March 2008 Archives
What’s Richard Warman up to these days? It’s a question that even Athanasios Hadjis, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal chairman, was asking last week in Ottawa. That’s because the hearing over which Hadjis was presiding was called Warman v. Lemire, with Warman as the nominal complainant. But all that means is Warman filled out the paperwork to start the complaint – and he gets to cash the cheque from Marc Lemire when Lemire is convicted of thought crimes, as 100% of section 13 respondents have been before him.
Warman hadn’t shown up at his own hearing for months. But he had no reason to show up – the taxpayers of Canada were doing his work for him, in the form of Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyers and staff who were prosecuting the case. In fact, Warman had a positive reason not to attend – pesky reporters were in attendance, chock full of questions about his serial complaints, his collusion and interference with CHRC staff, and his personal philosophy of “maximum disruption”.
Warman wasn’t far away, though – his office is literally one block west of the Tribunal, actually. Warman works as a lawyer for the Department of National Defence. But what does he do there?
Warman is no soldier – unless you count the time he bravely commanded a squad of street urchins in their surprise pie attack on Warman’s enemy, David Icke. So what does Warman do to help keep our country safe, and liberate Afghanistan?
According to the Defence Wide Access Network, Warman’s title is “Director of Special Grievances – Enquiries and Investigations”. What the heck is that?
The DND’s Judge Advocate General reports that the Directorate of Special Grievances was set up “to actively manage and resolve high profile and sensitive cases” just before Warman came over from the CHRC It sounds to me a lot like the Canadian Forces’ internal human rights commission. Warman (listed on this org chart as DSpecGrievE&I) reports to the head of the DND’s Grievance Authority, who in turn reports to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.
I want to find out more about this Directorate of Special Grievances. I want to know if it is indeed the Canadian Forces’ internal version of the Canadian Human Rights Commission – and if Warman is importing to them the same abusive, unfair practices that he perfected at the CHRC.
I want to learn what sort of grievances the Directorate hunts, and what cases Warman himself has investigated. I want to learn their tactics – are they as corrupt, collusive and abusive as the CHRCs? Does Warman file complaints himself, that he then investigates? Does he approach soldiers under a false identity and try to entrap them, as he did at the CHRC? There are plenty of Internet sites catering to Canadian Forces troops. Does Warman use fake names to post provocative comments at places like www.army.ca, to entrap our troops in some "grievance"?
The men and women who serve in the CF these days face every imaginable threat as they defend our way of life and help secure and rebuild Afghanistan. I want to find out if Richard Warman, Director of Special Grievances, is making their lives easier or harder.
If you’re a soldier or anyone else who has first-hand information about the Directorate of Special Grievances or Richard Warman, please send me your story. I promise to respect any requests for confidentiality or anonymity. It's bad enough that civilians have had to put up with his crap for years -- I want to know if our troops do, too.
I've received a spate of anti-Tibet, pro-Communist China comments in response to my blog entries about Tibet.They are all signed by folks with English names, but the language has the slightly clunky style of Chinese propaganda. I mean, other than in China's denunciations of Taiwan and Tibet, have you ever heard the word "splittist" used before? I can spot Chinese government spin when I see it, and unless it is properly signed by the Chinese foreign ministry, I'm just not going to go along with the charade by posting the comments.
On what basis -- other than the clunky Maoist rhetoric -- do I make this claim? A year ago, the Western Standard published a story by Kevin Steel about one such Internet soldier for China (quick but free registration required). Here are some excerpts:
He posts his messages everywhere under several different names on Internet blogs and discussion groups. He writes letters to the editor anywhere and sends e-mails to anyone--anyone who might take seriously shocking evidence that the Chinese government "harvests" and sells live organs from political prisoners. His main message is that the Falun Gong--the group which first brought evidence of live organ harvesting to light--and the Epoch Times newspaper that broke that story are spreading propaganda against China's Communist government. And he's not even Chinese. He is Charles Liu, a 40-year-old Taiwanese-born technology consultant who lives in Issaquah, Wash., and does business in China.
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He doesn't really explain, when asked, why he started a blog last year called "The Myth of Tiananmen Square Massacre" under the name of Bobby Fletcher (one of his online aliases, which he also uses to comment on the Western Standard's online blog). On that blog, he pushes the minimal 250 casualty figure that the Chinese government has always maintained died that night in 1989 (more reliable estimates put the figure at at least ten times that).
Liu's actions mirror disinformation campaigns waged by the Chinese government in the past. Typically, these include the deliberate spreading of false or misleading facts to sow confusion or doubt among the conflicting accounts. The classic example is the Tiananmen Square massacre; the Chinese government has maintained that no one died in the square itself, that there was only pushing and shoving on the streets around the square, resulting in a few military casualties. Overseas, the CCP relies on its United Front Work department, part of the Chinese intelligence service, to propagate its message. During the Cold War, the Soviets employed many overseas flunkies through their Disinformation Department.
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Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer, and Kilgour's co-author, David Matas, really doesn't know what to make of Liu. "I don't know who he is, but what he does is spend a lot of time replicating nonsense to defend the Chinese government," Matas says.
The only concern Matas has is that Liu seems to know who he and Kilgour met with in the United States to discuss their report. Matas discovered Liu had sent e-mails to politicians--and their staff--prior to the meetings. "The only people who would have that information would potentially be the Chinese government. I can't imagine how Liu would know we were meeting with those people," Matas says. "We're not super-secretive, but you can't find information on the Internet or in any public place about who we're meeting with, where and when." He himself has received at least 10 e-mails from Liu, all of which he's ignored. Maybe Matas is onto something with that approach.
The Alberta Human Rights Commission has launched a new website. I poked around it a bit and found this annual report. It’s an insight into how the HRCs see themselves.
Public Relations
The commission states that the HRC's official website received, on average, 22,717 visits a month. In three days, my single blog entry about an Alberta HRC staffer named Arman Chak clocked more readers than that. A few of my posts about the HRC have exceeded that traffic in a single day.
I don't note this just to boast; I note this as part of my theme of "denormalization". It is important that Canadian HRCs receive more media coverage than they've ever received before, to shine the light of public scrutiny on their abuses of natural justice and their infringements of our constitutional rights. If my own little blog has almost ten times the traffic of the HRC's site, imagine how much information the entire blogosphere has imparted about the true nature of these commissions -- Free Mark Steyn crested its 100,000th visitor earlier this month, after only three months on the job. It will be interesting to see what the HRC's own traffic is like in their next annual report. I imagine it's grown tremendously, merely from hostile bloggers linking directly to appalling HRC rulings.
The HRCs aren't used to the kind of scrutiny they're receiving these days. They hate it.
Case Load
Another interesting statistic about the Alberta HRC is that the number of complaints they received actually plunged by 15% year over year -- down from 778 to 659. This, despite the fact that Alberta's population has grown over the same period, and the province is more multiracial than ever. Maybe that's why the HRC came after me for publishing cartoons: they needed to drum up more business, so they were lowering their standards. That's pretty much how it goes for human rights commissions across the country -- the real fights for racial, religious and sexual equality have been won, so the HRCs, in order to perpetuate their existence, invent new and strange problems to solve. If it weren’t for Richard Warman, the federal HRC wouldn’t have any section 13 thought crime complaints at all anymore.
I’ve read all of the Alberta HRC rulings for the past few years and, going from memory, I can’t think of a single case that had to do with someone being denied housing on the basis of their race or religion. That was actually one of the big rationales for the HRC in the first place – that minorities couldn’t rent apartments because of racist landlords. The other big rationale for HRCs was to protect minorities from being fired for bigoted reasons. Again, spend some time surfing the rulings. There are plenty of HRC cases involving fired employees, but the bulk of them are workers who were injured and laid off – and wanted a bump-up from what the were entitled to under workers’ compensation or their collective agreement. As Alan Borovoy continually reminds us, the original purpose of these HRCs has long been lost.
Fewer cases, but dragging them out
Despite the 15% decline in complaints filed, the average time it took to resolve a complaint increased by 7%, from 382 days to 410 days. So we’re looking at a combined decline in productivity of 22% in a single year. That’s not the best of it, though: the commission says its goal is to complete complaints in – wait for it – 435 days. That’s not a typo – their goal is to get even slower.
Stop for a moment and think about what this would mean if the HRC was actually doing what it was supposed to do – helping someone who was fired from a job or kicked out of an apartment. It would be useless -- coming to the aid of a downtrodden person a year and a half after they were kicked out of their home. But deployed to its new purpose – shaking down extra severance pay from employers, or grinding Christian pastors into powder (Rev. Boissoin’s case took a whopping five years to complete) – and the bureaucratic molasses has a new and obvious purpose: the slower the process, the more punitive it becomes to the respondents. Not only do they have to retain lawyers (and spend hundreds of hours of their own time) but the stigma of the accusation remains on them for years. In my own case, I’m well past the 700 day mark, and we haven’t even set things down for a hearing – we’re still at the “investigation” stage.
Junkets galore
Perhaps one of the reasons for the HRC’s plummeting productivity is the sheer number of junkets that HRC staff attend around the world. HRC staff travel to important meetings across Canada, and have joined important Government-Organized Non-Government Organizations at the U.N. – a great way to be invited to countries at the forefront of human rights, such as Libya and Iran. Perhaps it was to show off to their new friends at the U.N. that the Alberta HRC decided to prosecute me for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. We’re not exporting Canadian values of free speech and rule of law; we’re importing Saudi values of censorship and sharia law.
No public demand
The number of complaints to the HRC fell 15% last year. So, like any business selling something that the public doesn’t want, the HRC commissioned a survey. Fully 88.1% of Albertans said that human rights were “fairly well” or “very well” protected in Alberta, up from 86.7% the year before. Now this stunningly high number – given the margin of error, Albertans are almost unanimous that human rights are fine here – might be due to the commission’s stellar efforts, including their well-ignored website, and their Oprah-style workshops that the HRC puts on for the handful of companies who request them. Or – call me crazy – our satisfaction might just have nothing to do with the HRC's self-important, psychobabble at all. We’re satisfied despite them.
Outrageous powers of the HRC
Most of the HRC’s annual report is laughable. But some of it is terrifying. Take the page that outlines examples of remedies that the HRC can order. The annual report gives an example of someone who was fired from a job for racial reasons. (By the way, I cannot remember a single example of this in the decisions I’ve read).
Someone who is fired “without cause” – and being fired for racial reasons would fall into that category – has a claim in a real court. He’d sue for “wrongful dismissal”. And he’d win. And employment law already has a built-in way of dealing with unfairness like racism: besides giving the ex-employee a normal severance payment based on things like the length of time worked, courts take into account the manner in which an employer fires an employee – whether or not that act was done cruelly, for example. The remedy is always the same: an order for compensation. Unlike “human rights law”, employment law goes back centuries, and balances the rights of employees and employers. It’s also realistic: courts know that if there was a breakdown in the employer-employee relationship, and the employer was to blame, the only sensible remedy is cash – not trying to force the two parties back into a relationship again. But look at what the HRCs have the power to do, trumping – or adding on to – what real courts give to ex-employees:
“… the recommended remedy may call on the employer to do one or more of the following:
• provide an apology to the complainant
• provide a job reference for the complainant
• commit to not repeating the behaviour or ensuring the behaviour will not be repeated in the workplace
• re-instate the complainant to his or her former job
• make financial compensation to the complainant for lost income
• make financial compensation for pain and suffering, humiliation and embarrassment, or injury to dignity and self respect
The recommended remedy may also call on the employer to:
• have an education session on human rights
• introduce a non-discrimination policy into the workplace
• stop a behaviour or practice found to be discriminatory
• set up internal processes to deal with any future complaints that may arise”
That’s not employment law. That’s social engineering. That’s expropriating a company, or at least its human resources decisions. That’s untrained busybodies telling companies how to run themselves. And all of this is layered on top of what real courts already award employees who were wrongfully dismissed – HRCs do not step out of the way for other courts; they pile on.
The human right to receive a government rent subsidy while still living with your mom
One of the more enjoyable things about the HRC’s annual report was to see how real courts smack down the kangaroo courts from time to time. It doesn’t happen often enough, of course – most respondents lack the money or the time to appeal a decision, and courts still show too much deference to HRCs. But there was a wonderful court of appeal case noted in the annual report that shows the difference between real law and the counterfeit law conducted by the HRCs.
In a laughable 2004 decision by Lori Andreachuk – the same bigot who ruled that Rev. Stephen Boissoin’s freedom of religion and freedom of speech are trumped by the right not to be offended – the Alberta HRC ruled that a grown man was entitled to receive a government housing allowance even though he was still living at home with his mother. That’s right: it’s your human right to indefinitely mooch off both the taxpayer and your parents at the same time.
In this case, the appellant was the Government of Alberta that suddenly had images of paying an allowance to every twenty- thirty- and forty-something couch potato in the province who “failed to launch”. The government finally won at the Court of Appeal. But the only reason they won was because they had the time and money to waste, out-lawyering and out-red-taping the HRC ‘crats. No-one else could have beat the HRC.
The Alberta HRC has recently received national attention because of its war against Rev. Boissoin, and now its war against me for publishing the cartoons. But Andreachuk’s decision in the Human Resources and Employment case was just as stupid, if not as dangerous -- it deserves to be known and ridiculed, too.
Duplication
The one last thing I’ll point out about the Alberta HRC is that, not surprisingly, it has offices in Alberta’s two major cities. But there is another layer of HRC sediment on top of that, of course – the Canadian Human Rights Commission itself has jurisdiction in Alberta, too – with their regional offices and 170 staff. That’s not just a sign of a bloated, unionized, make-work project. It’s a legal problem – too many human rights provocateurs all chasing after the same real – or imagined – human rights crimes. It’s one of the reasons why Mark Steyn and Maclean’s were hit with not one but three identical human rights complaints (two of which are still proceeding). In criminal law, this is illegal – it’s called double jeopardy. You can’t be tried for the same crime more than once. Steyn was charged three times. And not only are there no limits on the number of HRCs in different jurisdictions that can hear the same case, Maclean’s style, there is no limit on the number of complainants who can file identical complaints within the same jurisdiction. That’s why, when Syed Soharwardy dropped his complaint against me earlier this year, I had no relief – his jihadist allies in Edmonton have filed an identical complaint, the prosecution of which continues.
Next year’s report
Reading the HRC’s annual report was a fascinating glimpse into the nanny state’s mindset. If I lacked self-respect and a work ethic – and thought that government knew best – it would be a great place to work a solid 30 hours a week. That’s the kind of place it’s been for years; Canada is one of the most harmonious countries in the world; discrimination hasn’t been a pressing problem here for decades. But into these lazy government sinecures have crept bitter ideologues like Lori Andreachuk, and dangerous radicals like Arman Chak. It’s my personal goal to make sure their next annual report is a tale of legal setbacks and political woes.
UPDATE: You can watch the video clip of the documentary here.
UPDATE 2: Did you notice -- as I did -- that the CBC showed the cartoons on air? I sense a human rights complaint coming!
I watched the CBC Sunday mini-documentary today on human rights commissions. If I can find a link to the video, I'll post it. In the meantime, here are my thoughts.
The fact that the CBC is talking about these commissions, and their censorship of political and religious free speech, is a victory in itself. Such coverage would not have happened three months ago. Ask yourself this: do you think the complainers-of-fortune and the human rights commission's hangers-on were happy that this documentary was made? Hardly -- it's a part of their denormalization, branding them as censors.
The report focused on three cases -- the Western Standard's publication of the Danish cartoons, the Canadian Islamic Congress's complaint against Maclean's and Mark Steyn, and the conviction of Rev. Stephen Boissoin for rambunctiously professing Christian beliefs about homosexuality. In each case, the CBC interviewed only one side of the story. In my case, it was my side -- so, needless to say, I was pleased with how the case was represented. I'm not sure if this was because Syed Soharwardy has simply decided to cut his losses and stop talking about his complaint, or because the CBC didn't even try to interview him. I suspect the former.
As to the other complaints, the CBC says they tried to contact Ken Whyte, the publisher and editor of Maclean's, but he declined to be interviewed, so that segment only interviewed one of Mohamed Elmasry's sockpuppets, without rebuttal. Finally, the CBC interviewed Darren Lund, the complainant in the Boissoin case, without a word from Boissoin himself.
I'm sure Boissoin and Maclean's were unhappy with that lop-sidedness. But I think that critical thinkers watching the show would have picked up on revealing comments made by Elmasry's spokeschild, Khurrum Awan, and by Lund.
Unlike what he has usually done, Awan didn't commit the fraud of ascribing embarrassing comments about Islam to Mark Steyn himself. This time, when Awan read passages from Maclean's about pedophilia and bestiality in Islam, Awan (unlike on previous occasions) grudgingly acknowledged that Steyn was quoting from Muslim imams. In other words, Steyn was reporting grotesque remarks about Muslims, made by other Muslims. The comments about bestiality and pedophilia weren't his -- they were said by radical Muslim leaders. In effect, Awan was saying that Steyn and Maclean's should be forbidden from reporting facts that embarrass him.
To me -- and, I hope to other viewers -- that exposes the absurdity of the complaint against Maclean's and Steyn. The words complained about may well be embarrassing, or hurtful, or demeaning, and indeed they do show Islam in a bad light. But they were said by radical Muslim leaders, and Maclean's reported that. To demand equal space to present "the other side of the story" -- when the first side of the story is the accurate reporting of facts -- makes Awan et al. look like illiberal fools. I'm biased on the subject, but I thought that Awan came across not only as thin-skinned, but as complaining about what Muslims said -- not what Steyn said. Out of an obviously lengthy interview with Awan, that choice of editing by the CBC served to highlight his weakness.
There was another point that Lund's interview elucidated that I was vaguely aware of, but about which the documentary refreshed my memory. In that offensive decision, the Christian pastor's views on homosexuality were linked circumstantially to an alleged beating of a gay teen a few weeks later. To apportion any blame for an act of physical violence to an unrelated political discussion about homosexuality is an abomination of our legal system. But what I had forgotten -- until Lund's interview -- was that the teen in question has never been identified, and did not even complain to the police. We only have a vague newspaper report and Lund's own say-so -- but nothing more. Who was that youth? Was he really attacked? He was a high school student -- was he one of Lund's own students? Did Lund have anything to do with the complaint? If there was a real, physical crime committed -- an assault and battery -- why was nothing done about it? Why did the police not make inquiries, either to Lund or the reporter in question? Or did they -- and did they dismiss the case as unfounded, or even a hoax?
That such a vague event -- a rumour really -- was used to convict a pastor shows how abominable these human rights commissions are. They didn't "convict" the person who allegedly attacked the teen. So they took out their politically correct venom on some Christian pastor who happened to be talking about homosexuality a few weeks before.
I'm not sure if those subtleties came through to many, especially to people unfamiliar with the case. But it was a reminder to me that HRCs use vague facts -- or, as we saw last Tuesday, even manufacture facts -- as ammunition in their wars against conservatives and Christians. I don't think I would have said so before the Lemire hearing last week, but having learned that human rights "activists" use the tactics of planting fake evidence, and using fake names and fake facts to provoke "hate crimes", I now wonder if the rumoured gay-bashing incident in the Boissoin case was itself manufactured, either by Lund -- the Richard Warman of Alberta -- or someone else looking to drum up business for the commission.
Perhaps those are small points, and Lund and Awan came across as persuasive to CBC Sunday viewers. But I don't think so. I think they came across as politically correct whiners, pampered liberals who would rather file a grievance against their opponents than debate them. Perhaps that will ring sympathetic with the stereotypical CBC viewer, but I think that enough people, even on the left, believe in free speech to be turned off by such thin-skinned complainants. As Lund himself said, the Red Deer Advocate published plenty of critical replies to Boissoin's article; only Lund himself started a five-year witch-hunt using goverment resources.
But the main reason I liked the report was that it started and ended with Alan Borovoy, the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The documentary showed historical footage of Borovoy being one of the founders of these human rights commissions; then it quoted him -- more than anyone else was quoted, in fact -- as being a very concerned critic of the commissions straying into censorship. He was set up as the neutral, father figure of the documentary -- me, Lund and Awan were the partisans. Borovoy was the go-to man for analysis; he was "the expert".
The fact that he -- rather than a human rights commissioner -- was set up as the arbiter of reason is quite dramatic, given how much of a free speecher Borovoy is.
The documentary wasn't perfect -- but, as a "report" as opposed to an opinion piece, it was favourable to the side of free speech. I thought it was yet another landmark event in our journey to expose and denormalize the commissions, and build momentum for political change. I'd give it a thumbs up.
Oh, this is just too good. And what makes it even better is that a.) Cherry is the highest-paid man at the CBC because b.) he commands an enormous and loyal audience. His five seconds of plain talk resonate much more with severely normal Canadians than countless hours of condescending claptrap from David Suzuki, the diesel-driving-hypocrite with two monster homes.
h/t SDA
Here's Lorne Gunter's powerful column in today's Edmonton Journal, dissecting last Tuesday's Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Ottawa. It's all too good for me to want to pick favourite excerpts, but here's a taste:
After years of investigating Lemire, CHRC investigators had too little proof that he was a hatemonger to proceed to a hearing. So they began logging onto his website under an assumed name, "Jadewarr," and posting provocative comments in hopes of obtaining racist replies they could then use in their case again Lemire.
To cover their activities, it appears commission employees logged onto the Internet through a wireless connection they detected in a woman's apartment near their offices, rather than using the commission's own server. They neither sought the woman's permission nor acquired a judicial warrant to tap into her computer.
During this week's hearing, the woman's name, address and telephone number were also revealed in public testimony.
These are the actions of people who have become a law unto themselves. They have convinced themselves that their goal -- the eradication of hatred as they see it -- gives them licence to run roughshod over traditional legal protections against wrongful conviction.
If they are convinced you are guilty, yet cannot gather enough evidence to prove it, they are not above manufacturing proof. There is no innocent until proven guilty. You are guilty once they decide you are and they will prove it no matter what.
That is appalling enough, but for them then to involve an innocent third party in their deception betrays an organization so obsessed with political correctness, so sure of the moral rightness of its crusade, that even the most evangelical pursuit of its ends is justified in its employees' own minds.
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Human rights commissions are out of control. They need to be severely curtailed or, better yet, dismantled.
Here's the answer, in English and French.
I believe in Parliamentary immunity from defamation -- otherwise MPs would be subject to a stream of nuisance suits every time they dared raise a controversial issue in the chamber. But the counterweight to that "absolute privilege", as its called in law, is that MPs are expected to be "honourable members" -- and not abuse that privilege. I regret that Raymonde Folco has yet to live up to her title.
Here, here, here, here and here are my five letters to her.
Oh well. I'm frustrated by Folco, but her silence on the matter will have to suffice as her admission that she was wrong. In that way I'm ahead of Dion -- I'm sure he wishes she's just shut up about him, too.
Nigel Hannaford was for freedom of speech before freedom of speech was cool. Here's his latest column in the Calgary Herald. An excerpt:
Even those of us advocating human rights commission reform, and thus inclined to think the less of them, have been amazed this week by what goes on at the CHRC, as revealed by a tribunal prosecuting alleged hatemonger Marc Lemire.
There we were, making abstract arguments about free speech and quoting Voltaire.
There the federal snivel servants were, logging onto Internet hate sites under assumed names, trying to conceal what they were up to by using the wireless Internet account belonging to a young woman who seems to be completely uninvolved in any of it and, according to Lemire, trying to entrap people who visited his site.
Only the unusual circumstance of these people being publicly cross-examined brought any of this to light.
Boy, did we ever not quite get it. We thought this was a high-minded disagreement over fundamental principles. Instead, we find the CHRC tolerates sleazy behaviours among its investigating officers that have no place in a free society.
We know that Hezbollah and their friends at AP and Reuters used fauxtography during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war -- that is, either elaborately staging photo scenes, or outright photoshopping news images, to make Israel look bad.
It should come as no surprise that the Chinese government is engaging in fauxtography in its war against Tibet. Take a look at these two photos, both of them distributed to the media by the Chinese government.
It's easy to spot the difference, when the two are juxtaposed: the knife-wielding fellow in the top right has been photoshopped out of the second photo.
Why did the Chinese propagandists erase that man?
According to this story in the Epoch Times, it's because that "Tibetan rioter" was not Tibetan at all, but rather a Chinese policeman dressed up as an ethnic Tibetan, sent out to wave a machete and generally look menacing. It's part of the Communist strategy to paint peaceful Tibetans as the violent brutes. It's the same reason the comical Chinese ambassador to Canada compared the pacifist Dalai Lama to the Nazis.
But the Chinese didn't count on one of their agents provocateurs being recognized -- so they hastily changed history by handing out a new photo.
I'm impressed that the Czech Republic and Poland are boycotting the Olympics' opening ceremonies. That shouldn't be surprising -- it hasn't even been twenty years since the yoke of the Soviet Union was lifted from their necks. They haven't forgotten that dictatorships thrive on propaganda, and that China sees its Olympics as a chance to get the world's good housekeeping seal of approval for their brutal repression. The Czechs and Poles won't be a party to that, and Canada shouldn't be, either.
Although Liveleak.com was politically brave to host Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, on their website, they decided not to be physically brave in the face of threats of violence. It's an acceptable excuse -- much more so than the a priori decisions of other Internet companies not to host the film, including Network Solutions.
Thoughtful defenders of Western, liberal values will see the irony here: a film about radical Islamic violence is stopped by the threat of radical Islamic violence. It proves Wilders' point.
But the violent censors -- the same ones who threaten to kill Salman Rushdie, and who have killed other Dutchmen, like filmmaker Theo van Gogh -- aren't interested in winning any debates, or even engaging in debates. They're interested in killing infidels like Wilders, and making the rest of us submit without a debate. It's a Western ethnocentrism to think that radical jihadists can be reasoned with or compromised with, or even debated with. That's not what they're about; to them, there is truth and there is blasphemy; there are believers and there are infidels; there is the peace of submission and there is permanent war -- jihad -- against the rest. There is no splitting the difference with these folks.
If you want to see the movie, you can see it on the website of Wilders' political party, here.
Here's Mark Steyn's new Maclean's column about Tuesday's human rights hearing. My favourite part is when he laughs at all the "human rights activists" cruising the white supremacist Stormfront website together:
I'm sure many Canadians have found themselves in that embarrassing situation where you cruise an Internet dating site, hook up with a hot blond 17-year-old cheerleader and arrange to meet only to find that Candii is, in fact, a 54-year-old overweight male accountant. Alas, the problem's far worse for a neo-Nazi hoping to find a friendly website and meet a few kindred spirits. There must be a few genuine white supremacists whooping it up over at "Stormfront," but they seem to be thin on the ground. Mr. Steacy, the CHRC's lead investigator, is a member of Stormfront; Richard Warman, celebrated Canadian "human rights" crusader and plaintiff on every CHRC case since 2002, is a member of Stormfront; and Sgt. Stephen Camp is a member of Stormfront. What proportion of Canada's "white supremacists" are, in fact, government employees? On a quiet day, chances must be pretty good that you'll log on and find the joint deserted except for "jadewarr" (Mr. Steacy) trying to entrap "estate" (Sgt. Camp) while "estate" (Sgt. Camp) is simultaneously trying to entrap "axetogrind" (Mr. Warman). "There really should be a register of pseudonyms," urged lawyer Doug Christie, "so that investigators don't wind up investigating each other."
Welcome to the wacky world of Canadian "human rights." If it sounds like a fetish club for servants of the Crown, well, that would be a lot cheaper. This is a long battle to reform a secretive and decadent institution. But Keith Martin is right: Section 13 should be repealed. We need a royal commission. And "jadewarr" and chums might be encouraged to find more useful employment.
Here is Jonathan Kay's assessment of Tuesday's hearing at the human rights tribunal. Some excerpts:
...even if the CHRC nails Lemire, Tuesday's eight-hour hearing will still be remembered as a landmark disaster for the commission. Despite efforts by Steacy and others to stonewall on specific questions of CHRC procedure, observers were nonetheless able to extract a fairly detailed picture of work practices at the Commission. The impression that emerges is an overstaffed shop in which bored, unionized desk jockeys sit around "investigating" obscure web sites in search of some scrap of actionable hatred. And when they don't find anything actionable, they try to stir things up by logging in and participating under their own house alias — a practice Lemire describes as a form of entrapment.
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Privacy is another value that the CHRC seems to find confusing. The most scandalous disclosure to emerge on Tuesday involved the manner in which investigators logged on to Lemire's web site. In what appears to be a ham-fisted attempt to avoid broadcasting the Commission's IP address to Lemire, they tapped into the unsecured wireless Internet hub of a 26-year-old woman who lived down the street from the Commission's 344 Slater Street headquarters. On Tuesday, a Bell Canada employee read out the woman's name, address, and phone number. A National Post reporter contacted her and found that she'd never heard of Lemire, Steacy, or his investigations.
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Nice work. No doubt, the privacy commissioner will be having a chat with Dean et al in coming days.
This is the beginning of the end for Section 13.1 of the Human Rights Act, the legislation that (nominally) mandates this kind of fishing expedition. For years, Canadians have averted their eyes to the sort of shenanigans going on at our nation's human-rights commissions under the theory that any means used toward such a noble end as "human rights" must somehow be justified. What we saw this week turns that conceit into a pathetic joke.
That's my view, too. I hope to continue with a stream of horror stories from the human rights commissions. It's not hard to do -- outrageous cases are not anomalies, but standard fare these days. But I think we've got enough evidence of their corruption and illiberalism; they are being denormalized and discredited. Now is the time to press politicians for change.
Communist China is properly taking a shellacking for its pogroms against Tibet. China's political talking points -- clunky Communist rhetoric reminiscent of Mao's Little Red Book -- have made a joke out of that country's pretentions of being a respectable member of the family of nations. No-one alive thinks that the Dalai Lama is an evil man, or even a Nazi as Beijing's official clowns in Ottawa called him. If anyone's Nazi-like, it's China, with their Mengele-like harvesting of organs from Chinese political and religious dissidents.
No-one is buying that -- unless they've got a personal stake in believing it. And in Canada, that means a phalanx of Communist ventriloquist puppets, mouthing what their masters in Beijing tell them to say. Here's the depressing story in the new Epoch Times. Here are the opening paragraphs:
It was the kind of tightly scripted broadcast typical of state-run television in China. The narrator introduced the story: "Incited and masterminded by the Dalai Lama clique, a few criminals did beating, smashing, looting, and arson in downtown Lhasa, causing huge damage to people's lives and property."
Statements like this one, which opened a March 23 documentary on the unrest in Tibet, have been beamed into the homes of Chinese Canadians over the last two weeks via the communist regime's China Central Television 4 channel, which airs on Rogers Cable.
Last week, CCTV 4's segments on Tibet ranged from a few to 15 minutes in length and aired up to eight times a day. Each presented a one-sided account of events inside Lhasa since protests began there March 10.
Contradicting reports that police had violently crushed the protests, CCTV 4 said Chinese authorities had used "maximum restraint," not retaliating under attack, not cursing when criticized.
Obviously CCTV, which broadcasts from Beijing, is going to be straight Communist propaganda. But the Epoch Times story shows how made-in-Canada Chinese media are also toeing the Beijing line.
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who has taken up the anti-jihadist challenge from the assassinated Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, has produced this short film on radical Islam in Europe. I think it's a safe bet that there will be riots, boycotts -- and, I regret to predict, Wilders' own assassination.
The film isn't particularly groundbreaking -- there is no original footage. What's novel is its juxtaposition of warlike passages from the Koran, with jihadist exhortations from European imams, with footage of terrorist carnage. It's an effective piece -- and a warning of what's yet to come.
UPDATE: As of midnight ET, the clip had been seen by 1.5 million people in English, and 2.5 million in its original Dutch. That's how the marketplace of ideas works, especially when threatened by medieval censorship. I'm sure Wilders' film would have been popular without all the fatwas against it; but I doubt it would have been seen by 100 people per second. And congratulations to Liveleak, the Internet site that hosted the movie. Not only did they do a brisk business, but they stood up for freedom of speech, something YouTube/Google seems to get worse at every year.
I'll be on his show again tonight -- tune in and let me know how you think it goes.
UPDATE: My appearance was bumped! I'll let you know when I'm rescheduled.
I've read the blogosphere's several accounts of Tuesday's Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Ottawa in the Warman v. Lemire case, and it's on that basis that I've formed my first impressions. You can read some of those reports here, here, here, here, here, here, here and from the defendant himself here. I've also seen two newspaper stories, this one from the National Post's Joseph Brean, and this one by the Ottawa Citizen's Don Butler.
I'd prefer to review the actual transcripts of the hearing, but from what I've read, there will be no transcripts made, only an audio recording.
No transcripts
Let's start there in our analysis: This matter has been proceeding for four years; to investigate and prosecute this case, the CHRC has not only deployed the full weight of their own government staff, but they've retained a series of expensive private sector lawyers as well, such as the comical Giacomo "Serenity Now!" Vigna. I'd conservatively estimate that $2-million in taxpayers' money has been spent to date, but this being a government enterprise, the true number might be closer to $5 million. A half-dozen interveners, including the federal government, have sent lawyers, too, even if they merely sit in the hearing all day, not saying a word. And, of course, the Tribunal itself has been seized with this matter for well over a year, with about 20 days of hearings to date, in at least two cities.
Why was Tuesday's hearing the one day that won't be transcribed and published? Why was a trifling savings of a court stenographer -- who costs, what, a third of what a lawyer bills? -- chosen as the one area of economy to find? Is the Tribunal, with the unlimited resources of the government, out of cash?
The Tribunal's decision to nix transcripts is transparently biased: the one day that the hunters became the hunted -- where the CHRC itself was being grilled -- was the one day that accurate, typed, searchable transcripts were omitted. Try to "search" an eight-hour audio recording for a key word, as opposed to searching a written transcript. Try to hear words that are spoken quietly; try to learn the spelling of unusual names of words; try to skip to important matters and avoid others. It's yet another irregularity in a system where arbitrariness and capriciousness have replaced the rule of law.
That's offensive to anyone, like me, who cares about the openness of our legal system. But it's more than just offensive -- it's unfair to any defendant who will now not be able to rely on such transcripts for his appeal when he's convicted.
One day only
So the one day in which there will be no transcripts is the one day the CHRC is on the defensive. But why was Tuesday's hearing limited to just one day?
Again, this matter has been grinding on for four years, more than a year of which was in the Tribunal. Richard Warman, the nominal complainant, was given four days for his examination in chief -- that is, four days to make self-serving comments, with Vigna leading him along. Why the sudden impatience? Is it because, with the CHRC's own conduct on trial, it's just not as much fun as shooting white supremacist fish in a barrel?
According to several blog reports, the Tribunal chair, Athanasios Hadjis, was visibly impatient, repeatedly saying "this case is closed". In real courts, it's up to the two sides to announce "we rest our case," not for a bored judge to merely declare it. But don't bother Hadjis with such trifles. He's not a judge, so why should he pretend to act like one?
The CHRC knew that they only had to brazen it out for one day, and then they'd be free. They didn't pull a Vigna this time -- no-one announced that they weren't serene, and couldn't go on. But they did what lawyers do when they need to run out the clock: they made incessant objections of any sort, with merit or without, simply to interrupt the other side and talk out the clock. Scroll down this web page to hear an audio recording of the CHRC's lawyer objecting to Doug Christie's cross examination, before Christie even asked the question. I'd sound angry, too, if I had flown from Victoria to Ottawa, to be left with merely 45 minutes to ask my questions, and to have half that time eaten up with clearly dilatory objections. But with a weak and impatient chairman like Hadjis, and a corrupt system without clear rules of procedure, why the hell not? No need to pull the fire alarm. Just interrupt until the day is done.
Dean Steacy and Hannya Rizk weren't the only CHRC staffers who were supposed to be cross-examined yesterday; Harvey Goldberg was, too. He's the master strategist behind the CHRC's "anti-hate" team. He didn't have to say a word; because Hadjis had arbitrarily ruled that the hearing would be a single day, Goldberg can hide behind the improper objections that his lawyers made last June. You'll recall that's why yesterday's hearing was called in the first place: the CHRC had claimed that its rogue investigative techniques were a state secret, and couldn't be examined. Lemire appealled that arrogant objection to the Federal Court; thus yesterday's hearing to re-ask those same questions. Goldberg never took the stand -- so the illegal objections made last year by his lawyers were allowed to stand, despite their illegality.
No disclosure
It gets worse. After Goldberg's examination last year, he disclosed a further 300 pages of documents. That might mean nothing to non-lawyers, but it's very important, and it goes to the unlawful, unprofessional, abusive manner in which the CHRC conducts itself. Goldberg was subpoenaed, as were his documents. Subpoenas are not invitations; they carry the weight of the law with them. They can be appealled, of course, if the recipient of a subpoena thinks they're improper. At least that's what a law-abiding agency would do. But not the CHRC. They waited until after Goldberg's examination to disclose the 300 pages. And, wouldn't you know it, Goldberg was exempted from answering questions about those pages, too. Bogus objections and defiance of disclosure obligations: if that happened in a real court, the judge would blow his stack, order the offending party to comply, assess costs against the offending party, and censure the lawyers, too. But of course, this isn't a real court.
No integrity of evidence or other aspects of investigations
Still, a number of questions were put to Steacy. You'll remember him -- he was the CHRC investigator who told the Tribunal that "freedom of speech is an American concept so I don't give it any value". He's also the one who refused to accept a human rights complaint from someone he didn't like, based on gossip about that complainant's siblings. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that Steacy is a former public sector union boss.
Steacy did make a few embarrassing admissions. But the bulk of his answers -- just like the bulk of Warman's answers on cross examination last year -- were "I don't remember" or variants thereof. Some of the things he didn't remember were investigative actions he did mere weeks ago; some of them related to standing policies of the CHRC. No matter; he just brazened it out with forgetfulness.
Stop to think about how important the integrity of investigations is in real courts -- how the chain of custody of evidence is maintained under lock and key; how every test and inspection is documented; the extreme lengths police go to, to avoid giving the accused grounds for objecting to any evidence, including oral evidence like confessions. None of that integrity is present in the CHRC; Steacy, Warman and the others don't even bother keeping notes -- or, if they do, they simply "forgot" to disclose them, like Goldberg forgot to disclose 300 pages until after his court appearance.
It is not reasonable to expect investigators to remember every detail of every conversation -- or, in this case, of every occasion they pretended to be neo-Nazis, and went cruising the Internet. That's why real investigators take copious notes, and that's why courts permit police to refresh their memory with notes taken contemporaneously with the events in question -- and that's why those notes are disclosed to the accused, too. Either the CHRC is lying, and not disclosing their notes, or their investigative integrity is abominable, because it really doesn't matter how shabby a job they do -- they have a 100% conviction rate, and that isn't about to change any time soon.
Which brings us to the matter of Steacy himself. He's blind, and he has an assistant help him function -- no doubt a double-expense that the CHRC regards as a source of pride and a symbol of how the rest of society ought to work. I think it's great that Steacy is still working despite his handicap. But being an investigator, especially where the matters investigated are words and symbols and intricate websites, requires eyesight. Keeping a lead investigator who is blind isn't just an act of supreme political correctness, it's an act that so obviously risks the integrity of the commission's work. Again, if it helps, imagine if an investigator hunting real crimes, not thought crimes, were blind. It's inconceivable that any defence lawyer wouldn't immediately object to any of the evidence that such an investigator collected, on the grounds that it was flawed; I can't imagine any criminal judge accepting such evidence -- if it related to anything important, it would simply provide "reasonable doubt" to any charge, and yield an acquittal. It's so ridiculous, it wouldn't even fly in a fictional TV show, even the most politically correct of the Law and Order series just wouldn't be able to have a blind investigator without fans jeering "yeah, right".
It also raises the interesting question, posed by Jay Currie, about Steacy's office helper. Why wasn't she examined, too? She was clearly involved with every step; it would be fascinating to compare her testimony to that of her boss, to find discrepancies. In a real court, that would be done, and Steacy's assistant would be excluded from court as he was answering his questions, so as not to skew her answers. But this isn't a real court.
Look, I think it's great that Steacy's still working after going blind -- the fact that he was the CHRC's union boss probably ensured that his lower productivity and need for another assistant wouldn't even be considered. I'm sure that, if the CHRC could, it would require all Canadian businesses to go to such lengths and costs. But even the nuttiest anti-discrimination advocate would acknowledge that there are some jobs where vision is necessary. Being a pilot is one of them; being an investigator is another. Unless, of course, accuracy, comprehensiveness and fairness are optional -- which is why the CHRC permits it.
CHRC's open defiance of the rule of law
Despite the unfairness of the procedure, there were a few moments when lawyer Barbara Kulaszka had Steacy pinned down. Again, I don't have the transcripts, but from the reports, Steacy simply refused to answer several questions put to him. His lawyer had no legal objection to them; he was there under subpoena. Steacy simply didn't like the questions, so he didn't answer them -- and Hadjis sat there, blinking, a deer in headlights. In a real court, a real judge would have ordered Steacy to answer, or be held in contempt. That's because, to a real court, Steacy wasn't just thumbing his nose at the accused, he was thumbing his nose at the legal process itself -- at the judge himself. Steacy might even have faced jail, in a real court; his employer, the CHRC, might have faced other sanctions; the case against Lemire itself might have turned on that conduct. But not in the kangaroo court of the human rights commissions and their tribunals.
There was no sanction attached to that bald-faced contempt. One wonders why Vigna went to such a song and dance last year; one wonders why Steacy and Rizk even showed up at all yesterday. The Tribunal obviously won't do a thing to them -- Hadjis will save his punishments for Lemire. Why not? With a 100% conviction rate, the hearing itself is a game. You'd think the CHRC would put on a bit of a show for the gathered media but really, why bother?
The perfidy of the intervenors
The CHRC's conduct, as disclosed yesterday, showed evidence of abuse of process, violation of natural justice, substitution of personal vendettas for the rule of law, corruption of investigations, corrupt evidence, bias, arbitrariness and plain old sloppiness. It's hard to think of a tenet of our Canadian legal tradition that the CHRC did not violate. The Tribunal hearing itself piled on with more unfairness of its own, as outlined above. Which brings me to the intervenors in the hearing.
Stephen Harper's Conservative government was represented at the hearing by a lawyer, intervening on behalf of the CHRC. That decision was made long ago, perhaps even before the Conservatives took office. But they did indeed take office, more than two years ago, and they could have quit the case. And, even if they were unaware of the activities of a single government lawyer at first, the public scrutiny of the last few months has removed that excuse from them. More on this below.
As well, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the B'nai Brith intervened on behalf of the CHRC, too (and so did the Simon Wiesenthal Center). The CJC has been embarrassed lately, especially in the pages of the National Post, by its participation in these witch hunts. The CJC's reply -- and it seems to be the B'nai Brith's answer, too -- is that while they stand by the concept of HRCs, they oppose some of the excesses of the system. When Rex Murphy did a whole edition of Cross Country Checkup on the subject, the CJC's Bernie Farber admitted that the system needed to be "tweaked". The CJC's figurehead presidents even wrote that the CHRC needed to more carefully weed out abusive complaints, though they did so, as usual, in a very mealy-mouthed way.
Well, that's what they write publicly -- but the CJC and B'nai Brith participated in yesterday's abominable hearing, without a word of protest. They don't want to tweak the system -- that's just something Farber says when he's sitting on the hotseat on national radio. The CJC is a major part of the CHRC's thought crime system, a system that's rigged against the CJC's political enemies. They'll make occasional noises about reform and "tweaking" the system, but then they'll be right there in the Tribunal hearing, participating in an utterly compromised and abusive process. Shame on them.
Specific revelations
There were a few specific revelations that did emerge yesterday, despite the corrupt Tribunal process. It was amazing to read about how Richard Warman -- the complainant in this matter -- simply traipsed back into the CHRC offices and used CHRC computers, pseudonyms and passwords of the very people who were investigating his complaint. Just look at that again: he was a party to the complaint, but he had full access to the CHRC's own investigation into that complaint. That's staggering. If this were a real investigation of a real crime with real police, and the alleged "victim" were to walk right into the crime lab, hop on the officers' computers, and poke around the evidence, a judge wouldn't have to throw the case out -- prosecutors would be too embarrassed to even bring the case to trial. Not so at the commission, which was in collusion with Warman, as I've documented before.
Another stunning revelation is the improper collusion between the CHRC and police, and even CSIS, Canada's spy agency. Steacy admitted that police would use their extraordinary powers to search and seize computers from people, not lay any charges against them, and then turn that evidence over to the CHRC, which would then use that evidence for their own thought crimes investigations. That sounds like, at the very least, a lawsuit against the police for breach of privacy, breach of confidentiality, abuse of office and abuse of process. The tactics of the thought police are corrupting the real police -- which is terrifying. Parliament gave many powers to the CHRC in law, but they specifically didn't give them all the powers of real police. The fact that the CHRC is undertaking secret arrangements with police departments and CSIS to use their powers is deeply disturbing.
There were a half-dozen other factoids that were troubling, but for now I'll leave those to the bloggers I linked to at the beginning of this post.
Was the hearing a success?
It was a success for Harvey Goldberg, who got out of testifying. It was a success for Dean Steacy, who stared down Athanasios Hadjis, the Tribunal chair, and simply refused to answer questions, or had selective amnesia. He got away with that behaviour, that would have put him in jail overnight in a real court. It was a success for Richard Warman, the nominal complainant, who didn't bother showing up. Why would he? He doesn't have any skin in the game -- he didn't have to hire any lawyers or take any risks. He's managed to commandeer the entire process, and he doesn't have to be there -- until the end, when he wins, and picks up his cheque, tax-free.
(That's another post for another day -- the bizarre section 14 of the Canadian Human Rights Act that states that anyone who "retaliates" against a complainant like Warman is liable to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in fines. I can see the bona fide rationale for such a rule in other circumstances, to protect whistleblowers who complain about their bosses' illegal conduct, for example. But Warman is not an employee complaining against an employer; he has nothing to do with the websites he's complained about other than joining those websites as a member. That he is somehow immune to his victims mere criticism -- again, not just immune to real harm from them, but immune to their political protests -- is deeply illiberal, is an unconstitutional "prior restraint" on speech, and is deeply one-sided.)
So the CHRC and its allies won, in the narrow sense that, as usual, the Tribunal steamrolled the respondent, and Marc Lemire will surely be convicted, and will surely be fined, and will surely have his website shut down.
But that was never in any doubt.
What's new -- the reason why I believe that Tuesday's hearing was successful for critics of the CHRC -- is that the moment the Canadian media started to scrutinize the HRCs was the moment that their illiberal conduct was most clearly on display. I'm not just talking about the conduct of the CHRC as investigators. I'm talking about the conduct of the Tribunal itself. The discreditable substance was the CHRC -- the thought crimes "police" and "prosecutors". The discreditable legal process was Hadjis's kangaroo court.
In that sense, the more appalling things went on Tuesday, the more unreasonable objections the CHRC's lawyers made, the more outrageous answers Steacy gave, the more times Hadjis sighed and said "this case is closed", when it wasn't, the more procedural aberrations -- the better. Not better for Lemire -- who was guilty before he was even investigated, guilty before he was charged, guilty before he was tried. But better for the political campaign to reform these commissions.
Denormalize the commissions, then press legislators to act
Read again my plan for fighting these commissions. It never said "try to win in the Tribunal's kangaroo court". I never said "count on the shame -- or the honour -- of the CHRC staff, or its enablers". I said: 1. Denormalize the commissions; and 2. Press legislators to act. The plan only works in that order.
The flaws of the CHRC and the Tribunal were on full display. I think that some of them were nuances that wouldn't be apparent to lay observers -- people who don't know what a real trial looks like, or how real investigators and police are supposed to act. I think that lay observers would just have a general gut feeling that something was amiss; that it doesn't seem right that the investigator claims he can't remember dozens of important details; that an interested party in the case has access to the files, etc. Without the vocabulary of the law, it's hard to articulate just how abominable Tuesday was.
Fortunately, the reporters who were in the gallery on Tuesday have all sat in on real trials before. Even if they're not lawyers, they know enough of the rules and values of our justice system, from experience and study -- I'm sure they all know better than Dean Steacy, for example, that freedom of speech is a Canadian idea, not just an American one, and it happens to be one of the "fundamental freedoms" in our Charter of Rights, a law that governs the CHRC. Mark Steyn, Charlie Gillis, Joseph Brean, Don Butler and Kady O'Malley (and perhaps others who haven't published yet) know what trials are supposed to look like, and how police, prosecutors and judges are supposed to act. The CHRC and Hadjis didn't live up to those Canadian norms. Gillis et al. are used to hearing politicians fib, evade, object or say "I forget" -- and they're hard-nosed reporters, not afraid to be scathing when they see government officials lying or abusing power. The CHRC just isn't used to being criticized -- for heaven's sakes, they even outlawed criticism from their victims, under section 14 of the Act. That criticism has already started, not because reporters like Brean and Butler are political. That's the whole point here -- unlike the pundits that have weighed in, Brean and Butler are straight-shooting news gatherers, who present both sides of the story. The fact that they are so clearly shocked by what they see is a sign that the CHRC isn't just offensive to partisans, it's offensive to anyone who understands our Canadian values. The CHRC has much more to fear from news reporters than from the likes of Steyn and me, who are discounted because we have an opinion we're pushing.
What happens now legally?
Legally, final submissions are scheduled for June 11th (which begs the question, why was yesterday's hearing cut off so abruptly after just one day?) I don't doubt that Hadjis will wait until Friday afternoon of some long weekend in the summer to release his ruling. And I don't doubt that the ruling will continue the 100% conviction rate. How could it not, with the statute written the way it is, and with the hearings rigged the way they are? Why would Lemire be any different than the rest of them? And why should Maclean's think it in turn is any different? That's my point -- fighting these commissions from within is pointless; it's rigged, and it's meant to be. The fight has to be in the court of public opinion.
What happens now in the court of public opinion?
I have no inside information, but I predict that Maclean's will run a large package on the Lemire case. They deployed a lot of resources towards the story -- first, sending a lawyer to end the secrecy of the hearing, and then in the form of three different writers in the room. Maclean's comes out in two days -- if I had to guess, this might even be their cover story.
That's 2.8 million readers, according to the PMB readership survey -- and, along with CanWest's Brean and Butler, it's building a momentum that other news organizations, like the Globe and Mail and Sun chain, can't ignore for long. For a month, this story was isolated to the blogosphere; then it was limited to opinion writers; this week, it breaks out into "real" reporters, big-time. That means reporters will build up expertise in the subject; it will become their "beat".
And there are a lot of other "new pegs" coming up this spring and summer for those new specialist reporters. Maclean's B.C. human rights hearing is schedule for late spring; I don't know when my next round will be. But I can safely say, it won't just be bloggers covering those now.
But what about Parliament?
I ask my friends in Ottawa to take the temperature for me on this issue once in a while. Last night, one minister's aide reported that his office alone had received, in the last month, 40 letters about human rights commissions, and 0 letters about the Chuck Cadman matter and 0 letters about the Obama/NAFTA leak, for comparison. I'll have to ask him how that compares to other issues, such as the Tibet rebellion. But the point is, they're tracking the matter, and the public response is encouraging. I expect those numbers to go up after the Maclean's story, and as Maclean's own trial in B.C. looms.
In other words, now is the time to switch our scrutiny from the HRCs to the Conservative government itself. Of course, we should continue to expose the outrageous conduct of the HRCs as they go along. But, other than sheer absurdities, like this case, it's unlikely that in the next year we'll have another window on the inner workings of commissions like we had on Tuesday. But we already have dozens of awful examples; we don't need any more. The commissions are being denormalized, and by people with much more influence and audience than we bloggers have.
Pressure points: Martin, Nicholson and Kenney
Now is the time to work on translating public momentum into legislative change. Keith Martin is clearly the leader in making this change, with his private member's motion. It's important that we continue to encourag