Two new documents: CHRC's internal Maclean's report, and confidential CHRC ethics audit

Guess who investigated Maclean's magazine on behalf of the Canadian Human Rights Commission? Our old friend Sandy Kozak, the corrupt cop who was drummed out of the Carleton Place Police Department, for dating a criminal who was still under investigation by the force.

You can see her signature on the second page of the

Here are some old news stories about Kozak's ethical spiral down, down, down so far that she was just right for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. She was unethical -- so she was perfect for the human resources standard at the CHRC, who snapped her up.

Question: Is Kozak dating any of the parties in this case -- or even any of the sock puppets, like Khurrum Awan? That would normally be an absurd ethical question to ask, but not with Kozak.

Question: does the CHRC even have a code of ethics?

Answer: they didn't as recently as a few years ago when this internal audit, marked "private and confidential" on every page was done.

Given that the CHRC has been around for thirty years, it's staggering that no-one -- out of a staff of 200 -- thought of drawing up a code of ethics. Sort of tells you the kind of place it is. But we already knew that.

In that secret audit, the CHRC was given a failing grade for ethics -- see, for example, page 7, where the "values and ethics framework" didn't even meet the standard of "good" practise, let alone "advanced" or "best" practises. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 as the worst (no-one gets a zero!), the CHRC got a 2.5. That's a failing grade by any standard. Again, a perfect environment for Sandy Kozak, "investigator"of Maclean's.

Look at page 9 of the audit, and the wonderfully gentle title of that slide: "improvement opportunities to consider". One "opportunity" is listed as:

Develop and promote a formal ethics framework and further develop organizational culture in relation to ethics

Hey, good idea. You'd think a bunch of busy-bodies telling us how we ought to live might have its own rules about how it ought to behave. This audit was written nearly five years ago. How's the remedial ethics work coming along? Let's ask Dean Steacy, part of Kozak's "anti-hate" squad.

As he testified this March, there aren't any rules -- he and his fellow investigators can pretty much do whatever they want -- including becoming members of neo-Nazi organizations, like the U.S.-based Stormfront website (see page 5827 of that transcript). They can also write, in their neo-Nazis personas, directly to CHRC targets to elicit legal information from them, to destroy their legal privilege, through subterfuge (see page 5843 of the transcript). And they regularly request material, like hard drives, seized from their "human rights" targets by police using criminal search warrants -- a violation of the terms of those search warrants (see page 5864 of the transcript). Of course all of these activities would land a real police officer in trouble with Internal Affairs. But, as Kozak knows, there is no Internal Affairs department at the CHRC. It's Lord of the Flies over there.

Take a look at page 54 of the confidential audit, which notes:

The Commission does not have in place a formal ethics framework and does not have a formal structure and designated champion for ethics....

The auditors saw that as a problem. Kozak saw that as a perk. And, as Steacy's testimony shows, it's still business as usual -- ethics free, and loving it.

Back to Maclean's. Kozak's internal report to the CHRC doesn't acquit Maclean's, or even recommend an acquittal. She says the CHRC could go either way -- that the Maclean's article had some of the "hallmarks of hate" -- the CHRC's phrase for things they don't like. Here's how she phrased it:

That's when Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner, stepped in and threw the complaint out. Not for legal reasons -- as Kozak showed, they were ready to roll. But for political reasons -- to save the CHRC from more humiliation in the public eye.

Too late for that.