"Go Ezra!": Shakedown makes the front page of the Ottawa Citizen

Shakedown made the front page of the Ottawa Citizen today. You can see a .pdf the whole front page here. But here's the top right corner of it:

Putting aside how goofy I look in pictures, look at the amazing thing they've done: they've cheered Shakedown, and the cause it represents, on the front page of the newspaper of record in Canada's capital city. They've cheered my fight -- a fight to abolish Canada's corrupt and abusive human rights commissions.

I love the sell line: "He may not be your cup of tea, but he's written a book you should probably read". That's great -- and it's exactly right. The fact that I am sometimes a partisan, and most of the times conservative, has nothing to do with the message of Shakedown: that Canada's HRCs imperil our real civil rights, such as freedom of speech. That's something that should concern liberals as well as conservatives, and the majority of Canadians who don't even think of themselves as political.

It's a point made by Andrew Potter, the journalist who wrote the review. After we spoke in Ottawa last month, he wrote this quick blog item, in which he says my politics aren't his cup of tea, but my advocacy for free speech was downright... liberal. It's true.

His review today is massive; you can read the whole thing here. It's not uniformly positive, but so what -- the book isn't perfect. But it's a story that I felt had to be told -- and that Potter feels has to be read. Some of my favourite excerpts (I added the bold font):

...Ezra Levant is not a Hollywood casting agent's idea of a folk hero. The Calgary-based blogger, journalist, lawyer and political activist has been a prominent figure on the political right in this country for more than a decade, first with the Reform party, then the Canadian Alliance.

...In a show of support for the Danish paper and as an assertion of the right to freedom of expression, Levant reprinted the cartoons in his magazine. And that is where his new book Shakedown begins, with Levant summoned, in early 2008, to what he describes as a "90-minute government interrogation" before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission.

This meeting marked the nadir of Levant's trip through the looking glass into the world of Canada's human rights commissions, a parallel judicial system where none of the usual rules of procedure, evidence, due process and even rationality necessarily apply. You can take your pick of modifiers -- Orwellian? Kafkaesque? Stalinesque? -- but Levant will take them all. And why not?

Thanks to the complaint that brought him before the AHRCC, he became the only person in the world to face legal sanction for printing the cartoons.

This is something in which Levant obviously takes a great deal of pleasure. Sure, he acts like it has been a terrible ordeal, what with the financial cost (which he puts at $100,000), the threats to his safety, and the toll it has all taken on his personal and professional life. And these costs are real: In his interview with me, Levant mentioned one especially disheartening moment when, with unemployment and a $5,000 legal bill staring him in the face, his heavily pregnant wife turned to him in a cab and asked him where he was going to get the money. "I'll figure something out," he muttered back.

But at the same time, his difficult experiences at the limits of free expression in Canada provided him with the fodder to write Shakedown.

There are three major points on the agenda of this slim volume. The first is a look at the evolution of Canada's human rights commissions (what Levant calls "a beautiful idea -- that failed") from their origins as a tool for fighting racism and discrimination to their subsequent co-optation by the forces of hyper political correctness.

...This is some of the strongest stuff in Shakedown, particularly when Levant exposes what he sees as the dangerous combination of massive self-righteousness and utter cluelessness found in many of the people involved in the human rights industry. These include his interrogator, Shirlene McGovern of the AHRC, Barbara Hall at Ontario's Human Rights Commission, and Richard Warman, a former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who now seems to spend most of his time haunting neo-Nazi websites and chatrooms looking for people saying hateful things.

...Ezra Levant is not everyone's cup of tea, and if you really want to see the waters all-aboil, check out his blog (http://ezralevant.com/) where the tone of the writing is considerably less congenial than it is in his book, or even as he is in person.

Yet for all of these caveats and hedgings, you should probably read Shakedown. Because what is really at issue here is not official discrimination, free speech or the growing power of Muslims. It is about something even more fundamental: the right to due process and the dangers of arbitrary government. In the case of Canada's human rights commissions, these two combine in a twisted case of egalitarian do-gooderism gone horribly awry.

...The fact is, Canadians need to have an honest and open discussion about their human rights commissions, and while this book does not end that conversation, it definitely starts it. That is a very good thing, because our human rights commissions have flown under the radar of public attention for too long, ignored by journalists who don't fully understand them, a public that instinctively believes in the ideals that underwrite the term "human rights," and a judiciary that has inexplicably allowed these pseudo-courts to flourish under their very noses.

Which is why, for all of Shakedown's shortcomings, I found myself reading it through in one sitting, leaving off with two simple words running through my head: Go Ezra.

That's a pretty amazing way to end a review. I don't know if it's coincidence, but this afternoon Amazon.ca ran out of copies of the book again. (Don't worry, they're being rushed another shipment and will have it this week.)