Round-up of Shakedown reviews and news

I've been busy on the book tour -- or recovering from the book tour! -- so I haven't had a chance to bring to your attention all of the exciting mentions Shakedown has received in the press lately. Here are some from the past few days:

Maclean's

The great Andrew Coyne reviewed the book for Maclean's, Canada's largest news magazine, which also excerpted the case in the book about Beena Datt, the woman who won the "human right" not to have to wash her hands while working in a restaurant kitchen. Here are some of Andrew's comments:

...from the revelations of procedural abuses by investigators at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission’s investigation of a cartoonist at the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, to the celebrated “trial” of Maclean’s before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, the problem is pervasive, indeed integral. Flattening important civil liberties is not an accidental byproduct of the commissions’ work. It is their work.

...[Shakedown] makes a persuasive argument to this effect...

And that’s the issue. Human rights commissions have been set up as a kind of parallel police and legal system, yet without any of the procedural safeguards, rules of evidence, or simple professional expertise of the real thing. Human rights investigators can search homes and offices without warrants. Tribunals can accept hearsay evidence, or ignore disclosure requirements, at will. Common law defences such as fair comment do not apply. Complainants have their costs paid for, even if they lose, while their targets must fend for themselves. None of this is accidental. It’s deliberate—protecting “human rights” was considered too urgent a matter to be constrained by old-fashioned notions of due process.

...By the end of Levant’s book, readers will be left wondering whether it is enough to prune back the commissions, or, as he prefers, to weed them out altogether.

National Post

George Jonas lists Shakedown as one of the seven books he thinks everyone should read twice! The relevant excerpt:

Ezra Levant is the epitome of the crusading journalist — fearless, persistent, inventive, brimming with energy. He also happens to be right as far as I’m concerned. His new book Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, with a foreword by Mark Steyn, pulverizes the leading institution of budding Big Brotherism in Canada.

Levant wrote in a recent blog that I “was on to the fraud of Canada’s ‘human rights commissions’ ” before he was born. Yes, but once he jumped that hurdle, he wasted no time catching up.

Overlawyered.com

Overelawyered.com is a great U.S. website about the American affliction of too many lawsuits. Canada has a simple rule that America lacks, that has made us far less litigious: in Canadian civil courts, the loser has to pay a portion of the winner's legal fees. That means nuisance suits are far less common.

Which is why human rights commissions are so bad -- they remove that damper on frivolous suits, inviting the worst bullies and harassers to abuse the system. Here's Overlawyered.com's quick item.

University of Calgary's Gauntlet

Like most university newspapers, the Gauntlet tilts to the left. Which makes it all the more noticeable when they come out against the abuses of human rights commissions. Here is that paper's discussion of Alberta's HRC, and the prospects for reform. Excerpts:

Human rights law in Alberta may be getting a much-needed revision in the near future...

Blackett has also called for the reform of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. If this law is passed, the HRC will no longer have the power to adjudicate cases of free speech and will instead be downgraded to deal with small-scale rights infringements, like citizens being denied rent or being fired for discriminatory reasons.

The Alberta Human Rights Commission is the most embarrassing social service in the province and Blackett is doing every citizen a tremendous favour by demanding legal violations be dealt with in a real court. The present system has people with no legal training trying individuals who have broken no laws-- if they had, they would be in a proper court. The charges amount to hurt feelings and seek to limit free speech in an undemocratic way. As the case of Ezra Levant has shown, the cost of defending oneself can be very high and the opposition's fees are paid with tax money. Of course, discrimination is a problem in Alberta and there has to be measures to ensure rights are met, but the HRC is currently not it.

I have to tell you, as an alumnus of U of C -- and of the Gauntlet -- I never thought I'd see the day such words were written in that paper!

London Free Press

Rory Leishman has been a strong critic of the abuses of human rights commissions for years. His review is very generous. Some excerpts:

Ezra Levant, popularly known in some quarters as Ezra the Rant, has written an eloquent and powerful polemic Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights. The target of his righteous wrath is Canada's so-called human rights commissions.

The very name of these commissions is misleading. They serve mainly to suppress and subvert the fundamental rights and freedoms they are supposed to safeguard and enhance.

...At issue was Levant's decision as publisher of the Western Standard to republish a controversial set of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad. In the letter of complaint to the commission, Sohwardwari stated, "I am quite disturbed and mentally tortured by the cartoons." He also accused Levant of inciting "violence, hate and discrimination against me and my family."

...Levant notes he is "the first journalist in the free world to be grilled by a government inquisitor about the cartoons. Not even the Danish cartoonists were called in to answer for what they'd done. Nor had any of the newspapers in Europe that republished the cartoons.

 ...Early in the cartoons affair, the Alberta commission tried to shake him down, by offering to drop the case if he agreed to publish an apology in his magazine and pay several thousands dollars to Soharwardi.

Levant summarily refused. He relates, "I replied that I would fight the AHRCC and their hijackers all the way to the Supreme Court before I did that -- and even if I lost there, I'd contemplate doing jail time for contempt of court before apologizing."

Levant is a hero. All Canadians should honour him for defending their rights, and support the growing national movement that he and Steyn have ignited to persuade our federal and provincial legislators to curb, if not altogether abolish, Canada's rights-destroying HRCs.

By the way, I'll be speaking in London, Ont., along with Salim Mansur and Kathy Shaidle, on April 13th. You can see all the details here.

Stabroek News, Guyana

My book was mentioned in the Stabroek News in Guyana, a small city in a small country on the northern coast of South America. Guyana has had its own experience with nutbars from human rights commissions -- one of the many bizarre things about Jim Jones, who led his cult to mass suicide in Guyana, was once the director of San Francisco's human rights commission.

Here's the Stabroek News mention of Shakedown; here are some excerpts:

...As editor of the Western Standard, Levant published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed. When a single complaint led to his summons by the Alberta Human Rights Commission in January 2008, Levant decided not to bargain his way out of trouble, as most sensible people would have done. He pushed back aggressively against his interrogator at the commission, videotaped the encounter and posted the footage to YouTube. A few days later his clips had been seen more than 400,000 times and his cause was taken up by bloggers all over the world. They not only helped him to research and publicise his case − for free − they even donated large sums of money to help him pay the substantial legal costs associated with his heroic defence of free speech. Levant finally triumphed over the bureaucrats who intended to charge him with the rather Orwellian sounding offence of  “hate speech” but he readily concedes that his victory could not have happened before the social networks often referred to as ‘Web 2.0’ had become commonplace.

Vancouver Sun and Victoria Times-Colonist

Those two west-coast papers ran the same review by Sreerekha Verma, which you can see here and here. I'm glad the book is getting coverage in B.C. -- home of Canada's nuttiest human rights commission. Some excerpts:

...In Shakedown, Levant is caustic about his views of the CHRC, but successful in weaving a beautiful web against them.

He says human rights commissions "were a beautiful idea -- that failed . . . and is the biggest threat to our liberties -- freedom of speech."

This is the gist of the book and Levant does an admirable job in proving his point with detailed case studies and examples of how human rights commissions have taken on cases, which were not violations of human rights, at all.

...Shakedown is his argument, or rather his closing argument, before the jury of Canadians. He makes a passionate appeal to Canadians to stand up for their basic rights, freedom of speech, which according to him, is being threatened by the CHRC.

The foreword by Mark Steyn sets the tone perfectly for Levant's arguments...

Levant has researched a huge number of human rights cases in Canada and has stumbled upon numerous bizarre cases...

These are cases, Levant says, which might have not been heard by the Canadian legal system, so the CHRC takes them up, treating many grievances as human rights violations...

Shakedown raises some relevant questions and Levant tries to answer some, while others are left for Canadians to take action.

Calgary Herald

This massive story in my hometown paper -- replete with terrifying half-page photo -- was more of a review of me than a review of the book. It noted that I was a political trouble-maker even back in high school (I don't deny it).

The reviewer suggests I'm a bit much. But that's the whole point: anyone who isn't pushy, noisy, stubborn, confident and combative is doomed to be squashed by a human rights commission. Actually, let me adjust that: even pushy, noisy, stubborn confident and combative people wouldn't fight an HRC, because it simply makes no sense to do so: if you're going to lose anyways, why waste time and money fighting a hopeless fight? As I've proved, even being acquitted isn't much of a "win" if you've wasted a thousand hours and $100,000 that you'll never get back. As I said to The Tyee in my interview with them last week, in words that I shall surely regret for years, you need to draw on your "inner asshole" to fight back against such a Kafkaesque system, knowing the other side has all the money and time in the world.

Some excerpts from the Herald:

Levant's story makes up only a portion of the book, with the majority of it dedicated to outlining strange-but-true rulings that have been made through human rights commissions throughout the country. Within days of its release, McClelland&Stewart ordered a second printing of Shakedown.

...more telling has been the support Levant's case has received from politically progressive sources: The Toronto Star's editorial board, Toronto's alternative Eye Weekly, the gay advocacy group Egale Canada and even Canadian Civil Liberties Association founder Alan Borovoy.

..."It means more for a liberal to stand up for my rights that for a conservative to stand up for my rights," says Levant. "It's easy for a conservative to stand up for me. . . . Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the support of conservatives. But for the Toronto Star and Eye Weekly, what they are demonstrating is that they are putting their belief in free speech above whatever particular sub-stance we are talking about. And that's the essence of free speech. It only really counts if you're for it for people you disagree with."

As political comedian Rick Mercer says about Levant in his succinct blurb on the back cover of Shakedown: "thanks to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, God forbid, he's a freedom fighter."

And Levant has certainly taken to the role. Levant --who gained early notoriety protesting affirmative action policies as a student at the University of Alberta -- drops references to Martin Luther King and Gandhi into the conversation. He talks about the Suffragettes and gay rights movements. Earlier this year, he was even hobnobbing with the Toronto literati at the annual general meeting of PEN Canada, a non-profit organization that helps writers persecuted for voicing their opinions.

"That was an unusual place for me to be, it felt great," he said. "John Ralston Saul was there and that's usually not my crowd. But on this issue, it really was my crowd."

But regardless of your political views, the questions Levant asks about human rights commissions are sound. How can we justify Canadians being brought before proceedings that operate beyond the rules of civil and criminal courts? Why is someone who is cleared of any wrongdoing still responsible for paying his or her own legal costs --in Levant's case, more than $100,000--when the complainant doesn't have to play a dime?

Most importantly, how exactly do bureaucrats determine whether someone's words, writings or views are "likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt?"

"It's such a vague law, it practically begs for political abuse," says Levant. "That can be used against almost anyone, so it comes down to the political tastes of the censor."

..."There were points in time when I was very stressed about the legal fees, I didn't know if I could get help to cover them," he says. "But thank God I was able to cover those bills through donations on the Internet. So that took away all my stress. And then I could fight this as a political fight, which I actually do like. And I am a very stubborn person by nature."

McClelland & Stewart

That same Herald story had some great quotes from my publisher, McClelland & Stewart, better known for publishing Canadian left-wingers like Margaret Atwood and Mel Hurtig:

Doug Pepper, president and publisher of McClelland& Stewart, admits you'd have to be "deaf, dumb and blind not to know what Ezra's politics are," but says he thinks the subject matter and Levant's approach to it has been "politically blind."

"We had people outside of the office who said, 'You're publishing Ezra Levant? What kind of press are you?' " says Pepper. "And I said, 'That's thoroughly un-Canadian and undemocratic to say. Read the book and then make your judgment.' "

And so far, Pepper believes Levant has received a fair shake from both the left and right on this issue.

Of course, I'm pleased with Shakedown's success for my own reasons. But I'm glad that the good folks at M&S, who took a risk on this project, have a best-seller on their hands for their pains.

Ottawa Citizen

Last but not least, David Warren mentions Mark Steyn and me in the Ottawa Citizen today:

One is reminded of [the late journalist Brian Hutchison], today, by Canadian journalists such as Ezra Levant, or Mark Steyn, who, though their personalities may vary, nevertheless share that stiff-necked quality. Levant's new book -- Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights -- puts everything on the line in the way the best Canadian journalists always did. (I recommend that book without reservation: it delivers exactly what it promises, and every voter needs to know.)

So, in that sense nothing has changed. The nobility, or rather potential nobility, of the journalistic vocation remains.

That's very kind, coming from David, whose own miraculous presence in a newspaper of record is cause for hope.