Lorne Gunter's best column yet on the HRCs

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.