Little PEI's big HRC

According to this news story, Prince Edward Island's human rights commission hasn't had any hearings in 2008 -- all of their cases have been settled informally. In other words, everyone targeted by the HRC has taken a plea bargain, rather than gone to trial.

That raises more questions in my mind than answers. Are the HRC's targets so terrified of a hearing that they settle, no matter what? Or are the settlement terms so easy that everyone takes them? We don't know.

Alberta's HRC offered me a plea deal. If I gave several thousand dollars in cash to my radical Muslim antagonists, along with a page in the Western Standard magazine to do with as they pleased, I'd be let go. That was my plea deal. Had I accepted it, I wouldn't have spent an addition $90,000 in legal fees. But that would have been extortion.

The fact that PEI's HRC hasn't gone to a full hearing means we don't know all the details. Section 12 of PEI's statute has an outrageously broad censorship provision, worse in some ways than the Canadian Human Rights Commission's infamous section 13. Here's PEI's section 12:

12. (1) No person shall publish, display or broadcast, or permit to be published, displayed or broadcasted on lands or premises, or in a newspaper or through a radio or television broadcasting station or by

means of any other medium, any notice, sign, symbol, implement or other representation indicating discrimination or an intention to discriminate against any person or class of persons.

(2) Nothing in this section shall be deemed to interfere with the free expression of opinion upon any subject in speech or in writing.

PEI's section 12 permits their HRC to censor newspapers, TV and radio, signs, notices "or other representation". That pretty much covers everything including smoke signals.

12(2) is particularly precious: after listing all of the means of communication that are subject to the HRC's censors, the law has the humour (chutzpah?) to "deem" the law not to interfere with free speech. So the HRC can censor you -- it just won't be called censorship.

But back to the news. The HRC's executive director, David Larter, seemed defensive about his lack of prosecutions. He boasted to the CBC that, in fact, his little HRC had 60 complaints on the go at any one time.

In Canada's smallest province.

There are about 140,000 people in Prince Edward Island. And Larter targets them 60 at a time.

Canada has about 33 million citizens, or about 235 times more people than PEI. So 60 targets at a time is like Jennifer Lynch's CHRC having 14,000 cases at any one time. I know that would be a dream come true for her -- bigger staff, bigger budget -- but it would make Canada into a veritable police state of political correctness.

Well, proportionately that's exactly what's going on in PEI.

They've got nine staff at the PEI HRC. That would be like the CHRC having 2,100 staff, instead of the 200 that they do.

Nova Scotia Scott points out that Larter made a gaffe -- he acknowledged that HRC complaints are just like lawsuits. (That's a gaffe, because it acknowledges the costs, penalties and other seriousness associated with the HRCs' punitive processes -- processes that lack the checks and balances of real courts.)

But I don't even think that Scott's point is the biggest one.

The biggest point is that 140,000 of Canada's best-natured and friendliest citizens are some of the most hen-pecked, busy-bodied and eavesdropped-on people in the country, with a staff of nine snoops at the HRC looking over their every word and deed.

Fire. Them. All.