PEN Canada is mightier than the sword

I missed it when it was released, but PEN Canada has issued another statement condemning Canada's human rights commissions, and their abusive "hate speech" provisions. (I'm also quite impressed to see their advocacy for press freedom in China.)

Here is their new statement, released just this week. An excerpt, with my favourite parts in bold:

Recent complaints in Alberta against journalist Ezra Levant and in Ontario and British Columbia against Maclean’s magazine for a piece by writer Mark Steyn raise disturbing questions about the degree to which human rights commissions have taken it upon themselves to become arbiters of what constitutes free speech.

PEN Canada believes this is not the role of human rights commissions and that governments across the country need to make that clear both to their commissions and to Canadians.

…“Whether you agree with Mr. Levant’s decision that the Western Standard should publish the Danish cartoons about the prophet Mohammed or not, no one in a free and democratic country such as Canada can seriously argue the magazine should not have the right to publish them,” said PEN Canada’s national affairs chair Christopher Waddell.

“That is equally true for Maclean’s magazine and the excerpt it published from Mark Steyn’s book that led to the complaint against that publication.”

Neither complaints should ever have been accepted by a human rights commission and such complaints should be immediately dismissed.

To ensure there is no repetition of such attempts to constrain freedom of expression through the guise of human rights legislation, PEN supports calls for removal of subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act which states that it is discriminatory when individuals or groups say or write anything that is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

Similar wording in provincial human rights statutes should likewise be removed.

That's a powerful statement, and it's the second one made by PEN. Now all that's needed is for the Conservative government to stop hiding under their beds, and do what everyone in the country from the Toronto Star to the Globe and Mail to the CBC's Neil MacDonald is asking them to do -- take the duct tape away from the human rights commissions, and stop letting them gag free speech.