CBC's The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright

Last Sunday I was on Michael Enright's CBC radio show, The Sunday Edition, debating human rights commissions along with Keith Martin, the Liberal MP, and a nutty professor called Lucie Lamarche.

You can listen to the show here -- it's the May 31 edition. The debate starts at about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the show.

Lamarche goes first -- and for about sixty seconds she actually made a little bit of sense. She even joked about the difference between HRCs and "real courts". She keeps it together for a little while -- and even pretends that she's "neutral" about whether the censorship provisions should be scrapped.

But she loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don't get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that "discrimination is about attitudes... and transformation. It's not only about due process." 

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It's not law. It's brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche -- for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points -- likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They're about politics and propaganda -- making political dissidents like me conform to the "official line". And the high costs? That's just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Funny. I thought it was supposed to be about protecting real human rights -- like the fundamental human right to freedom of expression and thought and speech, no matter what busybodies of the state say you should believe.

Readers, do you think that Orwell or Solzhenitsyn would call Lamarche a defender of human rights, or a destroyer of them?

Do you think that giving the state the power to transform your attitudes is a protection of your freedoms, or an abridgement of them?

Do you think that Lucie Lamarche follows in the footsteps of dissidents who challenged the conventional wisdom, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi -- or is she a descendant of the censors and bullies who tried to shut those two up?

At 1:36, Lamarche is at her most radiant. Are HRC trials too punitive? Too slow? Too costly? So what is essentially her reply. This from a professor of human rights. I can just imagine what it's like to be in her classroom.

Could you imagine her being so dismissive of the civil rights of, say, an accused terrorist? Of course not: it would be too judgmental and ethnocentric to ask a terrorist to transform his attitudes. But a mere publisher of cartoons? Fire away.