What exactly is the March 25th hearing about?

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.