Testimony relevant to RCMP investigation deleted from CHRC transcript

Key testimony from the March 25th Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing in the Warman v. Lemire case has been redacted from the official Canadian Human Rights Commission transcript.

Like the missing 18 minutes of Richard Nixon's secret Watergate tapes, the official transcript produced by the CHRC omits embarrassing testimony about the CHRC's conduct -- the very conduct that is the subject of the Privacy Commissioner's investigation, an RCMP criminal investigation, and a proposed Parliamentary investigation.

The deletion was discovered by the respondent in the case, Marc Lemire, who painstakingly compared an audio recording of the hearing with the CHRC's written transcript.

At the hearing Lemire's lawyer, Barbara Kulaszka, was examining Dean Steacy, the CHRC anti-hate investigator who famously declared that "freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." Kulaszka was asking Steacy about the time the CHRC hacked into the Internet account of a private citizen, to log on to a Nazi website using one of the CHRC's secret identities, called Jadewarr. 

Here's what the official transcript said:

MS. KULASZKA: So, Mr. Warman was, in fact, present when you signed on to the jadewarr account and printed off the document?

MR. STEACY: Yes, he did.

But the actual testimony, according to audio tapes of the hearing, was this:

MS. KULASZKA: So, Mr. Warman was, in fact, present when you signed on to the jadewarr account and printed off the document?

MR. STEACY: Yes he was.

MS. KULASZKA: So he knew who printed it off, didn't he?

MR. STEACY: Yes, he did.

This is important for two reasons:

1. It confirms that the CHRC's word cannot be taken at face value on anything -- even official-looking documents, such as transcripts. It isn't the first time the CHRC has tried to brazen its way through a falsehood.

2. The deleted sentences are essential to proving that Richard Warman, the CHRC's former employee and currently its largest customer, lied under oath to the tribunal. Read my blog entry here if you want the details, but in 2006, Warman had denied, under oath, that he knew who printed off the Jadewarr memo. The deleted section of Steacy's testimony proves that Warman was there, and did indeed know who printed it off.

Don't take my word for it that this is critically important. The CHRC has gone to incredible lengths to keep the information at the March 25th hearing out of the public eye.

First, they applied to have the hearing kept secret, with media banned from attending.

When that failed, they refused to release a transcript to the public.

And now it turns out that the transcript they commissioned, that was leaked to the public, contains at least one omission that is strategically important to all three investigations -- Privacy Commissioner, RCMP and Parliament -- not to mention Warman's nuisance lawsuit against me and my fellow bloggers.

Here's a friendly tip for anyone doing business with someone from the CHRC: if you shake their hand, count your fingers afterwards.