Fifteen Government of Alberta employees are working on my case

UPDATE: E-mail link fixed.

I received the first, 200-page tranche of records from my Freedom of Information request to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, internal documents relating to their investigation and prosecution of me for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

There are a lot of gaps in those documents that my lawyer will try to get them to fill in -- it's obvious they don't want to show me certain things. But even the edited pages they have sent over paint a fascinating picture -- sometimes troubling, sometimes hilarious. I've skimmed through them, and I plan to post some interesting nuggets over the next few days.

One thing that surprised me was just how many government bureaucrats are working on my file. I obviously knew a few -- like Shirlene McGovern, my interrogator and fellow YouTube TV star. But then I started counting: there were fourteen people working on my file, plus a pair of mysterious initials!

In alphabetical order, here are "my guys", as I have affectionately come to call them:

1. Gerard Dale
2. Nichole Daugherty
3. Heidi Draper
4. Jennifer Drover
5. Pardeep Gundara
6. Dave Haynes
7. Donna MacKinnon
8. Charlach Mackintosh
9. Shirlene McGovern
10. Michael McQuaid
11. Marie Riddle
12. Kathleen Samuel
13. Tara Tkachuk
14. Wendy Wong
15. “L.B.”

Friends, until I received this information, I thought the complaint was about me. How selfish I was! Me, me, me -- that was all I could talk about! I couldn't go a day without bitching about my nearly $100,000 legal fees; or complaining about the 800 days I've been under the stigma of this prosecution; or whining about "freedom this" or "due process that".

I see now that this is much bigger than me. It's about putting bread on the table for fifteen hungry families. In the Alberta economy (unemployment rate: 3.3%) if these government bureaucrats couldn't prosecute me for a living, they might actually have to venture out from their 30 hour a week public sector union jobs and do some respectable work. The complaints against me aren't just about the "human rights" of cartoon-a-phobic radical Muslims. It's about the human right of a lot of government employees to continue to suck on the public teat.

What about Shirlene "Muzzle" McGovern's new car? Who will buy Pardeep "Gag Order" Gundara his new cabin at the lake? And doesn't poor Jennifer "Dhimmi" Drover deserve a wild weekend with her girlfriends in Las Vegas?

As they acknowledged in their own annual report, complaints to Alberta’s HRC are down 15% over last year. Any real business that lost 15% of its customers in a single year would either lay off staff or risk going out of business. Neither of those are possibilities here, of course -- so increasingly insane "human rights" complaints are entertained, merely to keep the office looking busy.

I've written a lot about the corrupt Canadian Human Rights Commission. But Alberta's HRC is just as nutty. It answers not to the provincial justice minister, but to the province's "Culture and Community Spirit" ministry. That's funny and sad at the same time.

Why not show your community spirit and send a note to Lindsay Blackett, the freshman MLA elected just two months ago, who is now minister of this portfolio. His biography looks surprisingly normal for a politician -- he coaches sports, and before becoming a politician, he sold electronics. In other words, he doesn't come from the grievance industry. He's also Black, living in a very white neighbourhood of Calgary. Which means he knows Albertans aren't bigoted and in need of a human rights commission to tell them how to behave. Otherwise, how could he have won his riding so handily? And Blackett isn't beholden to any ethno-politics for his victory.

Blackett is only two months on the job, so I doubt he's had a chance to become well-briefed on this file. I think it's time we sent him some correspondence to help bring him up to speed, don't you?

You can e-mail him here.

For 15 Government of Alberta employees, the human rights complaint I'm fighting isn't about me, and it certainly isn't about the law. It's about those 15 unionized grievance hustlers riding an 800-day gravy train, and not wanting the party -- at taxpayers' expense -- to end anytime soon.