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"?

I want to know what code of political correctness Warman and the Directorate enforce on our soldiers. Does it include thought crimes like the Canadian Human Rights Act does?

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.

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.

:::

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 encourage him -- not just to keep his spirits up, but to advance his plan. Right now, it's unlikely that his motion will actually make it to a vote in Parliament. We need to encourage Martin to build a coalition within the Liberal Party, such as with "Blue Liberals" who are upset with how HRCs are being used to persecute Christian clergy. More important, we need to encourage Martin to meet with his Conservative counterparts, too -- which could be difficult, since Martin burned some bridges when he defected from them some years ago. I believe that Martin's obvious good faith on this motion, however, should be enough to trump any lingering hurt feelings. If anything, conservative ideologues should welcome Martin as bipartisan political cover for an amendment that might otherwise be labelled as a "right wing" change.

Rob Nicholson, the Justice Minister, is the obvious second pressure point. Not only is he the boss of the federal government's lawyer who was dispatched to the CHRC hearing yesterday, but he is also responsible for the CHRC and its Tribunal. Nicholson is a very amiable man, a happy warrior in his own right. He's just risk averse, as most politicians are, and he's not the crusading type. His attitude, if I read him right, is simply risk avoidance: he believes in putting out fires, not starting them.

I could understand that, even if I didn't agree with it, on the eve of an imminent election. But it became clear after the budget that Stephane Dion won't go to the polls this spring; and this week's open rebellion in Quebec makes me think even a fall election isn't likely. In other words, the Conservatives could pass just about any bill these days without falling as a government. If Dion wasn't going to bring down the election over Afghanistan, Kyoto, the budget, the crime bill or the Senate, he's not going to bring it down over an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, one proposed by his own MP, no less.

So the risk to Nicholson is gone. While that might stop him from digging in his heels, though, it doesn't yet provide him with the positive motivation to actually do something. That's where the denormalization of the HRCs comes in. Tuesday's conduct by the CHRC was abominable by any normal standard of Canadian justice. I think the CHRC has survived politically the same way they've survived publicly -- by staying below the radar. That's gone now. And it's our job to bring the worst of the CHRC's corruption and lawlessness to Nicholson's attention -- and demand that he stop it, or insist that he wear it.

Richard Warman, Dean Steacy, Harvey Goldberg and others are all in on it together. It's unreasonable to think that any of them would discipline the system that they've created. In a real police force, Internal Affairs or the "police commission" would step in, but there's no such oversight here, and even the Tribunal is powerless to discipline them, as Steacy's contempt for Hadjis shows. The CHRC is Nicholson's baby. Steacy is Nicholson's employee. Their violation of norms of justice is Nicholson's shame -- or it ought to be. The CHRC's confessed, anonymous, online bigotry was done out of Nicholson's budget. He ought to answer for that. It would be nice if he dealt with it pro-actively, but that doesn't seem to be happening. So he should be made to wear the growing CHRC scandal, until he fixes it under pressure.

I really am surprised that no opposition MP has tried to hang the Tories with the taxpayer funded bigotry spread by Nicholson's staffers, on government time. You'd think that the Liberals or the NDP would love to tag the Conservatives with some of Steacy's or Warman's online posts -- the anti-Semitism, the anti-gay comments, and the outrageous anti-Black, anti-women comments directed at Sen. Anne Cools. You'd think it would fit their caricature of bigoted Conservatives. But if the leftist opposition doesn't care about such bigotry -- and some of them don't, because it's being done in the name of political correctness -- that's no reason for the right to countenance it.

One MP who gets this is Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism. Kenney has been on the right side of this issue for months, from his scrum on the subject, to his gutsy letters, to his question period answers. In a way, the CHRC is his file, too, as he has jurisdiction over human rights matters. Perhaps Kenney can be a bridge between Keith Martin and other reform-minded Liberals like Dan McTeague, and Nicholson. More to the point, perhaps Kenney can marshall the more ideological elements of the Conservative caucus -- including the Prime Minister himself -- to show Nicholson that reforming the CHRC isn't just the right thing to do, it's the politically smart thing to do, to keep the party's base happy.

Good luck to all of us

I truly believe we're winning. The HRCs are being denormalized; now we have to turn our attention to the politicians who can do something about it. Let's write to Martin, Nicholson and Kenney, and encourage them to do the right thing. Better yet, let's phone them -- and the Prime Minister, too. If we keep at them, the way we have been these past months, I believe we will see the beginnings of true reform before the year is out.

UPDATE: Looks like the YouTube video is down; you can view Rex's commentary here.

Rex Murphy is in top form in this commentary. And I like how he even manages to work in a reference to our Canadian human rights commissions! Bravo.

UPDATE: Young Abdullah doesn't much like the scrutiny that's come his way in the past 18 hours. He's changed his website -- adding an alibi. Check out his pre-edited website here.

UPDATE 2: Again from great sleuthing in the comments -- Abdullah's name before he changed it was Robert DeLancey. Some of his public utterances under that name include this:

"The usa shoud be the expelled from the security council then referred to the security council for war crimes. Impose sanctions against the usa until it stops invading innocent countries. The regime currently in control of the black house will stop at nothing to advance thier control and influence on the entire world. Living in canada one can clearly see that the usa never really wants to negotiate on anything. They are takers and they will take what they want sparing no expense or human life. The usa lives in a state of fear and any nation that is scared becomes a very dangerous nation. Only a dedicated group of nations that oppose american agression can stop the reign of terror commited by the usa."

and this:

"Al Jazeera shows reality very clearly. Americans can not deal with this reality. Specifically, because it forces them to face the atrocities that the Americans have commited in the name of "Freedom and Democracy" which is neither, but actually just rhetoric, being propagated to assist the expansion of their empire. Making it sound pleasant and right to the American populace to control the Middle East and the vast resources that it holds. The real terrorist mouthpiece is the American news agencies that are helping Bush spread his propoganda of hate against the Middle East and Muslims everywhere by repeatedly portraying America as good,true and just. While always portraying Muslims and the good people of the Middle East as Extremists and evil. Long live the voice of the Middle East."
Robert DeLancey from Canada

Stop for a moment to reflect on how far our campaign to denormalize Canada's abusive human rights commissions has come in the past three months.

Last year, 99% of Canadians hadn't even heard of human rights commissions. That number's probably still 90%, but amongst the political and media class, the issue has become commonplace. Who could have predicted both the Globe and Mail and the National Post editorializing for reform of the HRC laws? Or even the CBC pounding away again and again and again and again (and again next weekend -- I'll let you know the details soon). And that the Can-Con glitterati would join the fray, too, and the Canadian Association of Journalists? As I mentioned last week, a communications director for a federal cabinet minister told me it was the second most popular topic of constituent mail his office was receiving.

As I outlined in January, political movement doesn't usually come until public opinion moves, so it shouldn't be surprising that, so far, only bold politicians have called for reform. But, again, three months ago, who would have thought that any MP would become so well-briefed -- and so feisty! -- on the subject as Keith Martin has become?

But all of this, I believe, has merely been the prologue to what's coming next -- starting tomorrow.

I've described at some length what's scheduled to happen tomorrow at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in downtown Ottawa. But even that is just a sliver of the ground that could be covered. I reviewed just one transcript, that of Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer Hannya Rizk. I haven't even had the time to go digging into the transcripts of the other two CHRC staffers who have been subpoenaed, Dean Steacy and Harvey Goldberg. (These are the transcripts in which the CHRC makes various objections to answering questions about their conduct; those objections have now been overruled or abandoned by the CHRC, and so tomorrow's cross-examination of Rizk, Steacy and Goldberg will fill in the gaps left in these tantalizing transcripts from last year's hearings.)

But now I'm not talking about particular HRC outrages that have been uncovered, or those that are sure to be uncovered soon. What I'm talking about now is that, unlike the testimony of Rizk, Steacy, Goldberg and others last year, to a nearly empty room, tomorrow's testimony will be witnessed by the first rank of Canada's press gallery -- including those who had to sue to get access to the hearing itself. That should already tell you something about their interest in the subject, and their views on the CHRC's predilection towards secrecy.

Tomorrow may mark the hundredth day that bloggers like me -- or the indispensable HRC-watch site, Free Mark Steyn -- has weighed in. Mark Steyn, who has been fighting these commissions like hell, will be there, as you would expect. But for many mainstream reporters, like Maclean's Charlie Gillis, it's the beginning of their HRC beat. The National Post's Joseph Brean is clearly just getting warmed up, too. I wonder who else will be there; I suspect CanWest will have a reporter there, if they don't pick up Brean's work. I wouldn't be surprised if the Globe's Peggy Wente attends, or someone from that paper's Ottawa bureau, simply to stay competitive with the Post on the subject. I think Debbie Gyapong is attending -- as usual, she's bound to pick up one some details that others overlook. 

In other words, as far as reporting this story is concerned, this is just getting started. And all this, as the Post's Jonathan Kay notes, for a politically marginal respondent, Marc Lemire. Imagine the media scrutiny when mainstream Maclean's and Mark Steyn are hauled before the federal and B.C. HRCs. And if you think the videos of my interrogation at the hands of the Alberta HRC raised a ruckus -- 538,000 views so far, according to YouTube -- imagine the attention that my actual hearing will bring.

I can't help but to chuckle about a blog entry that the CHRC's lonely defender, Warren Kinsella, posted two weeks ago, under the headline "the big free speech debate":

Canada's self-styled Simon Wiesenthal hit the panic button because 25 skinheads marched in Calgary over the weekend. They carried flags saying "white pride", and rode the subway. Their march fizzled when they were met by police, and 150 communists and anarchists.

Those 25 white supremacists are bigots -- just like Indian supremacists and Black supremacists are. But criminals? From what I can tell, the Calgary skinheads didn't do or say anything that even reached the threshhold of a human rights thought crime, let alone a Criminal Code violation. They certainly didn't do anything as bad as publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

I'm glad that Calgary -- and Kinsella -- are so vigilant about 25 skinheads in a city of 1 million. I really am glad. But unlike Kinsella, I think social marginalization and spirited refutation is the best antidote to haters. More than that, I believe we each have to take civic responsibility to rebut haters, not delegate that to "anti-hate teams" at corrupt government human rights commissions.

But I've got a question for Kinsella. Where was his outrage a few years ago when more than 1,000 Muslim radicals marched through Calgary chanting "death to the Jews" and flying the flag of the terrorist group Hezbollah? Here are two news reports from the Calgary Herald.

Unlike the 25 impotent white supremacists, this jihadist mob tried to break and enter the U.S. consulate and the federal government's Harry Hays building, too.

I'm not sure if shouting "death to the Jews" meets the criminal standard of uttering death threats, or inciting violence. I think it sure warrants investigation -- but Calgary police didn't do so until pressed; and no charges were laid that I'm aware of. And, of course, the human rights commissions were silent -- they have never prosecuted a single case of Islamic fascism.

That "death to the Jews" incident isn't rare. Jihadist marches in Canada are becoming more commonplace -- and MPs from Kinsella's party are often there, not to bury but to praise. And then there are Lebanon-style Hezbollah billboards.

Darcey Jerrom reminds us of another leftist/Islamist "rally" in Calgary where the flag of the Hezbollah terrorists -- a hand holding an AK-47 machine gun -- was waved by a Muslim activist standing atop Calgary's war memorial. Here's a partial video clip; I'll see if I can track down at shot right on the memorial itself.

I don't think that flying the flag of a terrorist group should be illegal. Actually, it's a good way to identify and marginalize the radicals, who would otherwise be anonymous amongst us. I'm just pointing out, for the umpteenth time, that the true threat to Jews in 2008, and to inter-ethnic relations in general, is probably not from 25 skinheads unable even to come up with a rhyming chant. The true threat is from one or two thousand Muslims demanding death to the Jews, and trying to break into government offices. Not surprisingly, the faux anti-racists who were brave enough to stand up to the faux fascists this weekend were nowhere to be found when the Islamists were rallying. Actually, that's probably not true, either -- many of them were probably chanting right along. 

Here is a BBC report on the human rights controversy in Canada. I think it's pretty fair. Here's an excerpt about my case:

Leading the charge against the commissions is Ezra Levant, an Alberta-based publisher who was targeted by a complaint after reprinting the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in his (now-defunct) newspaper in early 2006.

His accuser, a Calgary Muslim leader who cited the Koran in his complaint, said the publisher had spread hatred.

In January Mr Levant appeared before an Alberta Human Rights official charged with deciding whether to refer the matter to a special tribunal.

In a videotaped statement later posted on his website, Mr Levant called the commission a "sick joke" and defiantly pleaded guilty.

"I'm not going to try to minimise what I've done and beg for mercy," he told the BBC News website. "I have the right to violate all those Koranic precepts because we follow Queen Elizabeth's law, not Muhammad's law."

I say again that while the mainstream media in Canada has been excellent at opining on the subject -- I think every newspaper and talk show has weighed in at least once -- only a handful, such as the National Post, have done real reporting on the subject. I find that odd, because there are so many facets to this story, from the nature of racism in the 21st century, to the idea of thought crimes or word crimes, to the administration of justice, to the definition of human rights, etc.

I suspect that drought of real shoe-leather reporting will end after Tuesday's hearing.

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui weighs in on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the thought crime complaints against Maclean's magazine. No-one who is familiar with Siddiqui's radical ideology would be surprised that he supports the complaints.

(By the way, whenever a journalist supports such censorship -- and, frankly, I can't think of another newspaper columnist in the country who shares Siddiqui's views -- I'm reminded of what Abraham Lincoln said about slavery: when I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.) 

Siddiqui gets some of his facts wrong. For example, he repeats the fiction that students Khurrum Awan, Naseem Mithoowani, Muneeza Sheikh and Ali Ahmed are complainants against Maclean's. But that's not true. If I'm reading these documents correctly, the complaint that is before the CHRC was filed by Mohamed Elmasry alone, and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint was filed by Elmasry and Naiyer Habib of Abbotsford, B.C. (the Ontario case was rejected for jurisdictional reasons). Those four students are not complainants; they are nothing more than a PR front, to conceal the fact that the real complainant, Elmasry, is a Jew-hating bigot.

But there is a point Siddiqui makes, and others have made it too, that has some merit:

There was little or no hue and cry when human rights commissions were ruling on complaints by various groups, but there is when the complainants are Muslim.

Martin and others need to address that if they are not to be seen as hypocrites.

The media, including the Star, also vehemently oppose human rights tribunals regulating the press.

They do so to protect press freedom. They also point to disparities in the human rights codes in different jurisdictions. Ontario's refers to signs, symbols, emblems etc. but not the media. The federal statute, and the ones in Alberta and B.C., are clearer, which is why the tribunals there heard the cases they did.

It follows, then, that the federal and British Columbia commissions have no option but to hear the complaint against Maclean's. Otherwise, they will stand accused of double standards.

The reason Maclean's is fighting back (and me, too) is not because our complainants are Muslim; it's because our complainants, regardless of their religion, seek to censor bona fide political discussion, and thereby are violating our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and our property rights. Their complaints are twisting any reasonable definition of "human rights" and "discrimination". I'm sure Maclean's and I would have fought back just as vigorously had the complainant been an opportunistic grievance-monger complaining "on behalf" of Muslims, like Darren Lund, or the usual complainant in section 13 cases, Richard Warman.

That said, Siddiqui has a point. And it's actually the same point I've been making for some time: the precedent of censorship and government persecution has been set, using oddballs and racists (or politically incorrect Christians) as the guinea pigs. Few people stood up for the constitutional rights of the CHRC's victims to date, because those victims were so politically or personally odious. That's Lemire's point -- though he argues that he is not as odious as he's been painted.

If anti-Semites can be censored by the CHRC, why can't "Islamophobes"? And if "Islamophobes" and anti-Semites can be censored, how about any other "phobe" or "ite"? Siddiqui defends an immoral law that is being capriciously enforced. But he at least understands what the Canadian Jewish Congress does not: it is inconsistent to demand that your enemies be censored, but to insist on an exception for your friends. That's exactly what the CJC (and Warren Kinsella, actually) are arguing, by saying Steyn and I should be acquitted. How is that anything but a violation of the rule of law in its own way? The CJC says:

In our estimation, the complaints against Maclean’s and Levant fall well short of the mandated standard of the provincial human rights commissions petitioned for redress and should not have been accepted. 

Well, obviously the HRCs disagree. Why should they limit their censorship to the CJC's enemies?

I think Elmasry is appalling; and I think the HRCs are not only violating our constitutional freedoms, and making a mockery of due process and natural law, but they're clearly exceeding their own statutory mandates. But if that's what HRCs are doing these days, it shouldn't surprise us that Islamo-fascists are attracted to them, and hijacking them for their own political fetishes, just as the Warmans and CJCs of the world have done for years.

Which is why the answer is not to tinker with these bureaucracies, or try to reform them, but to gut them, uproot them and abolish them.

I blame Elmasry; but he is only doing what the CHRC lets him do. And I blame the CHRC; but they are only doing what the federal government continues to let them do.

Siddiqui is right: until we change the law, we shouldn't be surprised that Islamic fascists abuse it.

Last month, Old Jed wrote a great song about Richard Warman and the human rights commissions.

Old Jed's back with a new song, a parody of Shania Twain, which you can listen to (and watch) here.

Let's be frank: Old Jed can't sing worth beans. But he's a very good songwriter. And that was good enough for Bob Dylan, right?

Mark Steyn points out that Keith Martin's criticisms of the Canadian Human Rights Commission are stronger than ever on the eve of Tuesday's landmark hearing. And Martin properly fingers a major culprit behind the CHRC's abuses: Richard Warman. Martin mentioned Warman specifically in the National Post:

Liberal MP Keith Martin, who has put forth a motion to scrap section 13.1, says it seems unfair that "someone could be using the power of the state for their own private initiative. I don't want to use the word pogrom, it would be too strong. One person's private crusade."

About which Steyn asks:

I wonder if [Warman] will sue - or threaten to sue - Dr Martin, as he has sued - or threatened to sue - everyone else who disrespects him.

I don't know if Warman has threatened any MPs with lawsuits, but I know that he threatened an MP with a human rights investigation. In fact, in one of the very first editions of the Western Standard, we did a cover story on just that case: Warman -- who was still working at the CHRC -- had filed a complaint against Jim Pankiw, then a Saskatoon MP, citing official Parliamentary brochures Pankiw was sending to his constituents about topical issues like crime and Aboriginal land claims. Here are some excerpts from Terry O'Neill's incredible story (link requires quick but free registration):

On April 14, 2004, Richard Warman, an Ottawa-based lawyer who is an investigator with the Commission, filed a landmark report recommending the Commission appoint a Human Rights Tribunal to inquire into the complaints. The next day, the CHRC's director of investigations, Sherri Helgason, gave Pankiw until May 7 to respond. The Commission will then decide whether to turn to matter over to a tribunal for adjudication (the Commission itself does not confirm or deny the existence of any case until it proceeds to the tribunal stage, a Commission staffer said).

If found guilty in what would be a precedent-setting decision, Pankiw could be fined up to $20,000. He would be able to appeal to the Federal Court of Canada, but a guilty verdict would likely be enough to cast a chill over Parliament Hill. No longer would MPs feel completely free to advocate--or criticize--controversial policies if they suspected that someone might be offended.

:::

So, the RCMP has determined the confrontational brochures do not qualify as hate literature. A legal expert on libel and defamation determines they are in no way racist. So why does the CHRC seem ready to pursue Pankiw despite all of the evidence? It could be that it's in its nature. For one thing, bureaucracies are motivated to justify their own existence. If the CHRC had no one to investigate or try, people might question why we need the thing. Subsequently, bureaucrats there have at least an unconscious drive to protect their jobs by fleshing out human rights abuses, even in a country with one of the cleanest human rights records in the world. On the conscious level, those inside the CHRC are likely going to be more prepared to be activists in terms of pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a human-rights abuse given that section 48.1 (2) of Canada's Human Rights Act stipulates that all persons hired to serve on a tribunal "must have experience, expertise and interest in, and sensitivity to, human rights." In other words, only those persons who are already predisposed to be in favour of human-rights prosecutions can serve on tribunals.

Take Richard Warman. The man investigating Pankiw has a storied history of making human rights one of his personal causes. He is a political animal, having run for the ultra-left wing Green Party in Ontario both provincially and federally. He was personally awarded $30,000 by the tribunal in June 2003 for helping to shut down a racist website. Last summer he also personally sued the Northern Alliance, a white supremacist group, for libel after the group said on its web site that he was "a misguided witch hunter." In a speech in October 2003, discussing the fight against offensive speech on the Internet, Warman said he was looking forward to international agreements that would allow nations to arrest those it considers promoters of hate-speech if they try and enter the country.

The reason that the CHRC is able to proceed with a case the RCMP considered pointless is that human-rights proceedings are not forced to adhere to the same sort of strict rules of evidence to which criminal courts must. Tribunals do not need to show that offending statements made by a defendant are actually false, for instance; prosecutors need only show that the statements were discriminatory. In other words, in the star chamber of the human rights tribunal, even the truth is not a valid defence.

Nor do prosecutors need to prove these discriminatory statements caused actual harm, only that they had a potential to do so. In August 2002, when a federal Tribunal found Vancouver businessman John Micka guilty of violating the Human Rights Act because of anti-homosexual statements he made on a web site, the tribunal based its findings on the evidence of a sole 'expert witness'--a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Windsor who is also a well-known a homosexual-rights activist. The tribunal heard no evidence that harm had come to homosexuals through the publication of Micka's statements. In effect, the CHRC gave the expert witness was given the power of censor, "deciding what [and what not] the Canadian public should be entitled to read," said McConchie at the time. The CHRC's case against Pankiw relies in part on the expert opinion of Derek Smith, another sociology and anthropology professor, but this time from Carleton University. Smith wrote in a Jan. 16, 2004 report to the Commission that Pankiw's pamphlets "far exceed legitimate and civil policy discourse." He opined it is "entirely appropriate" that the contents of the pamphlets be subject to a Commission action. He reached his conclusions based on a close reading of the pamphlets, including an analysis of the colour of ink Pankiw used. He found those colours--red and black, on a white background--to be "inflammatory," because those three colours, as well as yellow, are frequently found in ritual Native "regalia and clothing".

Four things come to mind.

First, I really miss the magazine, and the ability we had to fire a broadside at the issues of the day, every two weeks. But I'm glad that most of our former writers (and radio hosts) are still in the business. I guess I am, too. And Matthew Johnston runs the website, where all of the magazine's stories are archived and a blog continues. 

Second, I'd like to add up just how many complaints Warman filed at the commission while he was working at the commission. I had wrongly assumed that he didn't start his spree until he left. I wonder what kind of interference and pressure he brought to bear on his colleagues in the Pankiw case -- was it similar to the improper demands he placed on his colleague, Hannya Rizk, in the Lemire case?

Third, stop for a moment and think of the unmitigated arrogance here: that Warman and the CHRC would presume to be able to censor MPs. Put aside the ancient legal custom of parliamentary privilege and other immunities that we grant to MPs specifically to protect them from being bullied. What does it say about Warman's and the CHRC's respect for political debate, and for the democratic process that had elected Pankiw?

Fourth, I'm proud of the fact that the Western Standard made this a cover story, fully four years ago. But it's a reminder of how long Warman and the CHRC have been getting away with their abuses. Too bad Pankiw didn't turn the tables on the CHRC and Warman, the way Lemire is doing on Tuesday. But, to a lesser degree than Lemire, Pankiw was on the margins of politics, with few friends either in Parliament or the media. If he had fought back, it's unlikely that he would have had sympathetic treatment -- or indeed, coverage at all -- in the media, though he would have had the benefit of free lawyers from Parliament's legal department.

How many lives have been ruined by Warman and the CHRC in those four years? Not just in the cases that have gone all the way to a ruling, but the dozens of people who have been bullied along the way? We will likely never know all of the disreputable things done by the CHRC and we will never be able to set right all of their wrongs. But we can stop things from going on in the future.

Two groups of protesters met in Calgary yesterday: 25 members of the "Aryan Guard" white supremacist group, and 150 assorted leftist urchins, led by Bonnie Collins, the Communist Party candidate and spokewoman for the often-violent group, Anti-Racist Action.

A pox on both of their houses, I say.

And that's the point. I despise them both. But I don't think either group should be arrested for having foul ideas. According to the press reports that I've seen, there was some chanting and sign-waving and even a few leaflets being handed out, but no violence, and no incitement of violence. In other words, it was calmer than a typical Friday afternoon at Syed Soharwardy's mosque.

Like Soharwardy the radical Islamist, the two groups on display were ugly -- fascists and communists. And passers-by were appropriately appalled. That's exactly how it should be. As Gilles Marchildon, the executive director of EGALE, the gay rights group, has argued, one of the advantages of free speech is that it lets us know who the bad guys are, and motivates us to take our civic duties seriously. That's the difference, though, between bona fide activists like Marchildon, and anarchists and communists like the ARA, and their supporters like Richard Warman, with his "maximum disruption" philosophy. They just want a fight.

In a city of one million citizens if only 25 white supremacists can be marshalled on a sunny spring day, that's a pretty good indicator of just how marginal white supremacism is in Canada. (Question: how many of those 25 were agents provocateurs for the police, human rights commissions, or others in the anti-hate industry?) The larger numbers on the communist/anarchist side aren't surprising, especially given that Collins is a union boss. But even their numbers are pitifully low. The sheer entertainment value of the clashing protest should have been enough to bring out more. Professional grievance-mongers of all stripes have a better time of it in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. It's just not a Calgary thing to do.

That's my reaction. But it won't surprise you that the usual suspects on the censorious left want to ban public demonstrations like this -- but only for the side they don't like.

Warren Kinsella, on cue, is apoplectic. But what exactly is his complaint? The white supremacists rode the transit together, walked a few blocks, and were turned back by counter-protesters and police. The news report from which Kinsella excerpts doesn't say a word more -- no mention even of flags, chants or literature. Other than being politically marginal and offensive, where exactly is their crime? If I was a political activist like Kinsella, I'd be careful about calling for the banning of peaceful public rallies.

Even the ARA had trouble finding some crime to quarrel with, other than ideology. According to Jason Devine,

“We can’t just sit around and wait for the police,” Devine argues. “Essentially, the police’s hands are tied. Until they break the law, it’s our job to alert the community. We show up to let them know that we’re watching them and that the community doesn’t have to be afraid.”

No laws are being broken -- not even trumped up "hate" laws or even fake "human rights" violations. But Devine wants a fight anyways -- maximum disruption-style. It sounds to me like he's more of a threat of violence than even the thugs he opposes.

Nothing much happened in Calgary -- certainly nothing that comes close to the incitement you'd see on a typical day at an "Israel Apartheid Week" on a Canadian university campus these days. Kinsella and the CJC are mum on those demonstrations, and often ignore real jihadist threats of violence, too. To make up for that shameful silence, they hyperventilate about fake threats like yesterday's non-event in Calgary. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

I think this has to be the most politically incorrect -- and downright hilarious -- opening paragraph in any newspaper I've read in the long time:

Men, if while adhering to the dictates of an ancient creed, you find yourself housing four welfare wives, imported, one by one, from the wretched homeland, why have you not formed a curling team? Imagine the jostling for position:Who gets to be lead, second, vice, skip? Smock-ripping brawl to follow. And then, makeup sex -- you'll need a long weekend! No, you won't. None of you has a job.

Good lord that's cheeky. And my favourite part: writer Kevin Baker begs for a human rights complaint:

If anything I said above upsets you, please lodge a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. You pay nothing. Filing is risk-free. Your identity will be kept confidential. No commitment is required. Should you ever calm down, you may withdraw your complaint. I hope you won't, though. You see, I'd like a little of the fame that comes to those who are named respondents in a human-rights abuse action... I want to be a free-speech martyr, too. Give me some of that CHRC hate-speech love.

I wish Baker was covering Tuesday's hearing, too. I can only imagine the fun he'd have with Dean Steacy and Richard Warman.

Today's National Post has a huge news report by Joseph Brean, previewing Tuesday's human rights tribunal hearing in Ottawa. It's the most in-depth report on the subject I've seen so far outside of the blogosphere. But then, the only elements of the mainstream media to touch this story -- other than Joan Bryden's factually inaccurate "report" -- have been opinion editorials. Almost every newspaper in the country has weighed in with their views on the subject (and all of them have criticized the human rights commissions) but almost none of them have deployed actual reporting resources to the matter. The National Post has now set a high standard in that regard, and I assume Brean will be there on Tuesday to follow up the story.

Here are some excerpts from Brean's piece:

In the hands of adjudicators with limited legal training, poor investigatory resources and naively good intentions, critics charge that the power of section 13.1 is being abused for nuisance cases that would be rightly tossed out of a real court.

As evidence, they point to the two prominent conservative journalists who have recently been charged with the same violation: Ezra Levant of the defunct Western Standard and

Mark Steyn of Maclean's. And they point to Mr. Lemire's accuser, former human rights commission employee Richard Warman, who is also the complainant in more than a dozen other section 13.1 cases -- more by far than any other complainant ever -- and wonder how one man could be so widely aggrieved. They also note his 100% success rate.

The article also contains some of Keith Martin's toughest comments on the CHRC yet:

Liberal MP Keith Martin, who has put forth a motion to scrap section 13.1, says it seems unfair that "someone could be using the power of the state for their own private initiative. I don't want to use the word pogrom, it would be too strong. One person's private crusade."

Mr. Martin describes the legal test of "likely to expose" as "a hole you could drive a Mack truck through," and said it is being applied by "rogue commissions where a small number of people [are] determining what Canadians can and can't say."

And here's a quote from Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association:

"Although it's true that they have nailed some genuine hatemongers with it, it has nevertheless been used or threatened to be used against a wide variety of constituencies who don't bear the slightest resemblance to the kind of hatemongers that were originally envisioned: anti-American protesters, French-Canadian nationalists, a film sympathetic to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, a pro-Zionist book, a Jewish community leader, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and even a couple years ago, a pro-Israeli speaker was briefed about the anti-hate law by a police detective before he went in to make a speech," he said.

In none of these cases was there a lasting conviction or property seizure. "But only lawyers could be consoled by that," he said.

I've got a few comments in the article, too:

Others call the 13.1 offence simply a "pre-crime," a concept from the sci-fi movie Minority Report. They say it is an excuse to punish people for something that has not actually happened yet, but which is simply "likely," or even just theoretically possible.

"How can you even defend against what might or might not happen in the future? Of course I'm guilty because it [exposing people to contempt] might happen," said Ezra Levant, who is the subject of a complaint in Alberta by a Muslim organization for publishing the Danish Muhammad cartoons.

"If Canada had a 100% conviction rate for murders, you don't think that the civil libertarians would be saying, 'What the hell? No one ever wins?' " Mr. Levant said. "But of course it must be a 100% conviction rate because it's a pre-crime, it's a thought crime, and truth is not a defence."

The most, uh, creative comment in the report comes from Darren Lund. (Lund is an anti-American, anti-Christian bigot who runs his own Internet hate site, to use the parlance of the HRCs, dedicated to undermining the Christian charity Samaritan's Purse. Like his fellow anti-Christian bigots, Mohamed Elmasry and Syed Soharwardy, Lund has used the human rights commissions as his own censor. He's the plaintiff behind the abominable Boissoin case, which (at paragraph 357) ruled that Lund's right not to be offended by a newspaper article trumps the freedom of speech and freedom of religion of a Christian pastor.)

Lund told the Post:

"With more resources they could do a better job of weeding out the nuisance cases and of investigating."

 So the remedy to the nuisance suits at the HRCs -- his included -- is... more money and more staff? That's convenient. It's not a particularly original proposal, coming from a life-long government employee himself. But how will more money for the HRCs change their essence, other than to make them a larger menace? They are by nature vehicles for nuisance suits and the statute that governs them, with its vague prohibition against "symbols" that are "likely" to "cause hatred", is the root of the problem. The Alberta Human Rights Commission has now spent more than two years working on the ridiculous cartoon complaints against me. At least four HRC staff have been involved, including at least one lawyer. The fact that they didn't "weed out" the cartoon complaint against me isn't because they didn't have the time or the manpower -- the number of complaints the Alberta HRC received last year actually declined, though their budget didn't. It's because squelching politically incorrect ideas isn't an accident, it's the HRCs very purpose. Every case at the HRC is a nuisance suit -- Lund's being amongst the worst. But back to the National Post:

One of the most interesting comments in the article is from David Matas, of B'nai Brith:

"I don't think that it's a coincidence that we're seeing a number of people complaining and using the human rights commissions claiming that this is an attack against Islam. That's what we're seeing internationally as well," said David Matas, senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith Canada, who returned this week from the meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

"To me, looking at Steyn or Levant is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope, because the problem isn't that Steyn or Levant are being frivolously accused of something, the problem is that there is a wave now of people doing domestically what we have seen internationally, which is to try to use the human rights system to divert it from its true goal," he said.

That's an excellent point -- and exacly the subject of the conference I'll be speaking at in New York. It's about the concerted plan by radical Muslim nations to use the West's legal systems against ourselves, as part of the "soft jihad". The hard jihad isn't working out too well in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, despite what the surrenderist longings of the mainstream media would say. But the soft jihad is a roaring success -- in Western academia, and in Canada's HRCs. That's not just a coincidence. (Why hasn't Lund, a self-styled gay activist, set up a website criticizing the anti-women, anti-gay nature of sharia law, too? Why has he saved his calumnies and his human rights complaints for Christian pastors, but exempted Muslim clerics so reactionary on sexual politics, they make Pastor Boissoin look like Liberace by comparison? Is it fear of violence, like that which killed gay filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Or is it simply that Lund has some personal issues with Christianity that he's working out at taxpayers' expense?)

Matas points out that our human rights commissions are being deliberately used as a Canadian front in the global jihad. I am constantly puzzled by the B'nai Brith. Their chief counsel points out the abuses of the HRC system, and connects the dots to the global Islamist threat. And their own in-house newspaper, The Tribune, published a similar analysis by terrorism expert John Thompson (see page 4). Yet the B'nai Brith continues to be an abuser of these same human rights commissions, and in fact is an intervener, on behalf of Richard Warman and the CHRC, in Tuesday's hearing in Ottawa. A charitable explanation is that the B'nai Brith is slowly coming to terms with the truth about the HRCs, but hasn't fully made up its mind -- unlike the Canadian Jewish Congress, which is ever more obsessed and committed to censorship, no matter the cost to their reputation.

Needless to say, Warman himself declined to be interviewed by Brean. But that didn't stop Brean from doing his own research into the serial complainant:

The lightning rod in all of this is Richard Warman, Canada's most prolific and successful third-party human rights complainant.

Mr. Warman, who worked for the CHRC from 2002 to 2004 and now works for the Department of National Defence, declined to be interviewed, but transcripts of testimony at previous tribunals and records of his public speaking paint a picture of a determined anti-racism activist who pursues people he judges to be hatemongers with a strategy he describes as "maximum disruption."

Besides anonymous lurking in chat-rooms, frequent complaints to the CHRC, behind-the-scenes help with commission investigations and tips to police, this strategy has at least once involved recruiting fellow activists to throw a cream pie at a target, David Icke, a British author whom Mr. Warman considers an anti-Semite.

It was a large and well-researched article, and gave plenty of ink to the HRCs' critics. I can hardly wait to see what Brean writes about the hearing itself in Wednesday's Post.

On August 24, 2006, Canada's telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, rejected an ex parte application by Richard Warman and Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress to censor foreign websites, by blocking Canadian Internet users from accessing them. It was an attempt to replicate the Orwellian "Great Firewall of China" that the Chinese Communist Party uses to stop politically incorrect websites from reaching that country. I wrote about this unsuccessful but terrifying assault on our freedom here.

The CRTC's rejection of censorship was polite but clear: such a radical infringement of the rights of Internet users, and such unprecedented government regulation of the content of communications, was not something that could be done in a quick, private legal application. If it were to be done at all, it would need to be a big public discussion, including all stakeholders.

Needless to say, a transparent, public discussion of censorship isn't exactly Warman's style. So, some two months after the CRTC had given Warman and the CJC the bum's rush, the CJC approached Warman's old employer, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a group that likes to operate without the hassle of public accountability.

Here's a letter from the CJC to Harvey Goldberg, the chief of section 13 thought crimes investigations over at the CHRC. It's dated November 1, 2006 -- barely two months after the CRTC's decision.

The letter is pretty clear: the CJC wanted the CHRC to find other ways to "provide ISP's [Internet service providers] with the motivation and the ability" to block foreign sites. That is, to do exactly what the CRTC -- and section 36 of the Telecommunication Act -- forbids them to do: tamper with content on the Internet.

There's an element of lawlessness here. The Act specifically states that "a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public", and the CRTC confirmed that, yet the CJC wants to proceed in the face of those rules. So, naturally, the CHRC would be the perfect agency to help skirt those rules -- they've shown quite often that they don't give a tinker's damn about the rule of law.

But if the CRTC won't do it, what does the CJC have in mind? And what do they mean by giving ISP's the "motivation" to do what their own customers and the law won't abide?

The answer is hinted at in the CHRC's "strategic initiatives" outlined on this page of their website. There is a lot of government-as-nanny talk here that would offend most Internet users, but one of the "initiatives" proposed stands out: Canada's existing Internet "hotline", www.cybertip.ca.

Cybertip isn't about censoring politically incorrect thought crimes. It's about blocking child abuse and child pornography sites. Child exploitation isn't a thought crime, it's a real crime. But to the CHRC, Cybertip is their loophole to get past the nasty CRTC with all of their rules and procedures.

Cybertip doesn't play police themselves -- they pass tips of child abuse on to real police who take action. In six years, that has meant 32 arrests. But the CHRC isn't interested in passing anything on to the police, who are bound by all sorts of rules, like the Criminal Code, real trials, and innocence until guilt is proven. Cybertip blocks websites because those websites are part of the crime of child exploitation. But the CHRC is only interested in the final result that Cybertip can achieve: blocking websites. There is no crime being committed by the CHRC's enemies.

Bernie Farber and Len Rudner of the CJC have both written to the CHRC, encouraging them to do an end-run around the CRTC, and to set up a political Cybertip site. Here is an appalling couple of letters to this effect. Look at the second paragraph of Farber's letter:

Indeed, CJC, more [than] 10 years ago, observed that the internet might have the appearance of a wild frontier, but that it could be -- and must be -- tamed.

Oh, really? I know that throttling dissenting views is Farber's personal fetish. But does anyone at the CJC -- or its funders -- know the kind of things this man writes? Do the two figurehead presidents, Reuven Bulka and Sylvain Abitbol? What do they think of Farber's dream of "taming" the Internet?

We will of course not be satisfied until the number of "Canadian [hate] sites" has been reduced to zero, but the work is well underway.

Well, we know the kind of sites that the CHRC considers to be "hate sites". They investigated Free Dominion, a mainstream conservative site. Maclean's magazine's website was specifically named in a section 13 "hate site" complaint to the CHRC. And the Western Standard magazine itself was hit with an Alberta HRC complaint for publishing the Danish cartoons. But Farber and the CJC won't be satisfied until they're gone.

Section 13 trials at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal are bad enough. They are kangaroo courts, with countless flaws. But at least there is some process, and it is usually open to the public. Cybertip doesn't have a tribunal; they don't have document disclosure or hearings or stenographers. I'm pretty comfortable with that lack of due process when it comes to child exploitation. But I'd be terrified if there was a political Cybertip, with the likes of Dean "freedom of speech is an American concept so I don't give it any value" Steacy making the decisions in private, with Richard Warman there to stir up a constant supply of complaints. 

I doubt that the subject of the CJC/CHRC's desire to get Cybertip to start hunting and blocking websites with politically incorrect speech will come up in Tuesday's hearing in Ottawa, but it might. The CHRC's Goldberg -- who Farber claims "believes that this concept has merit" will be on the stand, in addition to Dean Steacy and Hannya Rizk. It's one thing for a nut like Farber to want to crush dissent -- he works for a special interest lobby group. But Goldberg works for a government agency. Does he share Farber's dark vision of censorship?

When the rotting, lawless CHRC is finally brought to heel -- and I believe that day will come, perhaps as soon as this year -- their desire to block what you and I read, and their disgusting proposal to compare politically incorrect ideas with child abuse, should be held up for all Canadians to see, as yet one more reason to shut down these careening threats to our freedoms. 

First, a member of the Canadian Jewish Congress's legal committee found swastika graffiti scrawled on the wall of a bathroom. Graffiti in a bathroom, dear reader!

Then, the Canadian Jewish Congress found out that a lake community in Ontario was named Swastika. A lake!

They demanded that the lake community answer for its obvious bigotry -- if not, I presume, they would be summoned to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Reader, how do you think the citizens of Swastika feel now about the Canadian Jewish Congress? How do you think they feel about Jews? And what do you think Canadian Jews should think about this embarrassing organization speaking on our behalf?

h/t MA

In response to the "I'm not serene" gambit tried last year by the Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyers, commenter Warren reminds us of the mantra shouted by George Costanza's dad on Seinfeld: "Serenity now!"

Here's a beautiful montage from that show. I regret I can't be in Ottawa on Tuesday for the hearing, but if I could be, and if I was feeling particularly cheeky, I'd quietly chant "Serenity now" whenever I was within earshot of the CHRC's lawyers. Just to help them keep it together.

It's safe to say that the past two months have been the worst two months, in terms of PR, that Canada's human rights commissions have ever had. And on Tuesday it's going to get a lot worse.

I spoke with a communications director for a federal cabinet minister today, who told me that the two issues that his boss receives the most mail about these days are Brenda Martin and Keith Martin's private member's motion to reform of the human rights commissions. I found that very encouraging.

What's happening is the rebranding of human rights commissions. Most Canadians hadn't heard of them before, but if ever they did, they probably would like the words: "human", "rights" and "commission" sound safe, even friendly. It's hard to rebrand something with such a pretty name, but it's happening -- now "human rights commission" is becoming shorthand for a politically correct kangaroo court that abuses our freedoms. It's denormalization.

It's like what happened to another beautiful word: "liberal". Look deeply at that word. It comes from the latin word "liber", which means free. It's even part of Alberta's motto, "fortis et liber", which means strong and free -- part of our national anthem. But over the course of the last generation, so many freedoms were trampled in the name of "liberalism" that the word lost its original, beautiful meaning. In Canada, it is simply the name of a corrupt political party; in the U.S., it's nothing more than a political insult. That's too bad, because it was a beautiful word. But it, too, was deracinated. It's a shame that the phrase "human rights" has to be destroyed to also destroy the government agencies that hide behind those words.

But who else will be damaged in the current denormalization? Anyone with a stake in it. Of course, that includes the direct participants in the human rights industry -- people like Pearl Eliadis, and of course Richard Warman. They are at the center of the bull's eye. But those in the next few rings will be hurt, too.

Take a moment, for example, to look at the very last page in the order issued today by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. It was copied to the "parties" -- Warman, the complainant, and Marc Lemire, the respondent. But look at everybody else.

The federal Justice Minister has his thumb in the pie, with two lawyers intervening in the matter. So it would not even been accurate to interpret the silence of Rob Nicholson and the Conservatives as neutrality in this whole matter; they are active participants in the CHRC's prosecution of section 13 thought crimes.

The Canadian Jewish Congress also has two men on the file. That's no surprise -- the CJC works hand in glove with the CHRC and Warman himself. It was the CJC that provided the self-serving "affidavit" in Warman's attempt to screen out "inappropriate" foreign websites from Canada, like Communist China and North Korea do. The CJC is in full-time damage control mode these days as its illiberal conduct receives harsh criticism in the national media. They never had much political capital in Stephen Harper's Ottawa, but what little they did have has been burnt up by casting their lot in with the CHRC.

The B'nai Brith has a lawyer on the Lemire file too, to their deep discredit. I had thought that BB had parted ways with its leftist rival, the CJC, and started to pull out of the CHRC cult. My basis for that hope was an article in the B'nai Brith's newspaper (see page 4) exposing Canada's HRCs as illiberal devices being exploited by jihadists. Apparently the BB's lawyer doesn't read their own newspaper. I know that BB's boss, Frank Dimant, is a sensible fellow with conservative values; I just don't understand why he would permit his political capital to be wasted the way the CJC's leadership has squandered theirs.

The final intervener for the prosecution in the Lemire case is the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. I'm not quite sure why a fundraising arm for a Holocaust studies charity is spending resources chasing websites in Canada. I've studied the Holocaust quite a bit myself, and censorship, kangaroo courts and the diminuition of natural rights are some of the tools that the Nazis used in their ascent to power. Too bad the SWC doesn't do some real good on the Internet -- like improving Ken McVay's excellent website. It's top notch in terms of substance, but could use some help in the style department. You'd think a Holocaust studies charity would do that. 

I believe that we've reached a tipping point in the political battle against the HRCs. I think it came in the past few weeks -- between Stephane Dion ensuring we won't have an election this year (which will permit the Conservatives to deal with the matter) and Rick Mercer's normalization and popularization of the fight against HRCs, and now Tuesday's pilgrimage by the national press corps to the CHRT hearing in the Lemire case. I don't just think we're going to win -- I think we already are winning.

The HRCs are losing. The only question is how much, and in what ways. It's time for the barnacles attached to that sinking ship to decide whether or not they want to go down too. I don't think any of the aforementioned interveners, other than possibly the B'nai Brith, have the humility to admit their past errors, or even the basic political instinct of survival, to get out now. Too bad.

Today, a one-man Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that his imminent hearing into the conduct of Canadian Human Rights Commission staff will be open to the public. This is a direct result of not only Maclean's magazine's legal application, but also of dozens of Canadians writing to the tribunal and, frankly, of the blogosphere's efforts to peel back the layers of the CHRC's secretive workings.

The CHRTribunal is no friend of freedom or fair play. As noted by many, it has a 100% conviction rate; it is not presided over by real judges; its procedures are arbitrary, not the reliable rules of procedure that exist in real courts; and the victims of these tribunals must pay their own way, whereas the investigators and prosecutors at these tribunals -- the CHRCommission, where folks like Dean Steacy work and Richard Warman used to work -- have the unlimited resources of the state. But even the CHRTribunal was appalled by the CHRCommission's latest tactics in its endless war against thought crimes.

I'm delighted to be a speaker at this upcoming one-day conference called "Free speech in an age of jihad", on April 10th in New York City. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and The New Criterion are co-hosting it, and fellow presenters include Mark Steyn, Judge Robert Bork, and other A-listers. I'm not quite sure how I made the cut -- though I do love their title for me: "Founder, Ezralevant.com"!

I'm glad to have the excuse to go to New York -- I read David Mamet's surprising article in the Village Voice, so I got tickets to see his new play, November. I'll let you know if and how it reflects Mamet's newly conservative views.

The last conservative play I saw off-Broadway was "The Caterers", by my friend Jonathan Leaf, which dramatized a real-life 1977 hostage-taking by radical Muslims in Washington, D.C., who were protesting -- surprise, surprise -- what they thought was a movie depicting Mohammed. Here's Mark Steyn's review, and here's Terry Teachout's review in the Wall Street Journal.

There aren't many conservatives in "the arts", or at least there aren't many who would declare themselves as such. But I've been staggered to discover how many exist "in the closet". Some are reduced to writing about their experiences anonymously, lest they be subjected to liberal, uh, McCarthyism. I'd like to think that some popular movies are conservative -- The Island was strikingly pro-life, and I thought Gattaca was, too -- but neither were major earners. Not that the slough of Hollywood's anti-war flicks were, either. But the closest thing to a "pro-war" movie in the past year, 300, grossed close to half a billion world-wide. Of course, the most fearlessly conservative movie ever made, Mel Gibson's The Passion, cleared $600-million, despite (or because of) the shrill and unfounded attacks against it, by the American counterparts to our Canadian Jewish Congress. 

Next Tuesday is the hearing in Ottawa where staff of the Canadian Human Rights Commission will have to answer questions, under oath, about their investigative and prosecutorial techniques. Whether or not that hearing will be open to the public is something we don't yet know; right now, it's in camera. Maybe Maclean's magazine's lawyers can blast those locked doors open.

We know a bit about Dean Steacy, one of the CHRC investigators who will be on the stand next week. He's the fellow who refused to accept a human rights complaint from a citizen whose brother and sister were, according to gossip, racists, and because the bigotry complained about was on the website of an "anti-racist" group. Steacy is the one who cruises anti-Semitic websites under a pseudonym. He's the one who declared that freedom of speech has no place in HRCs, since it's an American concept. In other words, we know all we need to know about Dean Steacy: he rejects our British inheritance of free speech as un-Canadian and he puts his own personal views ahead of the rule of law.

But how about Hannya Rizk, who will also be examined under oath next Monday? Unlike Richard Warman or Steacy, Rizk hasn't built her career on section 13 thought crimes -- she's more of a dabbler, handling just a few section 13 cases in her time at the CHRC. (She went on "health" leave, and has apparently since left the commission.) But she was the investigator in charge of the Marc Lemire prosecution. Too bad for her that she was assigned the one accused who decided to fight back.

Here is a transcript of Rizk's examination one day last May. As you can see, many of the questions put to her were objected to by CHRC lawyers, claiming that national security would be at risk if the work of these self-described 007's was exposed (as if, for example, the CHRC's use of the Internet secrecy site, www.the-cloak.com, to cover their tracks is some state secret). Now that the Federal Court has ruled against those absurd objections, Rizk (and Steacy) will have to answer the questions that they didn't want to answer about their own conduct. That's what's going to make next Monday so interesting -- the inspectors, the snoopers, the gossips, the voyeurs, the entrappers, the provocateurs themselves will be scrutinized for once. They don't much like to be on the other side of the microscope.

As I wandered through the transcript, I got a different feeling about Rizk than I did from, say, Richard Warman or Arman Chak. Warman has a personal philosophy he calls "maximum disruption"; he thinks pursuing people in human rights commissions can be "fun"; he plots physical assaults against his enemies, and he giggles about "humiliating" them. Chak is just plain scary, a "human rights" lawyer with an extremist belief in a Muslim supernation that trumps international law, and a bitter anger towards Israel, India, Bangladesh and other enemies. But Rizk? She seems to be just a bureaucratic drone who is a bit sloppy when it comes to following rules.

A sloppy bureaucrat at the department of motor vehicles or the liquor control board is one thing. But how about at a human rights commission tasked with censorship of political ideas, and empowered to mete out punishments ranging from stiff fines to lifetime bans on expressing "incorrect" ideas? Then sloppiness moves from an embarrassment to a danger.

And sloppy bureaucrats who are just watching the clock can be manipulated, too -- by people who are more motivated, say, by a philosophy of "maximum disruption".

Here are some highlights from the transcript of how Rizk and Warman interacted. It really is worth a read if you've got the time.

• On pages 4419 and 4494 of the transcript, Rizk states that Warman filed his CHRC complaint against Lemire while Warman was still working at the CHRC himself. Put aside the fact that CHRC policy is to not generate its own complaints. How outrageous is it that Warman would file a complaint to the commission, as a "private citizen", while still working at the commission?
• The only thing more outrageous would have been if Warman filed a complaint and then investigated it himself. That didn't happen; Rizk was assigned Warman's case. But wouldn't you know it: Rizk and Warman had a working relationship at the CHRC, and it was Warman who trained Rizk how to hunt Internet thought criminals (page 4438). He was the expert; she was new at section 13 cases. In fact, other than Warman's tutelage, Rizk says she received no training in how to assess section 13 complaints (page 4512).
• Rizk wasn't just Warman's colleague, trainee and then successor. She became his girl on the inside of the commission. He would call her regularly and they would chat about the complaint (page 4464) but Lemire, the respondent, had to wait up to a full year before Rizk would send him documents as required (page 4462).
• Warman didn't just chat with Rizk. He gave her instructions. In one stunning call, Warman told Rizk that he had filed a complaint against Lemire with the police, and that he wanted Rizk to slow down her work to let the police pursue possible criminal charges. He told Rizk not to disclose this information to Lemire. Rizk confessed under oath that she followed Warman's instructions, though she now realizes that was improper conduct on her part (pages 4466-4467, 4469, 4478).
• Warman had other people call up Rizk, too. He had a policeman call her up to ask for her file on Lemire. To her credit, Rizk declined -- but not for Warman's lack of trying (page 4472).
• Warman did manage to convince Rizk into proceeding to a full tribunal hearing against Lemire, instead of ordering an informal "conciliation" meeting. Such a conciliation was within the CHRC's discretion, and Lemire indicated his interest in such a solution -- an interest that seems genuine, given that Lemire had taken down the various comments from this website that Warman had complained about. But such a meeting wouldn't fit Warman's style of "maximum disruption". Warman "refused" it, and the CHRC went along with his refusal, though it was the CHRC's choice, not Warman's, to make (page 4570). But the line between Warman and the CHRC is awfully blurry, isn't it?

These are just a few of the items in this single transcript that are staggering examples of conflict of interest, collusion and downright corruption of the CHRC process. To her credit, Rizk refused some of Warman's attempts to interfere, and she acknowledges she was wrong to have complied with others. Unlike Warman, who looks at the CHRC as a method to "disrupt" his political opponents, or Arman Chak who is motivated by an ugly ideology, Rizk seems to have been a more or less nonchalant bureaucrat who made the mistake of working in an Orwellian hothouse where radical political agendas, not just clock-watching, were the corporate culture. No wonder she went on "health" leave.

The transcript I've cited is what was left despite the CHRC's absurd objections to answering questions about their tactics. Those big gaps are what's going to be filled in next Tuesday. I lack the imagination to try to predict what kind of trickery will be revealed. But I will predict that, unlike Rizk's testimony last year, this time her bombshells won't be ignored. 

Last week, Maclean's magazine filed its legal application to open the doors of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's secret trial, scheduled for March 25th. It was a thoughtful application, with references to court cases and arguments about the importance of a transparent legal system. It was the kind of legal brief you'd expect from a top lawyer hired by one of Canada's top media companies.

Now the Canadian Human Rights Commission has responded; you can read their slap-dash reply here (I'm impressed that they even managed to spell one of their own staff's names wrong).

The CHRC didn't cite any case law in their reply. They made no legal arguments. Their response was just a paranoid, self-absorbed conspiracy theory that someone, somewhere on the Internet named "Edward Kennedy" wrote that he really hates HRC investigator Dean Steacy, one of the CHRC investigators who will be cross-examined next week.

These days, whenever I hear of bigoted or hateful comments by someone with a name like "Edward Kennedy" on a website that the CHRC just happens to be targetting -- comments that just happen to be legally useful to the CHRC -- my first thoughts are of, well, Dean Steacy himself. Like his friend Richard Warman, Steacy has confessed under oath to posting provocative or downright bigoted comments on websites he was hunting, using fake names.

Now, there might really be an "Edward Kennedy" out there who isn't an agent provocateur working for the CHRC. He might even be serious that he wants harm to come to Steacy, and that he might actually do it -- not just talk tough on an anonymous chat site. And he might even show up at the hearing in Ottawa next week with such intentions. If so, that would something for the police to look into -- real police, not the feelings police of the HRCs. But I'm not quite sure how protecting against a ghost named "Edward Kennedy" is a justification to exclude Maclean's reporter Charlie Gillis, Maclean's columnist Mark Steyn, National Post reporter Joe Brean or other members of the public who aren't named "Edward Kennedy" from attending the hearing.

The CHRC's lawyer complains that public reports of Dean Steacy's physical appearance -- that he is vision-impaired -- constitute a security risk that require Gillis, Steyn, Brean and others to be kept out of the courtroom, barred from watching the witnesses as they testify. It reminds me of Shirlene McGovern's response to the blogosphere's criticism of her interrogation of me at the Alberta HRC: she was fine grinding me through two years of scrutiny, demanding to know my personal political and religious thoughts, and dragging my name through the mud. But when she herself -- as a government bureaucrat, paid with the public's tax dollars -- felt the first whiff of a public backlash, she resigned from my case in a huff. These HRC commissars can sure dish it out, but they can't take even the slightest scrutiny.

But read the appendices attached to the CHRC's letter. There are some of "Edward Kennedy's" comments. But the bulk of the clippings are political in nature -- including excerpts from Mark Steyn's political criticism of the CHRC. That's what this is about: the CHRC isn't really worried that an "Edward Kennedy" will assault Dean Steacy. They're worried that Mark Steyn and Charlie Gillis and Joe Brean will write about Dean Steacy.

The CHRC is used to dealing with politically marginal characters like those who usually show up at CHRC hearings -- people who howl in protest at the tribunal's corruption and unfairness, but who are ignored by polite society. They've never faced real public scrutiny, because they've made the strategically wise decision to pick on political oddballs and weaklings. But ever since the HRC complaints against Macleans and me, polite company is starting to pay attention. The procedural abuses that were ignored before are now getting enormous exposure. As the CHRC's response whines, "a great deal of anger has been expressed". No kidding.

Of course I want the hearing to be opened to the public, because I don't believe in secret trials -- especially to hide the antics of some rogue government clerks who think that anonymously trolling racist websites constitutes some sort of crime-fighting in this post-9/11 era. I want the hearing open, because I want the world to see what goes on in the name of "human rights" in Canada these days. Shining sunlight into these star chambers is key to their denormalization.

But, I confess, I would be almost as happy if the tribunal accepted the CHRC's whiny demand, and kept the reporters cooped up in some holding room, barred from even looking at Steacy and Hannya Rizk and the other CHRC witnesses. I can only imagine the simmering anger that would boil in that room. Some of the country's best reporters, who are used to access to the highest Prime Ministers, Presidents, Supreme Courts, titans of business -- and uninhibited access to the lowest of society, from accused murderers to disgraced politicians and industrialists -- being told by some petty, counterfeit court that they are not allowed to watch "justice" be done. Oh, the CHRC doesn't know what "a great deal of anger being expressed" looks like until they do that.

We're winning. 

This story in yesterday's Post by Kevin Libin, about the Chinese consulate in Calgary forcibly holding a Tibetan protester for nearly an hour, is growing into a international incident. RCMP are now investigating the conduct of the consulate staff. Kevin will be on Rob Breakenridge's radio show imminently to discuss it.

I believe in property rights, and I believe that trespass is a tort, and can even be a crime. I also believe in diplomatic immunity, even for diplomats from cruel regimes like Communist China. But if a Tibetan youth did break the law in Canada, it's for Canadian police and prosecutors to deal with -- not some brutish Chinese apparatchik, who thinks he's still back in Tiananmen Square, meting out Chinese-style "justice".

I understand that the youth in question doesn't want to make a fuss, out of fear for his family back home. Fair enough, but too bad -- I think he'd have a helluva case against the consulate for false imprisonment, assault and battery. If the staff who bullied him were locally-hired, he might be able to proceed against them. If they were Chinese nationals, they'd likely be exempt, and I doubt the case could proceed against the government of China itself. But even filing such a doomed lawsuit would be a well-deserved black eye for the world's biggest bully.

P.S. I love this suggestion aired by the National Review's John Derbyshire. I know it would never happen; but if Taiwan did declare independence on the first day of the Beijing Olympics, what would China do?

UPDATE: Kevin did a good thought experiment on the radio: what would be the media reaction if it were the U.S. consulate that seized an anti-U.S. protester and handcuffed and held him in their office for an hour before releasing him to Calgary police? 

Last night's Rick Mercer Report had an audience of 1,062,000 viewers; his Friday re-run of the same show usually picks up another 700,000 viewers. That's 1.8 million sets of eyeballs -- or about ten percent of adults in English Canada. That's comparable to the raw number of people who watch CNN or Fox News Channel across the entire U.S. -- proportionately, of course, it's ten times as many.

More people saw his "rant" about human rights commissions and free speech than, say, read the editorial about the subject in the Globe and Mail, as important as that landmark was. And the emotional impact of a 2-minute video clip, delivered with Mercer's combination of humour, indignation and earnestness, exceeds most anything that the medium of print can deliver.

Mercer's audience is demographically different than Globe or Post readers, or blog readers. His viewers are interested in public affairs, but they're not politically obsessed. Though the blogosphere has been discussing the human rights commissions' war against free speech for months, last night was likely the first time many of Mercer's viewers encountered the subject. As with the monologues on the various U.S. late night shows, Mercer is likely the primary source of political opinion for many "severely normal" Canadians. And he probably has more influence with them -- he is better trusted -- than any purely political pundit.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that Mercer's soliloquy was an important political landmark. When human rights commissions are mocked on the CBC's leading prime time show, you know the political environment has changed.

We're winning.

P.S. Here's a transcript of his "rant" -- replete with a terrifying photo of me.

The Caymanian Compass, that is. Here's their news story last week. Here's a letter this week. An excerpt:

Twenty–five years of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has done nothing but diminish the freedom of Canadians to speak their mind and associate with whom they wish, and turn what were once the assumed rights of Englishmen into privileges to be decided by ever more intrusive government meddlers.

Rick Mercer's "Rant" aired tonight on CBC. I loved it because it made gentle fun of me, but it was important for its serious message of freedom and intellectual diversity.

You can see it by clicking here.

This article in yesterday's National Post, by former Mossad agent Michael Ross, puts Canadian human rights commissions and their petty, vindictive work into perspective. There are real hate crimes in the world, but hate is the adjective, and crime is the noun. In Canada, we have it backwards -- hate is the noun, crime is the adjective. A real "hate crime" is a terrorist attack. Writing racist words on a website may be hateful, but it's not a crime.

Paul Schneidereit of the Halifax Chronicle Herald met with Irwin Cotler during the latter's visit to Halifax, and put questions to him about the human rights commissions and their failures. Like me, I think Schneidereit was underwhelmed with Cotler's response.

Finally: tune into the Rick Mercer Report tonight. I have it on good authority that Rick's rant will be on the subject of HRCs. That's an important media and political milestone in itself -- a sign that the subject is starting to enter the mainstream of Canadian discussion, not just the hyper-political world of blogs or the Parliamentary precinct. More than that, when the HRCs are the subject of humour and ridicule, it's a sign of how badly they've lost the argument. I can hardly wait to watch it!

Via Connie at Free Dominion, here are the written documents forming Maclean's court application to open up next week's secret trial at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The last five polls have yet to be counted, but it's pretty safe to call the northern Saskatchewan riding of Desnethe Missinippi Churchill for the Conservatives. That riding has switched back and forth between the Liberals and Tories by less than a hundred votes in the last two elections. Conservative Rob Clarke's win (at this point, by a 16% margin) is a landslide by comparison.

That's embarrassing to the Liberals to begin with; even moreso, given that Stephane Dion hand-picked the Liberal candidate, ruffling plenty of feathers locally (and betraying David Orchard in the bargain). Of all the ridings for the Liberals to lose, this was the most likely. But the margin of victory is a special and direct slap in the face to Dion -- not just for his general conduct as Liberal leader, but for his anti-democratic meddling.

Vancouver Quadra, two thirds counted as I write, is a win for the Liberals, but not by much. The Conservative candidate trails by just 5%. A win is a win, but that's uncomfortably close in a riding that has been one of the Liberals' most reliable seats in the West for decades.

Those two ridings can fairly be called setbacks for Dion; had Vancouver Quadra gone Tory, it would have been a humiliation. But what's interesting, besides the strength of the Conservatives, is the weakness of the NDP across the country.

With 90% of the polls counted in Toronto Centre, the Green Party almost exactly tied the NDP's celebrity candidate, at just under 13%. In Willowdale, both parties were in single digits, but the Greens bested the NDP. And with most of the vote counted in Vancouver Quadra, the NDP barely edged out the Greens, 16% to 15%. Only in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of the CCF, did the NDP handily the Greens in a rural riding -- but still only received 17%.

Of course this is just a by-election, with low turnout. But the Conservatives have been in office for more than two years; there is no honeymoon effect going on. A pick-up by Harper is noteworthy. But just as noteworthy is that Liberal voters are mimicking their leader -- and abstaining from voting, almost costing the party Vancouver Quadra in the bargain. And whatever Jack Layton's strategy is in Ottawa doesn't seem to be resonating either.

The fact that the Greens are polling so strong, at least in the urban ridings, should be very disconcerting to the Liberals and the NDP. Not only are those Green voters likely defectors from those two other parties on the left, but it shows that despite his monomania on the subject, and naming his dog Kyoto, Dion has failed to capture the environmentalist vote.

It's an encouraging night for Conservatives, for more reasons than just the one seat pick-up.

Jonathan Kay and Barbara Kay have both wondered aloud whether their old friend Irwin Cotler, the former Liberal Justice Minister and current Liberal Critic for Human Rights, would be true to his civil libertarian roots and join his fellow Liberal MP, Keith Martin, in proposing an amendment to delete the section 13 thought crimes provision from the Canadian Human Rights Act. That's the provision that has recently entrapped Maclean's magazine, and has been used to abuse other Canadians deemed to be politically unpalatable.

Cotler hasn't replied to their public letters yet, but I am informed by a law student at Dalhousie University that Cotler gave a speech there last week that addressed this subject.

From what my correspondent tells me, Cotler indeed has lost a lot of the civil libertarian spirit that he showed as a younger man. Too bad for that. But Cotler told the students that he has spoken with Dr. Martin about the latter's private member's motion, and believes that some changes to the Act are needed.

Specifically, Cotler said that section 13 "hate message" prosecutions should only be permitted with the express permission of the Justice Minister. This is currently the rule with the Criminal Code provisions regarding hate crimes.

My correspondent did imply that Cotler was interested in working with Dr. Martin to introduce a private member's bill (as opposed to a merely symbolic motion) to this effect.

I have two conflicting responses to this news.

On the one hand, I am delighted that Cotler sees a need to reform the out-of-control HRCs in Canada. The fact that he supports a requirement for the Justice Minister's consent before the laying of section 13 charges is a stunning rebuke to the CHRC. It's saying that they are incapable of exercising discretion on their own, and that it's time for "grown ups" to take over -- grown ups who believe in public accountability, unlike the disgraceful, secretive approach shown by the CHRC. If I were a commissioner or staffer at the CHRC, I'd be humiliated by this vote of non-confidence. As I've said before, this is as much about the rule of law as it is about the substance of the law itself, and Cotler has essentially said the HRCs can't be trusted to administer justice. 

Cotler is probably Canada's leading human rights expert, second only to Alan Borovoy who has already called for the overhaul of the HRCs. For Cotler to publicly express his concern about CHRC abuses, and recommend that legislative amendments are needed, is politically important. The fact that he is an old-time Liberal, and Jewish to boot, is only more persuasive for those who care about the pedigree of people making an argument, as opposed to the argument itself.

Cotler brings with him moral authority; he brings the respect of many in Parliament, not just in the Liberal benches but amongst other parties, too, who see him as a relatively non-partisan man who is driven more by his own philosophy of justice, as opposed to party dictates. His imprimatur is important -- although one wonders how many more seals of approval are necessary, after the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, PEN Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists and a dozen newspapers from across the political spectrum have already weighed in on the matter.

In that regard, it's great news.

But another part of me is deeply disappointed. From the report I received, Cotler is still clinging to the notion of human rights commissions as a tool for justice, which is a dangerously obsolete point of view. He believes that the emotion called hate can be regulated, and that mere words can be crimes. And, just as bad, with his one new caveat, he still believes in the illiberal processes of the HRCs, stacked with radical activists, devoid of the rule of law, and lop-sided in the extreme against the accused. He would cut a leaf or two off the noxious plant, rather than prune it to its trunk, or uproot it as is really needed.

The provision for ministerial consent has surely cut down on frivolous application of the Criminal Code provisions regarding hate speech. In fact, that's precisely why the HRCs took up "hate messages" with such gusto -- they're a way for activists to get around the checks and balances in the Criminal Code, such as silly, old-fashioned ideas like the presumption of innocence and natural justice.

Adding a requirement for political consent would likely have spared mainstream Maclean's magazine from a section 13 charge. But would it have spared me and the Western Standard magazine, further out on the edges of mainstream society? Or how about the bulk of the section 13 cases, which are even further removed from the center? I'm not sure if a Justice Minister, with one eye on the electorate, would nix cases against clearly racist websites. And that's an important point here; I'm not just looking for vindication of the Western Standard for our reasonable publication of the Danish cartoons in 2006; I'm looking to preserve my right -- and even the right of people I disagree with -- to be unreasonable, wrong, and even bigoted or motivated by hate. I don't want a Justice Minister -- even a mythical reasonable one, a benign one, a non-partisan one -- to be the editor-in-chief of what I write or what I think, or what anyone else does, either. I don't want people who exhibit bigotry regarding someone's religion, or sex, or appearance, to be answerable to the law -- only to the pressures of polite society. I don't even want folks who publish anonymous anti-Semitic comments on websites to be bothered by the law -- only by their conscience.

On balance, though, I'll take Cotler's comments as a step forward. As with so much in Canada these days, incremental gains are to be celebrated. It took forty years for the human rights commissions to sink so low. It's likely unrealistic to expect a generation of wrongs to be righted in a year.

Let's get the boulder of reform slowly rolling; getting it from a dead stop to one mile an hour is likely harder than getting it from one mile an hour to twenty.    

On March 25th we might get a glimpse at the inner workings of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and learn a little more about the kind of people who work there, like Dean Steacy. But, for the most part, Canada's HRCs operate without meaningful accountability -- or even basic transparency.

Take Alberta's HRC, where I've been prosecuted for two years for the thought crime of publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Who's running the show there? I don't mean the commissioners themselves, who issue the inconsistent, illiberal and often bigoted rulings of the commission. I mean the staff. Who are they?

How about one Alberta HRC staffer named Arman Chak? He's a lawyer with the Alberta HRC's Edmonton office. In many ways, Chak is an unremarkable man, best known for coming in dead last in the province-wide lawyers' election for the law society.

Arman Chak isn't famous, but his brother Farhan Chak is. Farhan briefly ran for office as a candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada. But then it was revealed that he had padded his resume -- oh, and that he was also a raging Jew-hater, a nutty conspiracy theorist and had once shot up an Edmonton nightclub. Here's the story that broke the news.

I don't believe Arman Chak should be guilty by association with his anti-Semitic, violent brother, or for his relationship with other cheeky Chaks like Naghman Chak. I'm sure it's possible for two brothers to grow up in the same household, one becoming a violent bigot and the other believing deeply in the equality and dignity of all men. It's possible.

Like a good brother, Arman stood by Farhan, despite everything. I'd like to think I'd stand by my brothers, too, even if one of them shot up a nightclub and uttered horribly bigoted things again and again and again. Maybe, like Arman, I'd even give lectures on the dangers of "thug life", though those lectures would be more meaningful coming from Farhan the gunman himself.

Arman didn't just stand by his brother Farhan -- he positively went on the offensive for him. Last year, Arman instructed the Chak family lawyer to threaten defamation suits, on behalf of Farhan, against any journalists or bloggers who had written about Farhan's embarrassing history. That lawyer served hilariously typo-ridden defamation notices all across the blogosphere, and even on the National Post and the Western Standard, of which I was publisher at the time. (I'll have to dig up that defamation notice and post it -- it's almost as funny as Syed Soharwardy's complaint. And, if I've still got it kicking around, I'll post my, uh, "vigorous" reply to it for a few laughs.) I'm pretty sure every recipient of the Chaks' threatening letter ignored it. But my conversations with the Chaks' lawyer left me with the distinct impression that Arman wasn't just doing damage control for Farhan, but for himself, too.

Indeed, besides trying to get websites to remove embarrassing traces of Farhan's misdeeds, the Chaks engaged in a bit of Internet hygiene on their own. Where they could, they deleted their own political comments from websites, including the radical website Pakistan Link.

Take this page, where the brothers Chak each wrote political letters to the editor. As you can see by clicking on the Chaks' links, those pages, and those pages alone, have been removed. 

But the Internet has a funny way of remembering things. Here is the archived page of Farhan Chak's letter. Frankly, compared to his other rants, it's fairly mild -- but I still wouldn't want to run into him at a nightclub if he was drunk.

And here and here are the archives of Arman Chak's two letters. Here are some excerpts from his letter called Friendship with Bangladesh:

If the people of East Pakistan did not wish to be part of the State of Pakistan, they did not have any internationally recognized right to secede from Pakistan.

What did happen was that the creation of Bangladesh, through the explicit and implicit help of India, was a precedent the world wishes to forget...

Dr. Rahman goes on to compare this situation with Kashmir and Palestine. Simply said, Dr. Rahman has missed the legal realities of both these situations. In both, the legal and moral position is that the countries who are on the opposite end of that equation are 'OCCUPIERS'; they have no right to be there by any definition of international law. Dr. Rahman's comparison is simply a display of ignorance. Pakistan was never the 'OCCUPIER' of East Pakistan, it was a part of its whole. Pakistan's actions may or may not have been brutal, but no more than Canada's imposition of the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis (French-Canadian separatists).

Dr. Rahman's neglect of incorporating the role that India played in the creation of Bangladesh, shows he would like to forget the realities of Pakistan's turbulent relationship with India. Legally, India's actions since the creation of Pakistan have been against international law. India has interfered in the flow of water, the distribution of land, the distribution of the colonial treasury, political espionage, as well as other acts which clearly show that the intention of India is the denial of sovereignty of Pakistan.

An apology to Bangladesh is an apology of a country for protecting its Sovereignty; this has never been done.

And from the other letter, called No Apologies:

I have recently read an article by Dr. Tariq Rahman in which he has suggested that in order to have better relations with Bangladesh, Pakistan should apologize to Dacca for the tragic 1971 events. I beg to differ with him. Not following the reactionary approach of comparing the wounds inflicted by the two sides, I look at the events in the context of the fundamentals of an Islamic State and its Muslim identity. Regardless of what West Pakistan did to East Pakistan, the latter's alliance with India makes the creation of Bangladesh one of the worst examples of the dis-unification of the Muslim Ummah in contemporary history.

Now, I'm no expert on Pakistan (though, these days, I'm sympathetic to the country.) But Bangladesh has been recognized by pretty much the whole world as a sovereign nation. And even the United Nations, which believes that Israel should no longer occupy the West Bank (it has already left the Gaza Strip), affirms Israel's unquestionable legal right to its pre-1967 borders. Arman Chak's views are radical in the extreme.

I don't think that radical, or even hateful, views should be outlawed -- though I wouldn't want to be someone from the "illegal" state of Bangladesh or from the evil countries of India or Israel, who had a file in Chak's hands at the HRC.

It's not just Arman Chak's extreme hostility to various countries, it's his rationale for that hostility: Chak doesn't believe in the "dis-unification of the Muslim Ummah". Evidently, he believes in the opposite: in the goal of one big Muslim country, where sharia law is the law of the land. Chak, an amateur filmmaker, has even made a movie called Qiyamat -- which happens to be the Muslim equivalent to the Apocalypse. Nice.

Now, if I was a thin-skinned complainer, I'd probably file a human rights complaint against Arman Chak. After all, his comments about Israel, India and Bangladesh meet the test of the thought crimes provisions in the HRC -- they could "expose" people to "hatred and contempt". That's probably one of the reasons he was so eager to delete his spirited letters from the Internet.

But I'm not the type to go whining to the government every time I unearth another bigot.

What I'm more interested in knowing is whether or not Arman Chak, the radical Pakistani nationalist who despises anyone who weakens the Muslim ummah, has handled the files of another radical Pakistani nationalist who despises the weakening of the Muslim ummah. I'm talking about Syed Soharwardy.

Soharwardy isn't just the subject of a human rights complaint at the federal HRC -- he was tagged in Alberta's HRC, too. But just last week, Soharwardy issued a press release on this anti-Christian, anti-Semitic website, gloating at the fact that the complaint against him -- by these women -- was rejected by the HRC out of hand.

Why was the Alberta HRC complaint against Soharwardy rejected where the identical CHRC complaint against him was not? Did Arman Chak, fellow Pakistani radical, run interference for him? What other files has Chak handled? Anything related to Muslims, or his nemeses, Indians?

Or -- hell, just to pull something out of the air -- did Arman Chak touch a file involving the publication of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, where the complainant was a fellow Pakistani chauvinist, and the respondent an Israel-supporting Jew?

I'll find out soon enough.

More of Syed Soharwardy's critics have been violently attacked.

The Iftikhar family, congregants at Soharwardy's mosque who have alleged financial corruption on Soharwardy's part, just had their house torched. Here's a news report from the Calgary Sun. An excerpt:

Dr. Iftikhar Ahmed, watched in horror as a car pulled up outside his Panatella Blvd. N.W. home and a man armed with a jerrycan and booze bottle got out, scaled the fence and set his home ablaze as seven children and three other adults slept.

Hours earlier, Ahmed had called 911 after two threatening men came to the door.

"I was so upset," said Ahmed, adding that's why he was still awake at about 4 a.m. when he saw the stranger set his home on fire.

"Within two minutes, we had a big fire," he said.

"We have a fear of death."

Arson Det. Scott Sampson said the family was definitely targeted and the fire could easily have been deadly.

The suspects hurled two Molotov cocktails at the home, one which ignited grass and another which bounced off a window, setting the exterior of the house on fire, said Sampson.

"If he wasn't up, the house would have gone up," Sampson said.

Cops are investigating several other attacks against members of the Muslim community with the help of RCMP, Services Alberta and the National Security investigation section.

A similar home invasion assault happened to another one of Soharwardy's critics, named Robina Butt. Here are the gruesome photos of her beating, and the news report.

One at a time, Soharwardy's critics are being picked off. Take a look at this complaint filed against Soharwardy back in December by Robina Butt, Shugufta Iftikhar (Dr. Ahmed's wife) and Qasira Shaheen. Prophetically, that complaint listed threats of violence.

Two down, one to go. If I was Qasira Shaheen, I'd hire a security guard.

P.S. There is something strange about the Sun report, don't you think? It doesn't mention Soharwardy, or the name of his mosque. Why that key omission? I think it has to do with a newspaper rivalry between the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun. The Herald has been extremely critical of Soharwardy; for some reason, the Sun has taken an opposite approach. I wonder how many more home invasions and beatings will have to happen before the Sun realizes that it bet on the wrong horse.

P.P.S. It is even more strange that such a rough and bigoted man as Soharwardy still manages to be polite company in some circles -- such as this planned reality TV show about him. Perhaps the producers simply haven't done their due diligence. Or maybe they have, and want to get some exciting action from the show -- maybe some footage of a beating or two down at the mosque.

P.P.P.S. But far more strange than either of these things is that our legal system is so twisted and politically correct that it will deploy untold resources towards pursuing Soharwardy's own human rights complaints, and other victimless thought crimes, at the behest of a man who clearly deserves closer investigation himself. I've got a crazy idea: why don't we pull a few more police off the thought crimes detail and maybe take a few million tax dollars out of the budgets of anonymous website cruisers, and redeploy that money to inculcating our Western values into incorrigible newcomers, and just plain enforcing the laws against assault and arson?

h/t Dust My Broom

I was interviewed today by a newspaper reporter doing a story on Canada's broken human rights commissions. I tried to sum up some of my recent thoughts more concisely than I've done on my blog. Talking about it with the reporter helped me work through my thinking.

It's all about the rule of law.

And the rule of law means that no-one is above the law and no-one is beneath the law.

That is, no-one is so powerful or mighty -- or so saintly, if they do say so themselves -- that they are exempt from the restrictions of the law. That's what Eliot Spitzer's downfall was about, in part: a law enforcer who thought legal limits didn't apply to his own bad behaviour. In the context of Canada's human rights commissions, HRC staff and activists who admit to posting "hate messages" on bigoted websites are acting above the law. Their brazen violation of the very laws they are supposed to enforce is a form of corruption -- they think they're above the law. (I happen to believe there ought not to be a law banning "hate messages"; but these folks do.)

The HRCs also push people "beneath" the law, too. As I described here, CHRC staff refused to accept a complaint from Andrew Guille, someone they found politically descpicable. I don't doubt that Mr. Guille is impolite company. But just as no-one is so mighty that he cannot be restrained by the law, neither is anyone so lowly or disreputable that he cannot seek remedy in the law. That's why we still have trials for people who are "obviously" guilty of horrible crimes -- no-one is above, and no-one is beneath. But the CHRC does both, all the time.

That's a form of corruption. We know this instinctively when it comes to real police -- we do not permit them to abuse accused or even convicted criminals, and we do not give police special dispensation when they commit crimes themselves.

My feelings towards human rights commissions, especially the CHRC and their busiest customer Richard Warman, have curdled as I've learned more about them. Before I started researching the matter, I thought it was simply a matter of philosophical disagreement about where lines should be drawn between what's merely "offensive" and what's an actual "crime." But I don't think that's our real difference. Our real difference is that I believe in the rule of law, and giving even those we despise natural justice. When push comes to shove, the CHRC and its courtiers don't. They believe in what Warman has called "maximum disruption". Warman says he likes tussling with his foes because it's "fun". But that's not justice. That's harassment. We'd be distressed if we heard a policeman saying he was motivated by how much fun he has arresting people, or using his Taser. Same thing should go for the human rights industry.

I first had a flash of this when I saw the videotape of Richard Warman campaigning against his nemesis, David Icke. That's where I saw Warman giggling gleefully with his co-conspirators as they talked about physically assaulting Icke, and "humiliating" him.

I felt it again when I read about the outrageous ex parte attempt by Warman and his enablers at the Canadian Jewish Congress to block foreign websites from Canada. That application was properly dismissed by the CRTC, but the very fact that Warman and the CJC though they could -- in a hearing with no opposition invited -- set up a system for blocking 33 million Canadians from surfing where they want to surf, shows the true character of the people we're dealing with here.

As Warman himself says on page 8 of this speech, he'll use "almost any means necessary" to win his little wars. He won't even rule out violence -- only "indiscriminate violence". If that all sounds dramatic or hypothetical, you don't know the violent history of the ARA, the group Warman was speaking to. Forget about what the ARA's critics have to say about their violence -- just spend a few moments poking around their own website.

I'm sorry, that's just not what human rights activists say or do. They don't gleefully call for the humiliation of their ideological opponents; they don't counsel young people to physically assault their opponents; they don't demand that the Internet be censored in one-sided, private hearings; they don't engage in limited and half-hearted condemnations of only certain kinds of violence towards their foes.

I just re-read Warman's legal threat against me. I stand behind every word complained of, and every word I've written since. I realize that his lawsuit is just another nuisance suit, just another attempt to wreak "maximum disruption" on an opponent. I'm just lucky he hasn't given a speech about me to the ARA, in which he nods and winks to them about how not to assault me.

But, if I'm reading things right, the CHRC's and Warman's campaign is no longer working. More and more, Canadians are waking up to the awful realities of these Orwellian HRCs and the type of people who support and use the HRCs. In the past forty years, these commissions have not had as much PR as they've had in the last two months. They're being denormalized. People are starting to scrutinize their excesses and take an interest in their inner workings.

Dear friends, I think that the tide is turning. And, God-willing, the only "maximum disruption" that will happen is what should happen: the out-of-control, capricious, abusive human rights apparatus in Canada will be uprooted. Let's all keep at it.

Here's Mark Steyn's latest column from Maclean's, in which he outlines the difference between true censorship (such as a human rights commissions ordering a lifetime publication ban against someone's ideas) and pretend censorship (which is what Canadian filmmakers are crying, since Ottawa has announced it will stop financially subsidizing Canadian-made pornography). I'm frustrated by Canada's "arts" community generally ignoring the first, but complaining about the second. I think that's what happens when your artistic community becomes just another agency of the state; they lose their idealistic spirit. Too many Canadian filmmakers are apathetic about free expression, and only really get incensed when their grants are in question. They dress that up as idealism, but I'm not sure how many people it fools.

Besides poking fun at the film industry's CanCon grantrepreneurs, Steyn mentioned the March 25th secret trial coming up in Ottawa. Here's an excerpt:

On March 25, a remarkable hearing will take place at the human rights tribunal in Ottawa. After a protracted legal battle to avoid giving testimony, employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission will be cross-examined on their various techniques regarding "hate messages." To date, at least one employee, Dean Steacy, and one former employee, Richard Warman, have admitted under oath (Warman after initially denying it, also under oath) that they post under aliases at so-called "hate" websites. This is potentially a little more than mere entrapment. In traditional entrapment, you wire up the hooker and get her to come on to the governor of New York, but Eliot Spitzer is still obliged to pay the money and have the sex lui-meme. By contrast, the Canadian Human Rights Commission regards website comments as actionable "hate messages" in and of themselves, yet its employees, past and present, admit that their techniques include posting their own comments at such sites: in other words, there's nothing to prevent them from creating the crimes they subsequently prosecute and then sticking some other schlub with the rap. This ought to be a public scandal, yet the March 25 hearing will attract less fuss than the question of tax credits for Sperm.

Better yet, as things stand, the CHRC — an organization which believes it has the right not only to police my public words but also to demand to know the private thoughts of Maclean's editors behind the decision to publish them — has succeeded in persuading the tribunal that, when it comes to the public acts and private thoughts of their own employees, the hearing should be held in camera — i.e., in private. Excepting very rare circumstances, free societies do not hold secret trials. But Canada's "human rights" nomenklatura do. Humdrum servants of the Crown can get away with portraying their furtive website postings as some sort of covert national-security operation requiring CIA-level secrecy. If the price of building a hate-free Canada is that the commissars have to vandalize every presumption of common law, so be it.

According to Connie at Free Dominion, the CHRC is "considering" requests to open up their secret trial to the public. How liberal of them. It will be interesting to see if Steyn's scrutiny in Maclean's magazine -- read by 2.8 million Canadians, according to the Print Measurement Bureau -- will force them to open their doors, or scare them into clamming up. 

They're laughing at us in the Cayman Islands, and not just because of our weather.

According to this report in the Caymanian Compass newspaper, they're having a debate over there about whether or not to create a Canadian-style human rights commission.

Reverend Nicholas Sykes knows what's in store for Caymanians. An excerpt:

Mr. Sykes detailed several cases taken on by the Canadian Human Rights Commissions.

“In [Human Rights Commission] the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law and by simply agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.”

Mr. Sykes said over half all of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions “hate crime” cases have been brought by one person who was a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Here are a few other choice words of warning from Mr. Sykes:

“I can assure you that justice in the eyes of these newly–conceived bodies has been quite unlike the justice to which we are accustomed,” he said..

“The function of the commission and any related appropriate bodies is to assist the complainant, to assist the bringing of complaints, to help individuals... “What about the other side of the issue?... All the assistance goes to the complainant, but where is the assistance given to the defendant?

“The system is one–sided, and in this matter alone, is offensive to a reasonable person’s sense of justice.”

...“This is the sort of madness you’ll face in Cayman....

What good fortune for the Cayman Islands to have a man like that on guard. I have no doubt that, given our wintery conditions, a half-dozen Canadian human rights commission staff are proposing to fly to the Caymans on our taxpayers' dime to lecture such obstinate men, and to stay there until they're convinced, or spring arrives in Canada, whichever comes first.

Good for the Caymans -- and for the Compass, which has already done more hard news reporting on the subject of Canadian Human Rights Commission than most Canadian newspapers have. 

I've written a lot about Keith Martin, the Liberal MP from the B.C. who has served notice of a private member's motion to delete the thought crimes provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I believe that Martin's notice of motion was a watershed moment, because it took this issue from the blogosphere into the heart of Parliament -- skipping over much of the mainstream media, by the way.

Joe Gamero shared this recent e-mail from Martin to him about the subject. I liked it because it was uncharacteristically frank and rambunctious for a letter from an MP. Why not fire off a note to Martin to give him your support and to encourage him to keep rounding up support from other MPs -- including an MP to switch places with Martin on the order paper, so that Martin's motion will actually make it to the floor for a vote.

As I mentioned the other day, regular commenter Mordechai has challenged my repeated statement that human rights tribunal panellists are not real judges, and many are not even lawyers.

I started to learn who these men and women were after reading the first dozen or so HRC rulings here. I wanted to know who wrote these inconsistent, arbitrary and biased "rulings". They were often mutually contradictory; they were sometimes rife with spelling and grammatical errors, and some of their logic could only be called pretzelian. I started to dig deeper when I read this abomination of a case, where the right not to be offended officially trumped such trivia as freedom of speech and religion (see paragraph 357).

That case, Lund v. Boissoin, was heard by Lori Andreachuk. (It took five years to go from complaint to ruling in that matter, by the way -- five years of grinding away at Rev. Boissoin, five years of stigma, five years of taxpayers' money. That extreme delay is standard fare at HRCs. It's illegal in real courts, by the way -- almost twenty years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out literally thousands of criminal cases that were dragging on like that. But then accused criminals have a lot of rights at trial that accused pastors like Rev. Boissoin, and accused publishers like myself, don't.)

Ms. Andreachuk isn't a judge of course, but she is a lawyer -- a divorce lawyer in Lethbridge. I don't know much about her c.v. other than she was a small-time provincial Tory organizer before she received her patronage appointment. But I don't need to know her bio; I know everything I need to know about her from her abusive, Orwellian, rights-destroying ruling in the Boissoin case.

Divorce lawyers know about divorce law. They don't know a lot about freedom of speech, freedom of religion and other constitutional matters. If I went to traffic court to fight a speeding ticket and I appeared in front of a divorce lawyer sitting in as the magistrate, I'd be concerned -- what would she know about traffic laws, or the minutiae of radar detectors and police lasers and road conditions? I'd be upset, and all I'd have at risk would be some demerit points and a hundred dollars. To think that a divorce lawyer is making monumental decisions about the freedom of Albertans to practise their religion is terrifying.

Here is the list of the other human rights commissioners in Alberta. (In that province the "judges" in the kangaroo court are called commissioners. In some other Canadian HRCs, the "judges" are called tribunal panellists.)

There are a range of commissioners from various backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: I wouldn't trust any of them with my constitutional rights. Diane Colley-Urquhart, for example, is a pleasant enough woman I've met in the Calgary Tory circuit. She also happens to be a sitting alderman, and a nurse by profession. That's great; and if I had a problem with the city's cat bylaw or garbage pick-up, she'd be the first one I'd run to. But Ms. Colley-Urquhart plays judge in these kangaroo courts. That's scary enough; the fact that she's also a turbo-partisan, seeking votes -- and accepting political contributions -- shows that basic judicial concepts like impartiality, non-partisanship and legal expertise are non-existent in HRCs.

I don't know the other Alberta commissioners personally. I'm sure Delano Winston Tolley was an excellent servant in the Royal Canadian Air Force -- anyone named after both FDR and Churchill and who lists "blaster" as one of his former careers is probably a helluva guy to have a beer with. I just don't want him judging my constitutional rights. Or anything else for that matter.

To be sure, there are some lawyers who sit on HRC tribunals. I have yet to come across one whose area of expertise is what is called, somewhat sentimentally in Canada, "civil rights" -- by that, I mean those dusty old cliches that happen to pack our Bill of Rights and Charter of Rights, and what unfashionable old men like Alan Borovoy keep muttering about. No, there aren't a lot of civil libertarians on human rights commissions. But there are a lot of professional "human rights activists" on them, which is a completely different thing.

(Question: Do you think that Lori Andreachuk, squelcher of religious expression, harasser of the clergy, censor of the press, knows that the first words in our Charter of Rights are "Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law"?)

I concede to Mordechai what I have never denied: that there are indeed some lawyers on various HRCs in Canada. Too many of those lawyers, I regret, are like Pearl Eliadis, the former Ontario HRC director who has made her career living off the government and GONGO (that's government-organized Non-Governmental Organization) human rights industry. She's like Dean Steacy, the "human rights investigator" who is actually a capricious violator of the human right to natural justice. Eliadis can be summed up best by a single line in her Montreal Gazette defence of HRC's:

"Are Levant and Steyn hatemongerers? Maybe not. But no one has decided that."

Putting aside the detail that there is no such word as "hatemongererer", just gaze in wonderment at the sentiment here: Steyn and I aren't innocent until proven guilty. We're guilty until proven guilty, in an HRC with a 100% conviction rate. Perhaps I'd be better off with an alderman as an HRC tribunalist than with a "human rights lawyer" who doesn't even accept the "Golden Thread" of common law: that a man is innocent until proven guilty.

It's all just another way that human rights commissions violate our Canadian standards of justice.  

The opposite of the "rule of law" is the "rule of man". Canadians love the rule of law so dearly because it makes us feel safe: we know what to expect in life; we know if we follow the rules, the police won't capriciously arrest us. There will be no knock on our door in the middle of the night. We won't be arrested without a proper reason. The rule of law gives us confidence when we deal with the state and its officers, even its policemen, even its prime ministers. Because we know that they are our servants and that, if anything, they are bound by more rules than we are. They only hold the power that we give them, and they only hold it in trust for us.

We are strict with our police; maybe even too strict, but that's a better error to make than being too lax. Besides Internal Affairs officers within police departments, we have additional layers of scrutiny. For example, Ontario's Special Investigations Unit does nothing but investigate police who are accused of abusing their powers. Canada answers Juvenal's question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? pretty well.

(As a student at law, I attended a hearing of Alberta's Law Enforcement Review Board, the body that considers complaints against Alberta police, ranging from the farcically trivial to the most serious. I was impressed -- and frankly, a little bit irritated -- at the lengths the province went to ensure fairness. As an example, complaints against officers from Calgary were heard in Edmonton and vice versa, to reduce the risk of collusion or even collegiality between police and those who were investigating the police. The particular day I was there, some nuisance complaints filed by prisoners were being heard. It was clear to me that besides the thrill of causing a hassle for the police and for the justice system in general, the prisoners in question had simply found a way to get out of jail for a day and travel, at taxpayers expense, to a hearing in which they were the center of attention.)

But it's not just the police who are countered with enormous checks and balances. The other half of the "Law and Order" duo is hamstrung, too. For example, prosecutors are generally not allowed to tell a jury about an accused's prior criminal convictions at his trial, unless the accused is foolish enough to claim that he has sterling credibility, or otherwise opens the door himself. This might seem frustrating to those who are "tough on crime", but cool reflection tells us such information would likely so overwhelm a jury's views about an accused that they would be likely to convict him even if he were innocent of the new accusations, simply on the weight of the old ones. Even convicted criminals have the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty when they're charged with new crimes. That's a form of rule of law, too. It's not just that the high and mighty (like Eliot Spitzer!) are bound by the strictures of the law; it's that the lowly and odious are given the benefits of the law, too.

Another example in this vein -- and I assure you, dear reader, that I am coming to my point -- is that of the "rape shield" law. It's an expression of the rule of law, too. Just as the general rule against adducing evidence of an accused's prior criminal record is done to give even past criminals a fair trial, the rape shield law was designed to give sexually promiscuous women -- such as prostitutes, for example -- a level playing field when they accuse a man of rape. If any and all of a woman's past sexual history was admissable in court, it could prejudice a jury against her in a current case of rape -- that is, her past behaviour could overwhelm the current facts at hand, and falsely acquit a man charged with her rape. I'm not well-versed enough in criminal law to know if the courts and legislatures have found the right balance here -- given that the rape shield law almost exclusively benefits women to the detriment of accused men, it has been called a feminist law that unfairly undermines men's legal rights. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that, but my main point remains: in the name of the rule of law, our police and courts go to great lengths to make sure that everyone has the same benefit and burden under law, no matter their personal characteristics or past behaviour. 

Which is all a lengthy introduction to this stunning internal Canadian Human Rights Commission document posted by Connie Fournier of Free Dominion. Here's her analysis. And here's mine:

Andrew Guille filed a "hate messages" complaint with the CHRC. He complained that a website called Recomnetwork.org, run by an "anti-hate" group, contained hateful messages that contravened section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, by discriminating against people based on race, colour, national origin, religion and sexual orientation.

So what happened? Did the "anti-hate" group in question, with all of the bigoted remarks on their website, become the first defendant ever to be acquitted in a section 13 trial? Or did Guille pull a Richard Warman -- slam-dunk a bigoted website and collect a few thousand dollars for bringing the complaint to the CHRC's attention?

Neither, actually. The CHRC refused to take the matter to a tribunal hearing, ruling it a frivolous complaint. But look at the grounds upon which this complaint was dismissed: Andrew Guille, said CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, is the "sibling of both Melissa and Chris Guille", who Steacy implies are racist. Steacy -- whose job it is to investigate complaints of bigotry -- indeed conducted an investigation. But not into the website and its hate messages. He investigated Guille himself. Steacy met with Sgt. Don McKinnon of the London Police Force to get the low-down on Guille; he spoke with "anti-hate" activists with their own axes to grind and books to sell. None of this was done under oath; none of this was done with Guille there to cross examine his defamers (or to challenge McKinnon's right as a government employee to disclose Guille's personal information without permission). But even those offensive procedures aren't the point: the point is the CHRC simply wouldn't accept a complaint from someone they didn't like, for the most tenuous and circumstantial reasons.

Even if their hunches and their gossip was right -- even if Guille was, himself, a racist -- so what? If a website is bigoted, isn't it the CHRC's job (an immoral job, an improper job, but their job nonetheless) to investigate it? Does the offensiveness of the site in question depend on the character of the complainant? Is the question of whether the Canadian Human Rights Act, a law of Parliament, is violated depend on who brings an alleged offence to the attention of the commission?

Compare that sloppy, vindictive, capricious standard to the aforementioned lengths real police and real prosecutors go to, to ensure that the law is applied evenly to all citizens. What Steacy has done here is exactly the kind of arbitrariness the rape shield law was designed to prevent. If a prostitute complains that she was raped, it is improper for the police to say "she has no standing to complain about rape" or "we know that, in the past, she has consented to sex with strangers -- no use investigating." An even more exact analogy would be if a convicted rapist complained of having in turn been raped himself. That would not excuse the police from ignoring the rapist's own complaint.

The CHRC isn't governed by the rule of law. It is governed by the whimsy of men -- in this case, Dean Steacy, who himself admits to making anonymous posts on bigoted websites.

Which is the other half of the broken system here. Put aside Guille; what about Recomnetwork.org, the hateful "anti-hate" website in question? Steacy's memo acknowledges that the site indeed had hateful words on it -- including copies of CHRC complaints filed by Richard Warman, which themselves contained bigotred remarks. But Steacy exculpates those sites by stating that the purpose of the website was to "educate the public about racism". That may well be true, but the Canadian Human Rights Act doesn't care about such nuances. Section 13 of that law makes it illegal to communicate "any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt." It doesn't talk about "intentions" at all; and, as I've lamented before, the truth of the statements made is not a defence, unlike in defamation law in real courts.

The test isn't good or evil intentions. The test is whether the words are "likely to expose" someone to feelings of "hatred or contempt". The rule of law would hold Recomnetwork.org, and indeed Richard Warman, whose complaints were on that site, to the same standard as the person who originally wrote the hateful words. To excuse them because they have noble intentions is Steacy injecting his own personal views or friendships or biases into the law, which the law does not permit.

By the way, I happen to agree with Steacy on the narrow point that there is a difference between someone uttering a bigoted comment as an epithet, and someone else repeating that epithet, simply by listing it in a complaint (as Warman did); and someone else who writes a report of the whole thing (Recomnetwork.org). But that's not what the law says. The law doesn't care about anything other than the likelihood of hurting someone's feelings, which is one of the reasons the law is so dangerous.

If merely reporting on a controversial communication was acceptable, then surely my own decision two years ago to report the news of the cartoon riots, including showing the cartoons in question, would have been equally lawful, and the complaints filed against me for doing so would have been ruled "frivolous and vexatious", as Steacy ruled Guille's complaint against Recomnetwork.org to be. Or at least you'd expect that, if there was a consistency in these human rights commissions -- if there was rule of law, instead of rule of men.

If these commissions were governed by the rule of law instead of the rule of men, Richard Warman and Dean Steacy themselves would be charged with violating section 13, because the Act gives no weight to intentions, and both men have posted on bigoted websites -- Warman ending many of his posts with a symbol for "Heil Hitler". If these commissions were governed by the rule of law instead of the rule of men, Mohamed Elmasry, the Jew-hating bigot who filed a complaint against Maclean's magazine, would be charged with a section 13 violation himself, for publicly excusing the murder of Jews in Israel.

Marc Lemire has compiled a chart of every section 13 decision. One of the line items in his chart is the ethnicity of the respondents -- 100% of them are white. When I first saw that chart, I was uncomfortable with that data, especially given the white supremacist overtones of Lemire's site. But with that caveat said, it is still a fact: not a single radical Muslim jihadi has had a section 13 trial; not a single radical Sikh secessionist; not a single Tamil Tiger supporter. There is no shortage of news on each of those groups, just to pick three. But none have been taken before the CHRC tribunal -- even though, unlike the poor shleps who have been, those three groups have actually gone beyond mere words into violent criminal acts.

There are many things I know now that I wouldn't have likely believed a few months ago, before I stared spelunking around the caves of the human rights commissions. I would never have believed that human rights "officers" would go around anonymously planting bigoted comments on websites -- I would have called that a nutty conspiracy theory. But then I saw the CHRC staff and Richard Warman admitting under oath to doing just that.

And, before reading Dean Steacy's memo on the Andrew Guille complaint, I would have thought that the CHRC runs itself at least along some basic concepts of natural justice. Now I know better.

As a lawyer, I know and accept that not all decisions by the government should be made as formally and rigorously as in a real court of law. But even the most trivial administrative tribunal needs to have basic rules of fair play. I really cannot think of a single element of fair play and natural justice that the CHRC has not violated. And, unlike so many other arms of the state, the CHRC has terrifying powers, from their official powers to fine people and subject them to life-long publication bans (surely an illegal "unusual" punishment under our Charter), but also their unofficial punishments, such as their abusive, costly processes themselves.

There is not a drop of doubt in my heart or mind: Canada's human rights commissions, with their illberal mission of political censorship and their perversion of the rule of law, have become a grave threat to our human rights. We simply must stop them. 

I was on Mike Duffy's partisan's panel today. We talked briefly about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's half-confession that he has been involved with a prostitution ring. News reports suggest he's been doing so for the better part of ten years.

Of course it's morally wrong for a married man and father of three to do so. And any man who would cheat on and lie to his own family would surely cheat on and lie to mere strangers such as taxpayers. And though strict libertarians hold to the theory that prostitution is a victimless crime -- a consenting transaction between consenting adults in which the state has no business -- in reality, many prostitutes are in that "profession" under extreme duress, including violence from their pimps.

The fact that Spitzer's job, first as a prosecutor, then as attorney general, and then as governor, involved upholding and enforcing the law -- including laws against prostitution and prostitution rings -- makes this a far graver act than mere infidelity. A law-maker and law-enforcer cannot be a law-breaker.

But it's worse again than that. As Ron Moore pointed out -- a comment I repeated on the show -- Spitzer exposed himself to extreme risk of extortion and blackmail. A multi-year relationship with organized crime, in which he paid with bank transfers(!) put him at the mercy of everyone at the organization, from the prostitutes themselves to the pimps and anyone else "in" on the deal. Did they try to blackmail the governor? Did they ask him to look the other way on some of their crimes? It goes without saying that he looked the other way on the crimes he himself was participating in. Anything else? Drugs? The organization's associates in other criminal ventures?

There's immorality; then there's criminality; and then there's putting the entire integrity of the governorship in jeopardy.

We did talk about a few other issues on the show; a breathless Dominic Leblanc stopped by to share his excitement about some arcane details of parliamentary procedure in a house committee. I admit that his side of the story made things sound a little bit odd, but I was confused about the matter, and all I could think about was: does anyone other than the 1,000 or so people who work on Parliament Hill give a fig about what happened on that committee? It was so obscure, so "inside the beltway", and in that sense it was a giant placebo, a replacement for any real Parliamentary work by the opposition.

The Harper government has given the Official Opposition much to oppose. But instead of opposing it by voting against it in the chamber, or even going to the polls, Stephane Dion backs down from the big battles every time, choosing instead to deploy his MPs to the kind of trivia that Leblanc was talking about. If Leblanc's point was really such a scandal, then he ought to bring down the government over it. If not, the Liberals should actually dig into the real matters of government.

There's another showdown coming with the Liberals over a substantive matter: the Liberal bill to allow parents to deduct $5,000 a year, per child, for their kids' RESPs. That's a substantive matter, and there are reasonable arguments to both sides. If I were arguing for the Liberals, I'd say that any tax cut is a good tax cut, and this one encourages education, and encourages Canadians to save and invest, too. I also see the merit in Jim Flaherty's objections: budgets are about priorities, and giving upper-income Canadians (and that's who would be using this deduction) a billion or two dollars means that's money that's not available for broader-based tax cuts.

So here comes the showdown. The Liberals said their bill was a coup, and important. Flaherty and Harper will now call their bluff, and will effectively turn the matter into a confidence vote, by embedding the RESP bill's defeat in the upcoming budget. Of course the Liberals will cave in again -- if they did on Afghanistan and crime and the Senate, they surely will on this trinket of an issue.

Oh well -- all the more time for Dominic Leblanc to squabble over procedural minutiae over non-scandals about which severely normal Canadians just don't give a damn. My prediction: no election until 2009.  

Richard Warman, Canada's most prolific human rights complainer and all-around censor, is a member of EGALE, Canada's prominent gay advocacy group.

Other gay activists have also resorted to human rights commissions to silence critics of homosexuality -- including dispatching HRCs to bully Catholic newspapers and even a Catholic bishop. It's fair to say that HRC's no longer consider freedom of religion to include Catholicism. That's why I hate even calling them "human rights" commissions.

So I was surprised and delighted to come across this article by EGALE's executive director, Gilles Marchildon, in which he came out swinging against using human rights commissions to bully anti-gay activists. Marchildon even mentioned the shameful Lund v. Boissoin case that ruled that freedom of religion and speech is subordinate to the imaginary right not to be offended (see paragraph 357). 

Here are a few excerpts from Marchildon's letter:

It can be challenging to hear an opposite point of view. When that opinion is vehement and hurtful, it’s even more challenging to defend the right of that opinion to be expressed...

Boissoin called [gay] people “perverse, self-centered and morally deprived,” and said that “where homosexuality flourishes, all manner of wickedness abounds.”

The Pastor condemned the “horrendous atrocities such as the aggressive propagation of homo- and bisexuality” as well as the “psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.”

He went on to say that “war has been declared,” calling on readers to “take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the wickedness.” (Click on this short-cut to see the full letter: http://tinyurl.com/dzsg6.)

:::

For reasonable people who believe in equality and safety for all, it is easy to condemn Boissoin’s hurtful and inflammatory language. Furthermore, the temptation is strong to want to silence such an angry diatribe which might find an audience of people willing to join his war against equality.

While it is difficult to support Boissoin’s right to spew his misguided and vitriolic thoughts, support his right, we must.

If Boissoin was no longer able to share his views, then who might be next in also having their freedom of expression limited. Traditionally, the LGBT community’s freedom has been repressed by society and its laws.

Plus, it is far better that Boissoin expose his views than have them pushed underground. Under the glaring light of public scrutiny, his ideas will most likely wither and die.

Marchildon gets it. And so should anyone who claims to be an advocate for the downtrodden or the powerless. Historically, free speech -- scratch that -- offensive free speech has been the only tool available for powerless groups, precisely because they had nothing else: no power, no money and in many cases, no votes. From the anti-slavery movement to the suffragette movment to the civil rights movement, it was the force of ideas, spoken plainly and with the express purpose of offending the sensibilities of the status quo, that caused social change.

It's appalling that so many "official" spokesmen for groups that in the past have felt picked on -- I'm thinking of Official Jews, Official Feminists, Official Gays, etc. -- are now using the very tools of oppression and censorship they once chafed against. There is a libertarian streak to many gay activists; I think of martyrs Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Their philosophy of persuasion and freedom is much more sympathetic than the abusive, butch politics of censorship and prosecution that Richard Warman and Darren Lund express.

When it comes to winning over public opinion to the cause of gay rights, for every person Marchildon persuades, Warman and Lund alienate ten others.

(h/t Rob Breakenridge) 

Today I was interviewed by Pamela Geller of the great Atlas Shrugs website, on her radio program. I imagine that most of her listeners are American, and so I did my best to explain how what's happening to me in Canada is a possible premonition of what will happen in the U.S. next.

We talked about a dozen things ranging from Harvard's new sex-segrated swimming pool to the silence of feminists and gay rights activists in the face of Islamic fascism to "SLAPP" nuisance lawsuits on both sides of the border to the absurd idea of criminalizing the emotion called "hate" -- and how that's a sneaky first step to criminalizing political commentary.

We also talked about how the rules of civil procedure, and constitutional limits on real police, don't apply to human rights "officers" and commissions. (I intend to write a more detailed blog post on that subject, because it's interesting, and because my commenter "Mordechai" has challenged me on my facts, including my assertions that no human rights commissioners or tribunal panellists are judges, and many are not even lawyers. I look forward to telling you the story of one tribunal panellist who is a highly partisan non-lawyer whose expertise is in... cat bylaws and garbage collection.)

Here's an audio clip of this morning's interview; I regret I had to sign off before we took callers.

A friendly reader e-mailed me an audio clip of Naseem Mithoowani, one of Mohamed Elmasry's spokeschildren, who appeared on Cross Country Checkup today right before me.

Let's set aside Mithoowani's fib that she is a complainant against Maclean's -- she's not; Elmasry is, but he's rightly keeping a low media profile, given his infamous anti-Semitism. And let's not, right now, quarrel with her misrepresentation of what Maclean's actually published, what Mark Steyn really wrote, and her convenient omission of the fact that Mithoowani and her friends demanded cash from Maclean's. (Quaere: did the Canadian Islamic Congress, by filing a human rights complaint against Maclean's when they wouldn't pay that shake-down money, commit criminal extortion?)

Let's instead enjoy the deer-in-the-headlights responses Mithoowani offered up to Rex Murphy's simple challenges to her bromides. How could she claim she's been silenced, if she and Elmasry's other spokeschildren have appeared in a dozen newspapers in response? How has an "offensive" article actually impacted her "human rights"? What, exactly, does she propose as a remedy?

Mithoowani says the answer is to have "mandatory" regulatory bodies to forcibly compel magazines to carry rebuttals from "groups" who feel slighted by a publication.

Of course, Maclean's already runs such rebuttals voluntarily; they're called letters to the editor. But Maclean's, and many other media, receive more letters than they could possibly run, even if they were editorially up to snuff. Who would be the decider as to which rebuttals would be run? Right now, that decision is left to Maclean's editors; Mithoowani wants to make that decision herself -- she wants to tell Maclean's readers what they'll read, and tell Maclean's editors what to print. I don't think she convinced many listeners. 

But, in case she did, I'm excited about all of the writing opportunities that will suddenly come my way. I will expect to be able to have a "rebuttal" column in every issue of the Canadian Islamic Congress's weekly e-mail newsletter -- not to mention a "Jew's Views" column in the half-dozen Arabic language newspapers in Canada, many of which are virulently anti-Semitic. I'll even demand my "equal time" when the Liberal Party publishes its newsletters -- after all, as a conservative, I'm sure I'll feel offended by what they have to say.

I wrote earlier that Rex was far more patient than I would have been when listening to such foolishness. But upon reflection, I realize that there was nothing that he could have done that would have more powerfully proved the folly of Mithoowani and company than to let them be hanged by their own words.

P.S. Here is my clip from today.

Take at look at this story on the Globe and Mail's website, which seems to be headed to their print edition tomorrow. It's weird in so many ways.

First off, it has an odd "news peg" -- that is, the newsy reason why a story is written in the first place. Calgary mullah Syed Soharwardy says he's "thankful" that police are purportedly following up on anonymous Internet comments made in December.

That's news? Maybe not; the Calgary Police Service wouldn't confirm a word Soharwardy was saying. And how would Soharwardy know the status of an ongoing police investigation, anyway?

Or take Soharwardy's vanity organization, the grandly named Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. It's more of a personal club than any grand council; sort of like Soharwardy's mosque which attracts about 40 Muslims a week out of Calgary's 70,000-person Muslim community (and half of those 40 are in mutiny against his financial dealings). Soharwardy hasn't even filed the ISCC's corporate returns -- it risks being struck from the corporate registry. He is actually a part-time mullah; his full-time job is as an engineer at IBM. But this sentence is just plain weird:

"Mr. Soharwardy presents his supreme council organization as a moderate Muslim group that is against terrorism."

I would understand a newspaper referring to the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada by its formal name, even if it is patently ridiculous. But to unpack the elements of that name, take away the capital letters and actually call it a "supreme council organization" is really strange. What does that even mean?

I have a hunch that the reporter, David Ebner, with whom I chatted about Soharwardy's foibles, wrote something much tougher about him, but had some of his words edited out of his article by worry-warts in Toronto. Other than taking at face value the "supremacy" of the "council", that sentence implies that something's amiss with the mullah. Soharwardy "presents" his group as "moderate"? Doesn't that foreshadow a sentence comparing how Soharwardy "presents" himself, with other, contrary facts -- sort of like what Licia Corbella did in the Calgary Herald last month? But that other shoe doesn't drop. Again, I suspect it was redacted in Toronto.

The next few sentences are just goofy: Soharwardy says he's scheduled to appear on a reality TV show about his personal life, to show how he lives his life "day to day". That's going to be must-see TV. Not because the life of this part-time preacher is interesting, but because it will be delicious to see if he can keep his mouth shut for 13 full episodes, and not blurt out his real thoughts on Jews (Israel treats Muslims worse than the Holocaust), Christians (when they helped out Indonesian tsunami victims, they kidnapped Muslim children), Canadian women (they should live under sharia law) and other conspiracy theories (when Spanish conquistadors landed in South America, they slaughtered the native inhabitants, who happened to be Muslim). It's going to be like watching a man with Tourette's Syndrome try to keep his cursing under wraps just until the cameras stop rolling.

The Globe's strange and meandering report ends with a hint of what Ebner probably wanted to write more about: that despite Soharwardy's plans to appear on reality TV and "present" himself as moderate, those in his mosque who have been foolish enough to criticize their supreme leader have wound up either with lawsuits or with home invasion beatings. That seems to be a bit more of a news peg than Soharwardy's idle musings about a police investigation that may or may not be ongoing.

But I concede that the absolute weirdest part of the Globe story was this sentence:

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Levant alleged that the Canadian Human Rights Commission may have planted the controversial postings to get the Western Standard in trouble.

Of course, I said that and I meant it. Anyone who has been following the abuses of the Canadian Human Rights Commission knows that using fake names, infiltrating "enemy" websites and even planting bigoted messages is their modus operandi. We know this not because it is alleged by any of the CHRC's critics, but because it is confessed under oath by CHRC staff themselves, including CHRC investigator Dean Steacy and former CHRC staffer and serial CHRC complainer, Richard Warman, who personally admitted under oath that he would regularly end his online comments with Nazi shorthand for "Heil Hitler".

But most Canadians don't know that -- partly because the CHRC is doing everything it can to keep its questionable tactics hidden from public view, including insisting that the upcoming March 25th cross-examination of its staff on this very subject be done in secret.

Of course I stand by my statement. And whenever a bigoted comment is left on a website in Canada, the first reflex of any skeptical person ought to be: "is this another dirty trick by the CHRC or Richard Warman to entrap their next victim?" rather than to take the comment at face value, as an indicator of any real bigotry in Canada.

If I didn't know anything about human rights commissions and I read that Globe article, I'd probably think that whoever thought there was a conspiracy by the government to plant racist comments on websites to entrap them was a nutbar on par with 9/11 "truthers". I'd think whoever said that was slightly mad, because that's just not how things work in the real world, at least not in a country like Canada.

My comment was the strangest part of the Globe story -- stranger than Soharwardy's reality TV show ambitions, stranger than the Globe's nonchalant, passing reference to violence against Soharwardy's congregants.

And that's why we need to keep up the denormalization campaign against these commissions: what they do is so severely abnormal and un-Canadian that even describing their conduct sounds like madness. It is madness, and many sane people would rather just ignore it to avoid the hassle of fighting such injustice, or to simply avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from apprehending fascism in the midst of a liberal democracy. But I think if we don't root out this madness now, it will only expand. 

I thought Rex Murphy had a great discussion on censorship today, with a range of talkers including Alan Borovoy, Keith Martin and me. Even one of Mohammed Elmasry's spokeschildren called in, as did one or two other hard-leftists who made the creative argument that commandeering Maclean's magazine and forcing them to run "the other side" of a story is somehow not censorship (haven't they heard from their leader, Noam Chomsky?).

When I hear incoherent gobbledegook like that, my blood pressure rises. But Rex is patient with everyone, which is one reason he's so successful. He puts counter arguments to such callers very gently, like when he asked Elmasry's spokeschild if she believes her demand for "equal space" in a privately owned magazine really makes sense -- if, say, special interest magazines ought to be forced to run "the other side" of the story, too. Imagine living in such a world -- where a Catholic magazine would have to set aside equal time for anti-Catholic views, or where a Jewish magazine would have to save space for anti-Semites and Israel-haters, or where I'd get a guest column in Elmasry's own weekly e-mail newsletter. I think -- I hope -- that the 500,000 people who listen to Rex's question connected these dots on their own.

One thing that irked me somewhat on both Cross Country Checkup and the TVO show last week is how such government-ordered censorship is being conflated with the bogus news story about bill C-10 (drafted by the Liberals, adopted by the Conservatives) that would apply a morality code to movie productions that receive Canadian tax subsidies. It seems obvious to me that the government telling a pornographer to use his own money rather than tax dollars, is morally and legally different than the government hauling anyone into a star chamber to answer for their thoughts and words.

It's a sign of the unseriousness of Canada's small arts community that they would compare their receipt of government hand-outs to the McCarthyism faced by Steyn, me and others. But it's not surprising; it reminds me of any Oscar night, when Hollywood's A-list bravely rants against George W. Bush or even long-dead Sen. McCarthy -- but don't dare mention the censorship-by-murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh. It's easy to be brave when criticizing Bush; the silence of the arts community about human rights commission censorship suggests the only thing they're really idealistic about is free money.

You know we're winning the battle in the court of public opinion when the defenders of the human rights commissions resort to fibbing. We've seen that from the radical Canadian Islamic Congress, whose spokeschildren actually claimed that these HRCs are not government agencies, and so there's nothing to worry about.

I watched the new TVO show about HRCs -- kudos to them for covering the subject again -- and HRC defender Len Rudner of the Canadian Jewish Congress plain old made up facts.

Rudner claimed that HRCs follow the same procedures and standards that regular civil courts do. But that's just not true. The civil rules of court don't apply; civil rules of evidence don't apply; HRC "investigators" have stunning powers -- including search and seizure powers without warrants -- that do not exist anywhere in civil procedure. And the "burden of proof" necessary for a conviction in HRCs is not at all like civil courts. The standard is the absurd "pre-crime" standard of "likely to cause" hurt feelings, and that standard is applied inconsistently by HRC tribunals, which are staffed by non-judges. No wonder the federal HRC has a 100% conviction rate under its thought crimes provisions.

The fact that advocates of HRCs like Rudner have to resort to such fibs, in a way, is a good sign, like the secrecy of the March 25th hearing. If the HRCs are so embarrassed about what they actually do and how they do it, all we need to do to win this fight is to keep shining sunlight on them, to expose them for what they are, to "denormalize" them in society.

I've argued in the past that radical mullahs like Syed Soharwardy may think they're promoting Muslim interests, but in fact they create anti-Muslim sentiment, because they're so un-Canadian in their attempts to censor Canadians and make our country more like Saudi Arabia. I'd say the same thing about people like Rudner -- their smug self-righteousness, along with their paternalistic idea that they can handle "hateful" words (but we mere mortals cannot) actually breeds resentment against Jews, or at least Official Jews.

I'll write more about the TVO program later, but I'm going to listen to Cross Country Checkup now -- and I'll be on the show at 4:40 ET/2:40 MT. 

Syed Soharwardy, the radical Calgary mullah I've described here at length, is back in the news, praising police for "identifying a trio of bloggers who posted hateful messages on a local website".

(Now, we have to take everything Soharwardy says with a brick of salt. I can spot at least one fabrication in this very brief story -- contrary to his claim, Soharwardy did not file a human rights complaint in December against the Western Standard website (which I sold last fall to a new owner). That's just a bit of taqiyya on Soharwardy's part, as per usual.)

I find it odd that, in a city where real crime is in the news every day, real police have time for this baloney. But I am curious: if it is true that two Ontarians posted "hateful" comments anonymously on the Western Standard site, who were they?

Given what we know about the Canadian Human Rights Commission and their investigator Dean Steacy, it's fair to ask: were those "hateful" messages from Ontario planted by the CHRC in the run-up to an investigation against the new Western Standard?

That was they did when they were stalking the conservative Free Dominion website (and they're doing it again). Given the enormous amount of "hate" in Canada that is generated by "anti-hate" activists and government agents provocateurs, I think it's a fair question as to whether such vandalism was committed by the CHRC looking to set up its political opponents.

One of the hallmarks of justice in a liberal democracy is transparency. In extreme circumstances there are secret trials in Canada, or trials that are open to the public but that are covered by publication bans, but such secrecy is only permitted for very unusual and overwhelming reasons -- such as to protect the identity of a child victim of a crime, or for true national security reasons. Secret trials, such as those conducted in the Star Chamber, are notoriously susceptible to abuse, and erode public confidence in the administration of justice.

So it should come as no surprise that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing on March 25th -- where human rights commission staff themselves are to be cross-examined on their dubious tactics of anonymous infiltration of websites, entrapment and even the bizarre practice of commission staff themselves planting bigoted remarks on websites -- is going to be closed to the public.

It is hypocritical in the extreme that HRC staff who scrutinize every public utterance and private thought of their victims will be exempted from public scrutiny themselves. There is no legitimate reason for this blackout, other than the HRCs simply being HRCs and engaging in censorship and the restriction of public debate. Usually they censor political expression they disagree with; this time they censor their own embarrassing conduct from being seen and heard by taxpaying Canadians. I don't blame them, frankly -- the more their inner workings are publicized, the greater will be the demand for politicians to rein in their excesses. The videos of my own interrogation at the hands of the Alberta Human Rights Commission have been seen more than 500,000 times; imagine the publicity that a videoclip of HRC staffers admitting to planting evidence of bigotry would receive.

I'm disgusted but not surprised by the tribunal's decision to be secretive. And I won't hold out hope that Canada's large media companies, who normally rush to court in unison to overturn other publication bans, will do so here.

But however appalling this secret hearing is, it's nothing compared to what the commission itself wanted. Here is a ruling last year by the tribunal that refers to the commission's wish list in this case (most of which was rejected). The commission didn't just want to exclude the public from the hearing. It wanted to exclude the accused himself from the hearing:

[5] ...Their physical and visual appearance would be seen by the Tribunal and counsel via video while everyone else, including Mr. Lemire, would be seated in a separate room where they would only be able to hear the audio portion of the testimonies.

:::

[9] The Commission submits that the evidence it has filed provides a reasonable ground for the fear regarding the personal and professional safety of the Commission witnesses. Yet, the special measures that the Commission is asking the Tribunal to adopt do not relate to the witnesses' security at the hearing....

[10] The issue therefore, for the Commission, does not seem to be security at the hearing but rather the witnesses' identities or more correctly, the capture and publication of the three witnesses' images...

[11] Interestingly, no similar request was made when Mr. Warman and the expert witnesses testified in Toronto, although it would appear that their images could already be found on the Internet.

[12] The Commission has directed me to a number of decisions where courts have ordered that special measures be taken regarding the evidence of witnesses. I note, however, that the special measures in these cases relate to the concealment of the witnesses' names. In the present case, we not only know the names of the witnesses but we also know that they are employees of the Commission.

:::

[15] ...If granted, Mr. Lemire will be excluded from the hearing examining his own alleged conduct. He will be denied the opportunity to view the evidence. His opportunity to assist and instruct his lawyer will be restricted.

The commission didn't just want a secret trial, kept out of the public eye. They wanted a secret trial where secrets were kept from the accused himself. Uncle Joe would have been proud.

Canada's human rights commissions have fostered a sick culture of obsessive secrecy, unfairness towards the accused and un-Canadian procedures. But this is more than that: it's a psychological clue as to how the commission's staff regard themselves. They don't see themselves as thin-skinned busy-bodies, or politically correct censors, or bureaucratic bullies, strangling marginal and oddball citizens with red tape. They see themselves as stars in a James Bond movie, or an episode of 24, where they are the fearless protectors of all that is good, fighting against powerful, evil, violent men -- and if they need to break a few rules along the way, well that's a price we have to pay. It would be laughable if it weren't destroying the lives of innocent people -- and the reputation of justice.

These aren't counter-terrorists, or even real police. These commission staff aren't Jack Bauer or Horatio Kane. They're civil servants who sit in their government offices, surfing the Internet under fake names, posting bigoted comments to chat sites, and then complaining about it. Comparing them to Pee-wee Herman is more accurate.

There are those who believe all that's necessary here is to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to excise section 13, the thought crimes provision. That's essential, but it's not enough. The problem with these human rights commissions isn't just that they dare to tell Canadians what they can or can't say and think. It's that their processes and procedures -- no matter what they're investigating -- are abusive, one-sided and un-Canadian. So-called human rights activists would know that instinctively if the victims hauled before these HRCs were, say, named Omar Khadr or Maher Arar. But the human rights industry isn't really about human rights. It's about "maximum disruption" to those the state finds politically incorrect. What a dishonour to our country.

Dow Marmur, a Toronto rabbi, weighs in on the Battle of Khartoun in today's Toronto Star.

...though newspapers should have the power to publish such pictures at will, they should choose the path of prudence not to do so out of consideration for the feelings of the Muslim minority. In the hierarchy of values, there's a strong case for at times allowing sensitivity to and respect for others to come before free expression.

I think that's what could be called the "conservative libertarian" approach: it acknowledges that we have the right to do a very wide range of things in Canada, but we can voluntarily choose to restrain ourselves from doing them. Fair enough; if Marmur was a publisher, it sounds like he wouldn't have made the choice that I did to publish those cartoons two years ago. Reasonable people can disagree on how to exercise their freedoms, and if an armchair publisher would choose to let "sensitivity" trump newsworthiness, that's fine. My objection is when the government steps in to make that decision.

Marmur's piece is a touch muddled, as modern sermons can be, and he gets some facts wrong. Contrary to his assertions, not all Muslims believe that depicting Mohammed is offensive. In fact, many mosaics and other engravings of Mohammed appear throughout the Muslim world. Radical mullahs like Syed Soharwardy have trumped up this "prohibition" as a political weapon against the Western free press, just as the recent Islamist insistence on the hijab is not a truly religious point, but rather a political weapon against the liberation and integration of Muslim women.

Marmur gets other facts wrong in relation to my own case. He writes that Alberta's human rights commission acknowledged that freedom of expression is central to Canadian life and so the commission didn't claim jurisdiction over me. That's just wrong: the Alberta HRC has vigorously declared that the right not to be offended trumps freedom of expression -- see paragraph 357 of this grotesque ruling -- and that's their precedent for having jurisdiction over me. And, though Mullah Syed Soharwardy has dropped his complaint against me, an identical complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim communities proceeds against me at the HRC. 

I suppose I should be gentle with the rabbi. His last column was surprisingly sensible for a Canadian clergyman, and the Star itself: he argued against abolishing the Lord's Prayer in Ontario's legislature, even criticizing the atheist -- or, more accurately, anti-Christian -- tendencies of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Maybe I have more in common with Marmur than first meets the eye.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn keys in on another passage of Marmur's that I ignored. Marmur says:

This was my stance more than a decade ago when Show Boat was staged in Toronto and some members of the black community objected on the grounds that it was racist. Many of my friends thought otherwise. For all I know, they may have been right, because it's difficult to describe Show Boat as a racist musical. Nevertheless, I felt that if some blacks thought that it was, their feelings were more important to me than my own artistic judgment. I think tolerance is also about that. 

Again, Marmur has the right to circumscribe his own life in accordance with the sensitivites of professional complainers, whether they're complaining about coverage of a news story or the production of a play. As Steyn points out, handing over such a veto to the thinnest-skinned people in society will make for a very boring life indeed, for any work of art -- or news or politics, or for that matter, religion such as the rabbi's -- is the subject of some controvery or offence. If Marmur wants such a sterile life for himself, he's welcome to it. I just don't want human rights commissions to command me to live my own life that way.  

I still get a kick out of watching Rick Mercer mock Stephane Dion's decision not to vote against the Conservative budget.

Imagine how much rougher Mercer would have been had he only known Dion's next excuse for not having his Official Opposition officially oppose anything: it's snowing.

"It's a bad government and we'll choose a time to defeat this bad government," he told reporters. "You will see. But it will not be at this time where we have a snowstorm in Ontario and just before Easter. I don't think Canadians want that."

So March is out. And April can be quite slushy, too. May has Mother's Day, so you know we can't have an election then. June's out because of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, and July can get plain old hot.

Dion's fecklessness is funny for political comedians like Mercer, and it's a gift from heaven for the Conservatives. But imagine, just for a second, what Dion would be like dealing with real troubles if he were ever to become prime minister -- not pretend troubles from the Parliamentary Press Gallery or the Conservatives but the real challenges and responsibilities of leadership. How do you think Dion would do going toe to toe with President Hillary Clinton if she wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and to end the Auto Pact? Or how do you think Dion would do in a military crisis in Afghanistan, for which our commanders were looking for a speedy decision? Or how about the more predictable matter of making the budgetary decisions that come with a continent-wide economic slow-down?

I just can't picture Dion being decisive, making tough choices, inspiring confidence or otherwise doing what leaders are supposed to do. I don't think his own party can picture it, and I don't think the Canadian public can, either.

Stephen Harper is not every Canadian's cup of tea. But even those who disagree with him would concede that the man can make decisions and execute plans. That's the job of prime minister, for which being the leader of the opposition is a four-year job interview. Dion thinks he's still a professor or a pundit.

Syed Soharwardy, the anti-Semitic, anti-Christian imam who filed a human rights complaint against me for publishing the Danish cartoons, is back!

Soharwardy had wisely decided to disappear from public view a few weeks ago after this devastating Op-Ed about him was published in the Calgary Herald. I haven't read a take-down like that in a long time. The column's strength was that it used Soharwardy's own words to show him as a bigot. Here are some of the quotes the Herald unearthed:

"Sharia cannot be customized for specific countries. These universal, divine laws are for all people of all countries for all times."

"Presently, what Israeli forces are doing to Palestinians is worse than the Holocaust of World War II."

"[Soharwardy's group] . . . strongly condemns the exploitation of tsunami victims by the Christian missionaries. There have been several reports that the Christian missionaries are kidnapping Muslim children in Indonesia. . . . It is now proven that the Christian missionaries do not help people on humanitarian grounds. They help people in order to exploit their needs and convert them to Christianity."

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has the stomach to surf Soharwardy's various websites -- or, worse yet, to search his website pages that he's since deleted, will find a deeply bigoted man who isn't afraid to publish "religious commentary" from terrorists.

I thought that Soharwardy had properly found some spider hole to hide in after the Herald's smackdown. But he's back. According to this blog,

In a statement [March 5th], Imam Syed Soharwardy said, “The alliance of anti-Islam hatemongers and few opportunists within the Muslim community will not succeed in stopping me from serving my country; Canada, my community and my religion. The hatemongers will fail in their hate and we, law-abiding and civilized Canadians will succeed in defeating the racist, illegal, hateful and bullying agenda of few hatemongers”.

Our lawyers are working hard on a criminal defamation lawsuit to be filed soon. We are also working to use all other available legal channels including Human Rights Commissions to bring the hatemongers to face Canadian
justice system.

Imam Syed Soharwardy will be available to the media today (March 5, 2008) at 12:00 noon - 02:00 PM at the Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre, 5700 Falsbridge Drive, Calgary NE for any questions. Imam Syed Soharwardy can be reached at 403-463-5723.

The first thing that sticks out is Soharwardy's threat to use human rights commissions as a weapon, again. This flies in the face of his statements, less than a month ago, that he had reconciled himself to our Canadian value of free speech. Here's what he wrote in the Globe and Mail in February:

...discussions with several Muslim leaders, and more particularly with some of my Christian and Jewish friends, have led me to conclude that my complaint was beyond what I now believe should be the mandate of such a commission. I now am of the view that this matter should have been handled in the court of public opinion.

Dear reader, like you I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that Soharwardy was lying during his "make love, not jihad" PR campaign, just to get himself out of a tight spot!

The second thing that comes to mind is Soharwardy's threat to file a "criminal defamation" lawsuit. I know a little bit about defamation law, and I know that it's almost always a civil, not a criminal, matter. Defamation does exist in our criminal code, but it's exceedingly rarely used. And, as with all criminal code charges, the burden of proof is enormous -- "beyond a reasonable doubt", not just the "balance of probabilities" test used in civil defamation proceedings. And then there's the small problem of trying to convince police and prosecutors to pursue such an abusive action. But this discussion pretends that Soharwardy has given any more thought to his latest ejaculation than he did to the hand-scrawled complaint against me two years ago. To call Soharwardy a thoughtful analyst of Canadian law is to be generous in the extreme.

This isn't the first time we've heard of defamation threats from Soharwardy. When I criticized him last month, he had his lawyer fire off a defamation threat to me; here is my response. I haven't heard back from him since. I'm not looking for more lawsuits right now, but it would have been a bonanza to take Soharwardy through an examination for discovery, where the phrases "no comment" or "that's confidential" or "you're a hatemonger" don't hold up. Imagine what one would find sifting through his mosque's financial records.

Besides his trademark bullshit, there is something troubling about his press release. Did the Alberta Human Rights Commission truly dismiss the complaint of the dissident women in his mosque? That complaint was essentially identical to this one, filed against Soharwardy at the federal HRC. I say again, I don't believe that human rights commissions are legitimate, and if the women in his mosque were truly threatened or harassed, there are other, more appropriate means of legal recourse, including going to the police. But, if we do have unreformed HRCs operating in Canada, and if they have felt free to prosecute me for two years based on the mere thought crime of publishing some cartoons, it would be remarkable if, as Soharwardy claims, they rejected these women's complaint out of hand, without even an investigation.

I've seen a 45-minute DVD of a rowdy meeting at Soharwardy's mosque, where these women and other dissidents try to pin Soharwardy down on his financial dealings. I've seen Soharwardy shout down the women when they tried to speak (from the back row, of course). And, far more troublingly, I've read the report of one of those women subsequently getting beaten in her own home, by an attacker who police say warned her to stop talking about Soharwardy's mosque. Here are the gruesome pictures of that beaten woman, as published in the Pakistan Post.

I say again that the proper office to investigate these beatings is that of the real police, not the thought police. The proper body to investigate financial dealings at Soharwardy's mosque is the Canada Revenue Agency, or the white collar crime unit of the real police, not the keystone cops of the human rights commissions. But it is passing strange that a complaint with so much circumstantial evidence of true discrimination, harassment and violence, is rejected offhand, while my political crime of publishing a cartoon has been prosecuted for two full years now, to the cost of $500,000 tax dollars.

I've read 50 Alberta HRC rulings, and probably 50 others from other HRCs. I cannot recall a single case in which the respondent to a complaint was a minority, let alone a radical Muslim fundamentalist like Soharwardy. I don't think it's because radical Muslims like Soharwardy are in compliance with the politically correct codes of HRCs. I think, at least in part, it's because the staff at HRCs subscribe to the "soft bigotry of low expectations". Like so much of the media, they excuse conduct on behalf of tin-pot fascists like Soharwardy and Mohamed Elmasry that they would prosecute if those men were Canadian-born WASPs. Take away the spelling errors, and Soharwardy's and Elmasry's websites read a lot like white supramacist websites. Replace the Arabic and Urdu accents with a Southern drawl, and Soharwardy and Elmasry sound a lot like former KKK leader David Duke. But in the politically correct eyes of the HRCs, Soharwardy and Elmasry are "victims" by nature of their race and religion, so they couldn't possibly be bigots in their own right.

And if that means the women in Soharwardy's mosque are denied equal justice under Canadian law, well, those uppity gals should be grateful they're not facing justice, sharia-style.

UPDATE: As Rightgirl points out in the comments, the blog on which Soharwardy's press release appears describes itself thusly:

"Also, this site is counter measure of bias information from The West Mafia News Media, which already been dominated by JEWISH & CHRISTIAN Mafia."

Yeah, that sounds like Soharwardy's kind of people -- and, increasingly, like the human rights commissions' kind of people, too. 

My former colleague Debbie Gyapong is becoming an increasingly indispensable read. Unlike most bloggers, Debbie does real on-the-ground reporting. Her scoop -- on video, no less -- that Liberal MP Dan McTeague has come out in support of Keith Martin's private member's motion to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to excise the abusive section 13 thought crimes provision, is important reporting.

(It is a sign of deep dysfunction that in a Parliamentary Press Gallery with about 200 members, it's left to an independent like Debbie to ask the only questions MPs are asked on this matter. I'm impressed with the comprehensive treatment that Canada's Op-Ed writers and talk show hosts have given the subject, but they are in the opinion business. What about the news reporting business? Other than a factually inaccurate smear by Joan Bryden, I haven't seen much news reporting on the subject.)

I have spoken with a handful of cabinet ministers, parliamentary secretaries and PMO staff over the past two months, and although I've detected strong moral support, the overriding response was that no meaningful changes were possible in the run-up to the federal election that was expected this month. Opening up new and potentially troublesome issues was not part of the Tory election plan; the phrase I kept hearing was "lock down".

Well, Stephane Dion decided to step back from the brink and, despite some overheated, Ottawa-only not-quite-scandals, it's a safe bet that there will be no election for at least six months, perhaps a year. Were it not for the fact that the Harper Conservatives have actually legislated a fixed election date, Harper's minority government might last indefinitely.

All of which means the Tories can put election planning on the back burner, and start governing again. It's actually quite amazing what they have passed into law, given their very slender minority. From beefing up the military to cutting taxes to marginalizing the Senate to toughening up the criminal justice system -- let alone extending the Afghan mission -- they've governed more forcefully than most majority governments do.

Which means that, in the months ahead, I think it is a distinct possibility that the reticence of the government on the subject of abusive human rights commissions will give way to action. That prediction is infused with hope and personal interest, of course. But, remember, this is the government that took on other politically correct sacred cows, from the Court Challenges Program to the Canadian Wheat Board.

It's time to fire up the e-mails again, and press Tory MPs to make the Keith Martin-Dan McTeague proposition a bi-partisan one. Two months ago, I thought that to amend the Act would be controversial. But with support from across the entire political spectrum, ranging from Eye Weekly, the Toronto Star, PEN Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the CBC's Rex Murphy, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Noam Chomsky(!) and a dozen metropolitan dailies, this should be a political slam-dunk.

The first stage in political reform -- the denormalization of these commissions -- is well under way. I predict we'll have good news on the second front -- political action -- before the year is out. What do you think? 

I've written about how Richard Warman, the former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who is now the CHRC's biggest customer for thought crime complaints, has tried to censor Canadian libraries in British Columbia and Ontario.

But the largest libraries in the world now, of course, are online. And defamation suits and human rights complaints -- Warman's preferred tools of censorship -- don't work as well if the libraries and other websites in question are based in the United States. Their robust First Amendment means that U.S. defamation law is not an effective censorship tool, and that country does not -- yet, at least -- have anything as pernicious as Canada's various thought crimes laws.

Well, if a Canadian can't censor U.S. websites, can he get Internet companies here in Canada to block those U.S. sites from Canadian Internet users, like Communist China does with politically incorrect sites? That's exactly what Warman sought to do in an application to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

I'm not an expert in telecommunications law, but from what I gather, Canada's big Internet companies like Rogers and Bell are governed by the Telecommunications Act (apparently little ISP's aren't). Section 36 of that Act specifically bans communication companies from interfering with content without government approval -- and that includes censoring websites:

Except where the Commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.

Well, that's what Warman -- and the censors at the Canadian Jewish Congress -- asked the Commission to do. In the written application to the CRTC filed by his lawyers, Warman asks not only for the CRTC's "permission" under section 36 to ban two particular U.S. websites, but he also asks for:

Directions on procedure... whereby Canadian carriers and other interested parties can present their views as to whether the blocking of these URLs should be made a final order of the Commission and whether the blocking of these websites should be mandatory for all Canadian ISPs.

Warman didn't just want to crack open the law forbidding the big telecom companies from tampering or censoring content. He also wanted the CRTC to set up a procedure where "interested parties" like him could get the big carriers to block websites -- and force the little ISPs to do so, too.

There are so many appalling aspects to this application, it's hard to know where to start. The first is that Warman made his application ex parte -- that means without notice to anyone else with skin in the game. The owner of the two U.S. websites being being discussed wasn't there to make his case; no Canadian Internet companies were there, neither big nor small; no one else with a stake in communications was invited at all. Of course, ordinary Canadians who surf the Internet weren't invited, either, to say whether or not they wanted Warman and the CJC to decide for them where they could or could not surf. It was almost as cosy as a former CHRC employee filing a complaint with his former colleagues at the CHRC.

The second worrisome thing is that Warman and the CJC sought to criminalize websites without the trouble of a criminal trial. Here's the affidavit filed by the CJC's Bernie Farber; in paragraph 5 he says that in his "expert" opinion, the U.S. websites in question likely violate sections of Canada's Criminal Code. But Farber is not a policeman or a prosecutor; he doesn't work as an officer of the law, he works as an officer of a special interest lobby group. And even if he was a policeman, a policeman's view is just one side of the story. Here in Canada we don't convict someone of a crime ex parte; we invite the accused to hear the case against him; we allow the accused to present a defence; and we ask well-trained criminal judges to make those weighty decisions, not CRTC bureaucrats whose expertise is telephone red tape.

Very few Canadians knew about this outrageous application -- an attempt to turn the CRTC itself into a replica of the CHRC, but even more unfair. At least the CHRC invites respondents to make their case. (The respondents never win; the CHRC has a 100% conviction rate for section 13 idea crimes. But at least they pretend.) There would be no pretending at the CRTC, because any website, anywhere around the world, would be summarily tried, here in Canada. In almost every conceivable case, it would be a thin-skinned Canadian complainer's word against someone in a foreign country who would be absent. Just imagine the abuses that would happen in such a system. Canada would truly become like China, a gross violator of "netiquette", a censor en masse, treating our citizens like sheep.

To their everlasting credit, the CRTC threw out the application, for several of the very reasons I've outlined above:

...given the unprecedented nature of the relief sought in the Application and the serious and fundamental issues it raises, as well as the fact that the specific approval is being sought in favour of Canadian carriers without notice to such carriers, it would be inappropriate to consider granting the interim relief sought in the Application on an ex parte basis, and in particular without affording Canadian carriers and all other interested parties the opportunity to comment.   Such a public process would allow for consideration of the broader policy and legal issues regarding the scope, and appropriate use, of the Commission's powers pursuant to section 36 of the Act.

I'm interested in this subject because I'm interested in freedom, and I am only recently discovering the relentless nature of those who would erode or limit our freedoms here in Canada, especially in the name of phoney "human rights", such as the human right not to be offended.

But I'm also interested in this subject because, a week or so ago, Richard Warman, the applicant in this censorship gambit and the plaintiff in the library-censoring defamation suits, filed notice of a threatened defamation suit against me, too. And one of the recurring complaints in that notice was that I defamed him by calling him a censor.

I know, it's absurd. But then so much of this story is absurd.

If you want to help me fight Warman's threatened defamation lawsuit -- or help me in my other legal battle, the Alberta Human Rights Commission's two-year prosecution of me for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed -- I'd be grateful. I promise to keep fighting until the fight is won.

If you want to be part of the fight, too, please click on the PayPal button. Thank you very much.

"This organization is not a registered non-profit organization.  Donations to this organization are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."

On a completely different subject, here is my February column from Canadian Lawyer magazine. I thought the headline the editor gave it was spot on.

I was delighted with the response I received from it -- lots of support from ordinary lawyers, and a note of protest from the Canadian Bar Association.

It's a question that has come up as a result of Cadscam. Do they offer bribes? Here's a column I wrote for today's National Post that describes my experience negotiating with the two men:

Note: See UPDATES 1 and 2 below

If I'm reading this order correctly, March 25th may become known as Black Tuesday at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

That's when Marc Lemire -- one of the few Canadians who has had the energy and legal resources to fight back against the CHRC's section 13 thought crimes steamroller -- will be allowed to cross examine commission staff about their "undercover" activities on the Internet. Judging by what Lemire has uncovered so far -- such as an Edmonton Police "hate crimes" officer posting anti-Semitic and anti-Aboriginal bigotry on the Internet -- it's sure to be a blockbuster.

(It's deeply disturbing that "hate crimes" police -- I'm not talking about human rights keystone cops now, but real police officers -- publish such bigotry on the taxpayers' dime, and all in the name of keeping the peace. One must ask: at what point is the "fake" hatred generated by the police a larger problem than the "real" hatred that exists already on society's fringes? And, really, is there any moral difference between the two, other than the police claim they don't really mean it? At what point does the cure become worse than the disease?)

Remember that these are the same "anti-hate" activists -- police, human rights activists, and even CSIS agents -- who paid a government agent to set up the Heritage Front, arguably Canada's leading neo-Nazi movement twenty years ago. The fact that these same government agents then "infiltrated" the nascent Reform Party, to the great embarrassment of Preston Manning, shows that these "anti-hate" campaigns have long been torqued into a partisan political weapon.

The CHRC had vigorously opposed the coming interrogation of their staff, and it's easy to see why. Dean Steacy, one of the staff who will be compelled to answer questions on March 25th, has previously admitted to creating Internet pseudonyms to infiltrate websites the commission was hunting (something Richard Warman has admitted to doing as well after, uh, first not admitting to it). But instead of preparing some hermetically-sealed, written answers to Lemire's questions, as Steacy has been able to do in the past, he must now take the stand and answer questions live, under oath, from Lemire's lawyer.

It will be fascinating to watch. Remember, Steacy was the commission staffer who once exclaimed that freedom of speech -- which just happens to be section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights -- "is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." Watching Lemire's lawyer cross-examine him might be worth flying all the way to Ottawa.

Another CHRC staffer, Hannya Rizk, will be ordered to take the stand, too. It will be interesting, if only to see why the CHRC tried so hard to deny Lemire the right to ask them questions about their investigative tactics. Surely one of the hallmarks of a limited, responsible government, where the police and other instruments of state power are accountable to civilian oversight, is transparency. If the CHRC wants to hide its tactics, isn't that in itself a sign that something is awfully wrong? The tactics and techniques of real police officers are subject to scrutiny by the public all the time -- from tasers to photo radar to search warrants to closed circuit TV cameras to wire taps. It's healthy -- and it reminds police that they serve the people, and not the other way around. Why did the CHRC try so hard to keep its tactics immune from scrutiny?

Besides grilling Steacy and Rizk, my reading of the order is that Lemire can now subpoena Internet records from Bell that would "remember" any details that Steacy or Rikz might "forget". That's another win, too.

But the CHRC isn't the only organization that's sure to be embarrassed on March 25th. If I understand the order, it will permit Lemire to enter as exhibits correspondence between the Canadian Jewish Congress and the CHRC, in which the CJC discussed methods by which Internet companies could block access to Internet websites -- that is, to censor them -- without even bothering to go through the process of a CHRC hearing.

This, I've got to see. The CHRC has a 100% conviction rate under its section 13 thought crimes section; people dragged before the commission have to pay for their own lawyers, and often are ordered to pay fines to the commission and to the person who brought the complaint to the commission's attention (like Richard Warman has done so frequently). Apparently that absurd, one-sided procedure is still too much hassle for the CJC. It will be fascinating to see the censorship plans cooked up between the CJC and the CHRC that involve short-circuiting the kangaroo court, and going straight to the censorship.

But I think the most dramatic moment of all will come when commission staffer Dean Steacy is asked about his undercover activities targetting Free Dominion, a leading conservative political "chat" website. Steacy's fake Internet name, Jadewarr, was used to sign up on Free Dominion just two weeks before a "hateful" post was made there, that later formed the basis of a CHRC complaint against the site.

Did Dean Steacy himself manufacture that "evidence" that was then used as the basis of a complaint against Free Dominion? Why was the CHRC targetting a mainstream conservative chat site, the same way it had targetted overtly racist sites in the past? Who at the CHRC had made the determination that taxpayers' dollars and bureaucrats' time should be used to infiltrate a conservative political forum?

We might just get an answer to these questions on March 25th. If so, it will be a rare glimpse into the secretive, unaccountable world of human rights commissions -- and therefore, an important step towards educating the public, and the politicians, about the aching need to rein in these commissions and cut them down.

UPDATE 1: Some commenters and bloggers are surprised that I would support Marc Lemire, because he runs websites that could fairly be called white supremacist. The answer is pretty simple: I don't. I just believe that a government that censors an offensive website is more offensive -- and dangerous -- than any website itself. And, as the March 25th hearings will likely show, in its zeal to "get" the Marc Lemires of this world, the government has become what they claim they abhor: sneaky, anonymous Internet lurkers, posting bigoted comments. Far more troubling than those government agents' own petty epithets, though, is the human rights commissions' perversion of our legal system, and their erosion of our freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Trying to outlaw hate doesn't work; hate is an emotion that's rooted in a real or imagined grievance; if it were possible to simply legislate such feelings away, we'd have passed the Love Each Other Act a long time ago. The answer is to leave the haters alone or, if you must, engage them to try to ameliorate their feelings of grievance, or prove to them that their grievance is unfounded. That last one is the Ken McVey approach to fighting -- that is, fighting the battle of ideas using words, not police and censors. But it takes a lot more work and patience than just criminalizing your opponents.

Having the government tape someone's mouth shut won't make his feelings go away -- it will probably make him hate even more, and it will confirm all of his suspicions, conspiracy theories and other rationales for hatred. I truly believe that the "war on hate" that the Canadian Jewish Congress and others have waged has had a symbiotic relationship with the haters -- they both feed off each other. If the government and officious do-gooders like the CJC simply ignored harmless haters (and focused on actual crimes, not thought crimes), the problem would atrophy. David Ahenakew is a prime example of this.

My "support" for Lemire is my support for his fight against the human rights commissions, which are procedurally and substantively unCanadian. I suppose that's one of the differences between Warren Kinsella and me: I don't rejoice when my political opponents are dealt with tyrannically by my government. I think it's unfair and, at best, amoral. But I also realize that the precedents set when the state prosecutes the Lemires of the world are then used when the state prosecutes the Levants and the Steyns of the world.

And if they ever go after the Kinsellas of the world. So far, Canada's left has been exempted from these human rights complaints. That's partly because the commissions themselves are stacked with lefty, politically correct appointees who would find a creative way to dismiss a complaint filed by a conservative or a Christian. (I have probably read 50 tribunal rulings, and the only one in which a complainant was a Christian was dismissed. A dairy farmer in Alberta didn't want his milk to be picked up on Sunday, but the commission told him he should have thought of that before becoming a farmer.) But I think the exemption for the left is mainly because conservatives and Christians don't tend to run to the nanny state to censor their opponents. Conservatives are so used to being in the minority that we've learned to debate, and to take rough and tumble insults without complaining quite as much, at least to the government.

But should that ever change -- should conservatives start filing the same sort of nuisance complaints at human rights commissions as do liberals and Islamic fascists -- I bet it wouldn't be too long before the left started to worry about due process and constitutional freedoms. That's why lefty groups like PEN Canada have stood with Steyn and me -- not because they agree with us, but because they see how it's Lemire's white supremacism yesterday, my conservatism today, and Kinsella's pain-in-the-neckism tomorrow. Any fellow who makes his living offending his rivals should realize that when Lemire's right to be offensive in danger, Kinsella's is, too.

A lawyer like Kinsella knows that you don't have to be "pro-murderer" to support the criminal law concepts of the presumption of innocence, a fair trial, no cruel or unusual punishment, etc., even if they -- because they -- benefit accused murderers. We support those rules because that's our own moral standard for justice. I support Lemire's fight against the human rights commissions not because I support his website -- I've actually never visited it, and I don't really care to. I support his fight because it's my fight too. 

UPDATE 2: Marc Lemire responds to Kinsella's and commenters' criticisms of him with his own comment (I assume it's him, and not a CHRC staffer posing as him):

With all the controversy about my alleged beliefs, I figured its time to add my $0.02. I am moving up the ladder daily. A few years ago I was a "nobody", now according to Wornout Kinsella, I run one of the largest white supremacist website ON THE PLANET! (Sadly the poor CHRC, who read every single thing I wrote since 2002, was unable to find a SINGLE post I wrote that was ?bad?)Amazingly how the more I expose what the CHRC is really up to the bigger a "nazi" I become. After smoking the CHRC on March 25, 2008, I may well become the secret inspiration behind MEIN KAMPF, and the driving force behind the entire Nazi regime.For the blog morons who have never heard of sarcasm? let me be clear: I have never been or will ever be a Nazi or supporter of Adolf Hitler. In fact look at my website. You know, the largest white supremacist one on the planet, and see if you can spot what Kinsella is talking about. (For those who don?t see the dripping hate, gas chambers, nooses and swastikas on my site? you must BE A NAZI SYMPATHIZER! Or perhaps, like Wornout, you might need to be knee-high?)Funny how people like Richard Warman go around signing his internet posting on Stormfront.org with Heil Hitler (which Warman admitted to doing under oath?) ... and he is the "anti-racist" YET, I have never spoken a single word in support of Hitler, no swastikas on my website? Yet, I am the "nazi".As George Orwell called it, "NewSpeak" is alive and well. Now "Anti-Racist" has become, someone posing as a woman on message boards, and posting vile hate for the purpose and intent of "stopping online hate". Seems sorta backwards to me.. but hey, I am just a vile Neo-Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, hater, Muslimphobic, ShariaHater, anti-semite, who knows nothing better. (did I mention Nazi?)With top "anti-racists" and hate crime unit police officers filling up message board from here to kingdom-come with hate messages, I feel somewhat left out. Being Canada's top nazi, hater and anti-Semite, I feel somewhat cheated. There is no one left out there, I can call a "n*gger" and "c*nt".From now on, I am going to assume fake names online like LUCY (oh wait thats already taken...) ok.. hmmm... ok... JENNIFER, then. And I will post things like: "THIRD-WORLD IMMIGRANTS WHO COLLECT WELFARE, RIP OFF OUR SYSTEM AND LIE TO GET INTO THE COUNTRY ARE .. A-OK"Christ this is CanaDUH, I might be able to get a government job pulling in close to $100k with those sort of comments!Time to change professions. Being a computer expert (with forensics specialization) certified by Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Citrix, and Novell, just doesn't cut it anymore, I need to get into the "Anti-Racism" racket.... My fingers are crossed the CJC will be hiring soon, since their current poster boy might not occupy that spot for too much longer. 
  

Thank you to the several readers who sent me information about Richard Warman's legal threats against Toronto's public libraries.

As I mentioned earlier, Warman's threats of defamation lawsuits against B.C.'s public libraries (and then threats of defamation lawsuits against the librarians themselves who complained about his earlier threats of lawsuits) led to that province changing the law to protect libraries. Now, until a book is found by a judge to be defamatory, B.C. libraries are granted immunity from lawsuits like the ones Warman was threatening. No more "prior restraint" censorship is allowed.

Not so in Ontario. According to this document from the Toronto Public Library, a book Warman complained about has been taken off of their shelves. I'm advised that the book is still not available on the libraries' online catalogue, but it is available in Mississauga. (I hope this revelation doesn't cause Warman to fire off another legal threat!)

Ontario needs to follow B.C.'s lead, and enact their own version of "Warman's Law" to protect their libraries from his threats.

Here's Dona Cadman's public statement on the allegations that the Prime Minister authorized a bribe of her late husband, Chuck. I think that each of the Cadmans has said and done some iffy things, frankly. Even according to the vanity biography commissioned by the Cadman family, Chuck's deliberations about that final, key vote make him look like someone who was more concerned with his own financial security, or the hassle of winning a party nomination or running an election campaign, or even the thrill of being at the center of attention (and the sheer excitement at having Paul Martin visit his apartment) than with voting on a Parliamentary bill according to some principle. But I think it's done, now.

Here's the statement:

March 3, 2008

Personal Statement by Dona Cadman

I'm a little bit surprised at the level of reaction to the disclosures in Tom Zytaruk's book and I guess that's probably because it was put to rest in my mind, when I discussed the matter with Stephen Harper, 2 ½ years ago. At that time, I recall specifically asking him if he was aware of a million dollar insurance policy offer, that upset Chuck so much.

He looked me straight in the eyes and told me he had no knowledge of an insurance policy offer. I knew he was telling me the truth; I could see it in his eyes. He said, yes he'd had some discussions with two individuals about asking Chuck to rejoin the party, but he'd told them they were wasting their time trying to convince Chuck.

From that point forward.... I didn't regard it as a "Party" initiative, but rather; the overzealous indiscretion of a couple of individuals.... whose identity, Chuck never revealed to me.

It all comes back to my conversation with the Prime Minister.... 2 ½ years ago. I want to be perfectly clear in that regard. Chuck liked, respected and trusted Stephen Harper. I like, respect and trust Stephen Harper. If I didn't believe in my heart, that he was telling me the truth.... I wouldn't be running as the Conservative Candidate for Surrey North.

Dona Cadman

I think that, between Dona's statement and Stephen Harper's defamation notice, the Liberals will probably drop this scandal-that-never-was. As Rick Mercer would say, they're backing down and loving it.