Steyn in Maclean's

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.