Steyn storm

Mark Steyn stopped by the Ontario legislature on Monday for just 30 minutes, but his visit was probably the most headline-grabbing testimony before a government committee in memory.

Here's the Toronto Star:

Steyn, whose work is published around the world so he has emerged as something of an international cause celebre for freedom-of-speech, said it was "a drive-by verdict."

"That is the very defining act of a police state: an apparatchik announcing that a citizen is guilty of dissent from state orthodoxy," said the author, accompanied by a dozen supporters, including one clad in a "Viva Steyn" T-shirt.

"But here's the point: Maclean's and I have no fear of Barbara Hall, the commission or the tribunal. You're welcome to try and do your worst to us. We have deep pockets, we pushed back and we filled the newspapers with stories about all these wacky cases that Barbara Hall and others are so obsessed about. Like all tinpot bullies, the commission couldn't take the heat and backed down," he said.

"No one was disputing the truth of what I wrote, nobody was arguing that it was libellous or seditious or false, for all of which there would be appropriate legal remedy. In essence, the plaintiffs were arguing that they'd been offended. Well, offensiveness is in the eye of the offended," said Steyn.

"When you subordinate legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril and that's the state in Ontario today. If you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you don't believe in free speech at all."

the Toronto Sun:

Ontario's Human Rights Commission is made up of "ideological activists" and should be dismantled, author and columnist Mark Steyn told a Queen's Park legislative committee yesterday.

Steyn also referred to commission chairman Barbara Hall as a "commissar."

"I believe in the abolition of the commission, because I believe the commission is nothing but ideological activists," Steyn told the standing committee on government agencies.

"I have no objection to that; I've been accused of that, myself. But I do it on my own dime and I don't see why commissar Hall and her colleagues shouldn't also do it on their own dime."

and the Ottawa Citizen:

Ontario's human rights system is a "laughing stock" and should be abolished, author and firebrand columnist Mark Steyn told a government committee in Toronto yesterday.

"Free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion," Mr. Steyn, a columnist for Maclean's, told members of Ontario's standing committee on government agencies.

"When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't start a newspaper and print what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up."

(I already cited the National Post.)

There's a lot more on the move; Brian Storseth of Parliament's Justice Committee is reintroducing a motion to review the CHRC's conduct and section 13. I understand that it looks set to pass -- though it's yoked to a Bloc motion to include "social condition" as a grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Whatever; this committee isn't writing laws. The point is to have a public, Parliamentary investigation into the corruption and abuse of the CHRC -- starting, in my opinion, with their membership in neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront and Vanguard.

I'm excited that the momentum for reform is back, and that it's got a toe-hold both in the Ontario and national Parliaments.