sense. If a commission could only dismiss complaints -- if it could do nothing else -- then it would be powerless, like a government-funded Oprah Winfrey show. I doubt I'd have spent any time on the problem, or hired a lawyer -- and I doubt Dr. Stubbs would, either. It's precisely because these commissions have the power to make orders -- fines, and forced apologies -- that they are so terrifying. I think Eliadis is playing silly bugger here; in most provinces, a wing of the human rights commission called a "tribunal" issues the orders, not the actual "commission" itself. If that's her point, it's a trick, not an argument.

Eliadis writes that "Inciting hatred or contempt is very serious business, even on the non-criminal side. It takes objective proof, and there must be evidence." But even a basic reading of section 13 or its provincial analogues shows that's not the case. There need not be any proof that incitement of hate happened -- only that it might happen, a "pre-crime" for which no evidence is possible. Look at paragraph 350 of this recent Alberta HRC decision, which convicted a Christian pastor because "there is a circumstantial connection between the hate speech of Mr. Boissoin and the CCC and the beating of a gay teenager in Red Deer less than two weeks following the publication of Mr. Boissoin’s letter."

No proof or evidence, just a coincidence.

Eliadis makes another statement that can only be called factually inaccurate: "If these longstanding laws were truly a threat, they would surely have diminished freedom of speech in Canada by now. Instead, after three decades, Canadians enjoy the highest levels of free speech in the world." I don't think it's a matter of opinion that Canada has less freedom of speech than the U.S., with its First Amendment. The Skokie case is a perfect example of how Americans have more freedom of speech (and assembly) than we do.

Arguments

Eliadis's factual errors show a weak grasp of human rights law in Canada. But her analysis is even worse. Most telling is her line: "Are Levant and Steyn hatemongerers? Maybe not. But no one has decided that."

Putting aside her made-up word hatemongerer (at least she didn't call us hatemongererers), Eliadis demonstrates the thinking of the HRC's: everyone is guilty until proven, uh, guilty. I am not a hatemonger, or a hatemongerer. But Eliadis won't grant me that. And why should she? With a 100% conviction rate, I'll be guilty soon enough.

Eliadis claims "the complaints against Maclean's magazine ask for the right to more, not less, information by demanding publication of the "other side" of the story." There is no "right to more information", just as there is no "right to not be offended". What the Canadian Islamic Congress is demanding is to have the government expropriate Maclean's magazine for the CIC's own propaganda purposes -- violating Maclean's rights to freedom of speech and their property rights, too. It's another example of human rights commissions acting as a sword, not a shield; acting to limit human rights, not protect them.

My favourite line is Eliadis's statement that being hauled before the commission, having my time wasted and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills has "revived" my career. But I am a former publisher, and now a lawyer in private practise and an author. Being a defendant in a court case is not my "career". It would likely sink me, financially, without the financial assistance I've received from donors.

Cui bono? Eliadis's true motivation

But by describing human rights commission tangles as some sort of career, Eliadis hints at her true motivation: human rights commissions are her career. Like Richard Warman and the two transsexuals in Margaret Wente's column, Eliadis isn't just a supporter of human rights commissions; she profits by them, too. She's a former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, running workshops for them and even travelling the country for them, a conflict of interest she didn't disclose in her column.

But my main reaction to learning what the Gazette didn't tell us -- that she used to be an OHRC director -- was pity, pity for the poor shleps upon whom she wreaked her foolishness and ignorance of the law. What's even scarier is that Eliadis exports her "expertise" to places like Rwanda and Iraq -- as if those countries need more tyrannies.

I've given too much thought to Eliadis's column -- certainly more time than she gave it herself. But I actually find it very encouraging. If this is the best that the human rights industry -- the hangers-on, the litigators-of-fortune, the professional complaining class -- can come up with in terms of facts and arguments, then they're even more brittle than we thought.

And the fact that the first (and so far, only) Op-Ed in a newspaper of record that defends these commissions comes not from an ordinary citizen, or even an independent academic or thinker, but from someone whose entire career is dependent on the perpetuation of these commissions and their culture of grievance, blame and pseudo-legal psychobabble, is encouraging, too, from a political point of view. No-one will lament the demise of the commissions, other than the those with a direct professional benefit from them (they're called rent-seekers by economists). If Pearl Eliadis is the best they've got, they're in deep trouble. That should be encouraging to any risk-averse politician out there.

P.S. When I was reading about Eliadis, I came across two different opinions she's written on the conflict between religion and equal rights for women.

In this one, she applauds the Supreme Court of Canada for trumping Orthodox Jewish custom, and enforcing the equality of men and women under law. But in this one, she condemns the Quebec status of women committee for daring to assert that the equality of men and women should trump Islamist customs, such as the hijab.

Let's be honest here: there is no such thing as "human rights law". Anyone whose views are so malleable with regards to human rights, depending on the religion she's discussing, isn't some keeper of the law. She's a political activist who found it easier to work as an unelected bureaucrat, than to seek public support for her ideology in an election. In this case, she's just a political dhimmi, a modern version of Lenin's useful idiot, putting forward an apologia for sharia law, but masquerading it as some sort of jurisprudence.