How would we know if the Alberta HRC went on strike?

On February 13, 2006, the Western Standard magazine, of which I was the publisher, printed eight of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, to illustrate a news story on the subject.

On February 15, 2006, an anti-Semitic imam named Syed Soharwardy filed a "human rights" complaint against the magazine and me, with the government of Alberta's human rights commission. You can see that semi-literate, hand-scrawled fatwa here.

On March 30, 2006, I filed a written response to the complaint, assuming there was someone with enough sense at the HRC to throw out Soharwardy's complaint as a nuisance suit. I was wrong.

On January 11, 2008, some 600 days later, the HRC summoned me to an interrogation at the hands of their "human rights officer", Shirlene McGovern.

That was four months ago.

So we're at more than 800 days since the HRC first received Soharwardy's complaint.

So you can imagine my amusement today when my lawyer told me that the HRC asked him for a copy of my videotape of that interrogation.

Uh, what have they been doing these past four months? Did Officer McGovern not take notes?

Have they not seen the YouTube clips I uploaded to the Internet? 565,000 other people did. But not our intrepid bureaucrats. They're no so good with this Inter-nets thing. So I'll send it to them on a CD. Though a VHS would probably be better for them. Or maybe a Betamax.

As the Alberta HRC boasts in its annual report, its case load of complaints has actually fallen by 15% in the past year. Albertans just aren't bigoted enough for them, it seems. But it takes the HRC 7% longer to dispose of complaints -- up from 382 days to 410 days. That's a net productivity decline of 22% in a year. And their goal for next year: 435 days. Yes, the Alberta HRC actually wants to be less "efficient".

(Imagine if the HRC was actually being used for its original purposes of helping people, say, kicked out of an apartment in wintertime because of their race. What good would "help" a year later do? But the HRCs long ago stopped pretending to be shields to protect people -- now they're swords to attack people for the crime of political correctness.)

So the average case takes 410 days. I'm at 800 days and running -- and my formal hearing hasn't even been scheduled. The only way I know my interrogators are still alive is that they called my lawyers to get a copy of my videos.

(Could you imagine if a real police officer grilled a criminal suspect for 90 minutes, and then four months later sheepishly called up the suspect and asked sweetly for a copy of that suspect's notes on the interrogation? Imagine the peals of laughter!)

OK, you lazy, unprofessional, incompetent, corrupt, jihadist slackers. I'll send you a video of my own interrogation -- and a bill for it. And I won't even take 800 days to do it.