Jennifer Lynch pressures a company for thousands of dollars of freebies

Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, is at it again.

No, I’m not talking about more five-star junkets overseas. No, she hasn’t crashed any more war memorials or funerals while sending out press releases announcing that crass behaviour. And, no, it’s not another case of her condoning a radical imam who preached the murder of gays and others.

This time she’s pressuring a prospective HRC target for free gifts – in this case, thousands of dollars of free radio ads to make her, her, her a media star.

I’ll get into the pressuring aspect in a moment, but first let’s talk about Lynch’s showy unprofessionalism.

Since when do appointed bureaucrats run radio ads featuring themselves?

Is Lynch running for public office of some sort?

She’s already told Parliament that she’s going to give them recommendations about what her job description at the CHRC should be. What an uppity, insubordinate, presumptuous hack. She is Parliament’s servant, yet she has arrogated unto herself the status of lecturing her bosses – and spending tens of thousands of taxpayers dollars on consultants and lobbyists to clean up her ugly reputation.

You’d think the only letters Lynch would be sending to Parliament would be apologies – for the half dozen boondoggles she’s overseen, including the fact that her staff hacked into a private citizen's Internet account, to cover their tracks as they accessed their memberships in neo-Nazi organizations. I know that sentence is crazy, but it's true.

Seriously: what kind of human rights organization joins and participates in neo-Nazi groups? Why has this woman not yet been fired?

But to the latest foul-up: Lynch recorded a couple of vanity radio ads. We hear ads from government agencies all the time – say, from the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects our bank deposits. But the ads are professionally produced, done to industry standards, and designed to promote public information about a particular government service. They’re not vanity projects used to prop up the ego of a self-important bureaucrat. Seriously: can you name another government agency where the senior civil servant is such a personal huckster? (You really have to listen to her plodding, monotone, bureaucratic delivery – what a perfect voice for a humourless censor. You can hear her ads here and here. You'd think someone at Hill and Knowlton -- to which Lynch has paid $10,000 for crisis communications advice -- would have told her how dour she sounds.)

But the problem here is not merely Lynch’s enormous vanity. It’s how she paid for the ads.

She didn’t.

Lynch wrote a letter to a radio network, telling them to parrot the CHRC’s political groupthink, by creating some positive propaganda about the CHRC. And the radio station complied.

Let’s do a thought experiment here.

The CHRC is a quasi-judicial organization – they have powers of search and seizure, they have armies of investigators and lawyers, and they have the power to prosecute. They are a regulator – and Newcap Radio, the company that succumbed to Lynch’s demands, is one of the legal entities they regulate.

That’s like the Securities Commission writing a “friendly” letter to stockbrokers, asking them to publish a self-serving ad for the regulator – at the brokers’ expense. If a broker refused, would he still be treated fairly? Would he risk it? Or, to be more blunt, imagine if a policeman from the vice squad visited a bar on his beat, in uniform, and made a very subtle request for a donation to the policeman’s benevolent fund. Seriously: what rational stockbroker, bar-owner, or other regulated person would refuse to pay the pizzo?

Lynch sent a letter to Newcap Radio – a station that comes under her jurisdiction. She asked them to fall into line with the CHRC’s way of thinking. And what came out the other end is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free ads featuring Lynch herself.

Question: Does that massive donation to Lynch constitute a political contribution? Is it a form of lobbying? What are the legal implications of Newcap simply gifting that to a bureaucrat for her vanity project? Where will the value of that gift be disclosed? What were the terms of the deal?

But much more important than the legal taxonomy for the gift: what was the quid pro quo?

I say again, Lynch has regulatory jurisdiction over Newcap, a growing media company – and thus is highly susceptible to human rights complaints of all sorts, not just section 13 "hate speech" cases. What kind of buffer has Newcap bought itself through their gift to Lynch? What was the conversation? What did Lynch’s thank-you letter look like? Were there any substantive issues discussed between them? Did Newcap have any legal matters pending before the CHRC? Newcap has hired lobbyists in Ottawa before. Did a lobbyist broker the deal with Lynch this time? No such lobbyist is registered.

Again, the questions write themselves, especially if you put it in other regulator/regulatee contexts, like a Securities Commission chief asking for and then taking a gift from a stockbroker.

Another question arises: what other gifts has Lynch taken from people or companies that she regulates? Will she disclose those as well?

There’s something creepy about a civil servant fusing herself so personally and politically to a propaganda campaign; and it’s even creepier that she’s pressuring companies to fund her.

It’s not politically appropriate. But it’s worse than that: it’s not ethical for a regulator to ask for and receive consideration from a legal entity subject to her regulation.

Jennifer Lynch should have been fired many times before for incompetence, poor judgment – and for permitting her staff to join neo-Nazi organizations.

But squeezing free ads out of companies she regulates? That’s a new low, even for her.