Another salvo from the National Post

Here is Jonathan Kay's assessment of Tuesday's hearing at the human rights tribunal. Some excerpts:

...even if the CHRC nails Lemire, Tuesday's eight-hour hearing will still be remembered as a landmark disaster for the commission. Despite efforts by Steacy and others to stonewall on specific questions of CHRC procedure, observers were nonetheless able to extract a fairly detailed picture of work practices at the Commission. The impression that emerges is an overstaffed shop in which bored, unionized desk jockeys sit around "investigating" obscure web sites in search of some scrap of actionable hatred. And when they don't find anything actionable, they try to stir things up by logging in and participating under their own house alias — a practice Lemire describes as a form of entrapment.

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Privacy is another value that the CHRC seems to find confusing. The most scandalous disclosure to emerge on Tuesday involved the manner in which investigators logged on to Lemire's web site. In what appears to be a ham-fisted attempt to avoid broadcasting the Commission's IP address to Lemire, they tapped into the unsecured wireless Internet hub of a 26-year-old woman who lived down the street from the Commission's 344 Slater Street headquarters. On Tuesday, a Bell Canada employee read out the woman's name, address, and phone number. A National Post reporter contacted her and found that she'd never heard of Lemire, Steacy, or his investigations.

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Nice work. No doubt, the privacy commissioner will be having a chat with Dean et al in coming days.

This is the beginning of the end for Section 13.1 of the Human Rights Act, the legislation that (nominally) mandates this kind of fishing expedition. For years, Canadians have averted their eyes to the sort of shenanigans going on at our nation's human-rights commissions under the theory that any means used toward such a noble end as "human rights" must somehow be justified. What we saw this week turns that conceit into a pathetic joke.

That's my view, too. I hope to continue with a stream of horror stories from the human rights commissions. It's not hard to do -- outrageous cases are not anomalies, but standard fare these days. But I think we've got enough evidence of their corruption and illiberalism; they are being denormalized and discredited. Now is the time to press politicians for change.