They're laughing at you in Dublin, Jennifer

Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, flew to Dublin, Ireland to give a speech to the Canadian Bar Association, which is holding its annual meeting there. I can't find her speech on the CHRC's website, so I'll go for now by Peter O'Neill's report for CanWest news.

I first saw O'Neill's report on the Internet yesterday morning; it went up on the websites of most CanWest newspapers, but it looks like only the Ottawa Citizen actually printed it in their paper edition.

The report is about two things; Lynch's speech, and the CBA's terrorist-coddling ways (which I addressed in a post yesterday). All I'd add to the Khadr matter is this factoid:

• Number of times terrorist Omar Khadr is mentioned on the CBA's website: 232.
• Number of times Chinese-Canadian political dissident Huseyn Celil is mentioned on the CBA's website: 0.
• Number of times Saudi-tortured prisoner William Sampson is mentioned on the CBA's website: 0. Et cetera.

Back to Lynch. The first question, of course, is how much did her Irish adventure cost Canadian taxpayers? I went to Expedia and to Air Canada's website, and found return airfare from Ottawa to Dublin for about $1,100 including taxes. Is there anyone out there who doubts Lynch will bill taxpayers in excess of $5,000 for her junket? I'm being modest: the last time Lynch flew to Ireland on our dime, she sent us the bill for a cool $9,000.

There's a difference, though. In her last five-star trip to Ireland, the purpose was purportedly the carrying out of her mandate as assigned to her by Parliament. It showed that her majesty has expensive taste, little regard for taxpayers during this recession, and hasn't been paying spending enough time back home in her Ottawa office cleaning up corruption. But she could at least plausibly make the case that going to Ireland -- and the many other exotic junkets she's been on -- had something to do with doing her job.

Not this time.

According to O'Neill's report, Lynch went to Dublin not to promote human rights. She went there to save her own job, to further her shrill campaign of hatred and contempt against her political critics -- especially bloggers like me.

Here's the story; let's go through it:

Earlier Saturday, Jennifer Lynch, head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, urged Canada’s legal community to help her defend federal, provincial and territorial human rights commissions and tribunals which she said are under attack by conservative critics.

Lynch engages in name-calling: free speech advocates, and proponents of the rule of law, are apparently "conservative". Now, that's not name-calling where I come from, but at the ultra-liberal CBA, it's fighting words. At her Montreal rant against bloggers, Lynch used the phrase "far right", which she surely thought would invoke the spectre of anti-Semites. You know, notorious Jew-haters like Ezra Isaac Levant.

That Lynch regards "conservative" as an epithet should be instructive to the Prime Minister's Office. I think they missed Lynch's personal track record of anti-Alberta, anti-conservative bigotry when they appointed her. And perhaps some people in Dublin were roused by it. But, simply put, I think many of the CBA lawyers probably just chuckled. For, other than noisy me and noisy Mark Steyn, who are the bulk of the critics of out-of-control HRCs? Let's take a look at a few:

• Alan Borovoy, forty-year boss of the labour-left Canadian Civil Liberties Association;
• Egale, the powerful gay rights lobby;
• The Canadian Association of Journalists;
• PEN Canada, with its honourary patron, John Ralston Saul;
• Every liberal newspaper editorial board in Canada from the Montreal Gazette to the Toronto Star to Eye Weekly;
• Liberal MPs and Senators from Keith Martin to Jerry Grafstein;
• Janet Keeping of the Chumir Foundation for Ethics.

To name just a few off the top of my head.

Next, and I'm relying on O'Neill's wording, but I've heard Lynch say it many times: she never refers to "human rights" (let alone "civil rights"). She always talks about the importance of the "human rights system" or of the commissions and tribunals themselves. Not civil liberties; but bureaucrats.

The system is what's valuable to her. Of course it is. It's the system that pays her $300,000 a year, the system that sends her on junkets, that gives her a staff of 200, and that gives her 800 more well-paid allies in 13 other HRCs across the country. She's strong on defending the system -- she'll do anything to defend it from accountability or reform, even when her own staff are revealed to be members of neo-Nazi organizations. It's the system she cares about.

But I think that lawyers -- even lefty lawyers at the CBA -- actually care about real human rights. I think when they saw Lynch whine like a schoolboy about how tough it is to be in politics -- do you think it's easy to fly first class to Dublin!? -- they probably thought: how did a thin-skinned child ever become trusted to run a 200-person commission? And if she doesn't like the cut-and-thrust of debate, why doesn't she just shut up and do her job?

And those lawyers who thought a little more probably thought: HRCs? Aren't those the folks that have been in the news lately, trying to censor magazines and churches?

She told the CBA that opponents of rights bodies have successfully created a “chill” that makes it difficult for anyone to defend those bodies without also becoming a target.

A "chill". A "target". I know what those words mean. I was the target of three HRC complaints. To be targeted meant, in my case, to have fifteen government bureaucrats and lawyers bearing down on me for 900 days, to be forced to hire lawyers to defend myself, and to be falsely accused, in the name of the Queen, of being a racist. It meant being interrogated by government bureaucrats about my private political thoughts.

That's what being targeted means. And that punitive process was meant to chill anyone else who had big ideas about speaking freely in a way that "offended" the political correctness of Lynch and her fellow commissars: watch out, or they will come to get you, and even if you "win", you'll lose time and money. Just ask seventy-something Fr. Alphonse de Valk, the Toronto priest who was investigated by Lynch for two years, before she dumped him on the side of the road with a $20,000 legal bill, but not even an apology.

What Lynch really meant in Dublin and at her previous hate-filled rant in Montreal is that she doesn't believe she ought to be accountable. Mere scrutiny, for her, is chilling. Mere opposition and criticism is being targeted. But no-one has sued her; no-one has commanded her to appear to answer for her private political thoughts. At most, she was invited to answer questions by her bosses, at a Parliamentary committee, to merely answer questions about her staff's outrageous conduct -- but she refused to attend, and now attacks the MP who invited her, Russ Hiebert, as one of her 1,200 enemies on her official enemies list, compiled at taxpayers' expense.

The woman spends her days prosecuting people who have offensive opinions. It's not too surprising that she finds it offensive when people criticize her for it. She's not used to dissent. She's used to bullying people -- real bullying, with court orders and fines. She's not used to being told "no".

Lynch, saying some criticisms have been “troubling” and “at times scary,” also read out a graphic anonymous letter she received stating that she should be shot dead.

I'm sorry, I simply don't believe that.

This is a woman who has been caught in lie after lie after lie. In the National Post and Montreal Gazette, I dissected two of her most abominable lies -- lying about her employees' culpability in an Internet hacking case, and lying about her employees publishing bigoted comments on neo-Nazi websites.

The woman is a liar. And if she'll lie to protect her staff, don't you think she'd lie -- or at least stretch the truth -- to protect herself?

We know this: Lynch's staff -- at least seven of them -- lie in the regular course of their work. They go online, pretending to be neo-Nazis (I hope it's just pretending) in order to entrap other bigots. They lie as part of their jobs.

And they do more than lie: they call for truth to be destroyed. Lynch's unsolicited memo to Parliament in June actually demanded that truth be removed as a legal defence to criminal charges of hate propaganda (truth is already not a defence in Lynch's kangaroo court).

As Henry Kissinger said about the Palestinians: if someone is willing to kill you, they're probably willing to lie to you, too. If Lynch is willing to shred the Charter of Rights to get you; if she's willing to imprison you through a contempt of court application to get you; if she's willing to lie in public to get you; do you really think she'd hesitate to read out a fabricated letter at her pity party in Dublin?

Not that Lynch herself fabricated the letter. I don't think she's quite that hands-on. But that either one of her rogue staff wrote it, in one of their Nazi personas; and/or that Lynch is dramatizing and exaggerating a letter, to trump it up into a real criminal threat, instead of merely a rude insult sent in by one of the many people she's stepped on in her dark career.

But let me ask you a personal, practical question: if you received a genuine, credible death threat, what would you do? Would you go to the police? Or would you save it for a big splash at a CBA conference, to make your case that you're being picked on and that politics isn't fair? Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I don't know for sure the provenance of her "death threat". I do know that her staff routinely and methodically lie, including lying on the Internet about the CHRC. I do know that Lynch herself is a damned liar.

“I’m here to ask for your help,” Lynch told CBA members.

She urged them to write “letters to correct misinformation,” encourage other experts to participate in the debate and promote public education of the role of rights commissions and tribunals in the justice system.

Lynch wants other lawyers to debate for her. But she herself refuses to do so. She specifically refuses to engage me and my charges in debate on radio or TV. Remember this gong show, when she tried to have me kicked off of CTV?

Why does Lynch refuse to debate, and refuse to debate me in particular? She has accused me of spreading misinformation. Well, she's had five months since my book was released to pick it apart; I've been blogging about the CHRC pretty much every day for nineteen months. You'd think that, by now, she would be able to articulate what, exactly, I've got wrong. What fact is wrong? What allegation is untrue? Surely a smart QC like her, with a staff of 200 and a budget of $25-million could tear me to pieces, and publicize the tearing coast to coast, if I was wrong.

That just hasn't happened, because I'm not wrong. The CHRC is a corrupt, abusive organization. That's why members of the Canadian bar -- not just members of the liberal CBA -- have pretty much just slowly backed away as Lynch has imploded over the past year. You can count on one hand the number of lawyers who have leaped to her defence. Well, one finger actually -- Pearl Eliadis. But she works for HRCs, so that's not really surprising. Even Janet Keeping, who says my language is too stout when I call Lynch a liar, condemns the CHRC for their censorship.

I think Canadian lawyers have actually been pretty attentive to the whole HRC debacle -- even a number of judges have mentioned the case to me, with great interest. And while, like Keeping, they might have some stylistic differences with me personally, they know this isn't a personal battle. It's a battle for civil liberties for all Canadians. Mark Steyn and I became accidental champions for it, because we were personally smeared by out-of-control HRCs.

That's where Lynch has made a gross miscalculation. She thinks that by personally demonizing me and Steyn -- that by keeping a 1,200 name, Richard Nixon-style enemies list, by denouncing her enemies as "far right" and by whining about how tough it is to hold a public office, she'll win this argument. But she doesn't realize what she looks like -- she's like the drunk at a party who doesn't realize that she's talking way, way, to loud and everybody is starting to get a little bit creeped out. Seriously: you've got the boss of the CHRC flying to Dublin to speak to the CBA -- and all she talks about is how tough a gig it is, because she's got political critics? Does she not know what she sounds like? I bet they were very quiet during her speech, but whispered about it a lot afterwards.

She said rights bodies have been under attack since 2007 after the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints over an essay published in Maclean’s magazine by conservative commentator Mark Steyn.

Note again: her interest is not in civil liberties. It's that her gang, her company, her system is "under attack". No concern for free speech. Plenty of whining about her, her, her.

But even that's not true. The Canadian Islamic Congress is a bunch of anti-Semites. Syed Soharwardy, the imam who complained against me, is an anti-Semite and an anti-Christian bigot, to boot. The fact that they filed complaints did not start this whole public debate. It's that the HRCs pursued those anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-freedom complaints with a vengeance that started this debate.

Syed Soharwardy and Mohamed Elmasry are the Muslim equivalent of white trash. They're stupid, hateful bigots who have imported Saudi values to Canada. But it took the HRCs to deploy the governments of Alberta, B.C., Ontario and Canada to the service of their bigotry. That's what's appalling here. They gleefully violated the separation of mosque and state, and destroyed our Western, liberal values along the way.

The complaints filed to the Canadian, Ontario and B.C. rights commissions were all eventually dismissed, though criticisms by those commissions against Steyn’s published views about Islam prompted accusations that his right to free speech was being violated.

Steyn, fellow conservative commentator Ezra Levant, various other bloggers, and politicians such as B.C. Conservative MP Russ Hiebert and retired former Tory cabinet minister Monte Solberg have all expressed harsh criticisms of rights commissions and tribunals.

Many of the critics have argued that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits the spreading of “hate messages” on the telephone and Internet, violates the right to free speech. Some have argued that hate crimes should be dealt with by police relying on the Criminal Code.

Lynch told the CBA that rights commissions are important components of the justice system, giving society’s “most vulnerable” minority groups access to a mechanism to deal with alleged rights violations.

Just a quick laugh on that last point. 12 out of the last 14 hate speech cases prosecuted in Canada were by the same complainant: a rich, white lawyer named Richard Warman, who is a member of no minority I can discern. He's a privileged bureaucrat, who actually worked for the CHRC itself when he started filing CHRC complaints (an abominable conflict of interest). He currently works for the Department of National Defence's own mini-HRC. And he continues to have his expenses paid by the CHRC, even though he no longer works there.

I'm not sure if he meets the test of "most vulnerable", so I'm not surprised that Lynch omitted that part from her call to action.

Critics are trying “to destroy our investigators’ and litigators’ reputations and credibility with untrue accusations,” Lynch said during her appeal for help from Canadian lawyers and academics.

Sandy Kozak is one of Lynch's investigators. She is a corrupt ex-cop, who was drummed out of the real police for illegal behaviour. You can read all about it here. It's not an untrue accusation. It's the truth. What's also the truth is that Kozak perfectly sums up the ethical issues at the CHRC: she's too corrupt for real police, but Lynch doesn't mind. I wonder what the CBA would think of that, if Lynch had disclosed the truth to them.

Dean Steacy is another one of Lynch's investigators. You can read about his racist actions here (scroll down).

It was Steacy's candid testimony in March of 2008 that really blew the lid off the anti-Semitic ring at the CHRC -- he was the one who named the seven HRC staff who have access to neo-Nazi memberships.

Stop for a moment here and put yourself in the shoes of one of the lawyers sitting there in Dublin, wondering who the hell this vindictive little woman is and what she's going on about. No; let's do better. Let's say you were in Dublin, and you actually believed every word that Lynch said. I mean, put aside her increasingly unhinged rhetoric, her boasting of her 1,200-person enemies lists, her ranting against the vast right-wing conspiracy of gay advocates and brown MPs and 60's civil libertarians. Let's say you actually bought was Lynch was selling, and you were so moved that you decided that, yes, you were going to answer her call and pitch in to the debate -- even if Lynch herself remains AWOL from any actual, you know, debating.

The first thing you'd do to rebut such lies and smears is to learn what they were, and what the truth was.

You'd do some digging.

You'd probably start with this whole neo-Nazi business, and the hacking thing, too.

You might look at Richard Warman's litigation-of-fortune.

You might even read some case law -- such as the recent ruling by the CHRTribunal about the "disturbing and disappointing" conduct of the CHRC.

If you dug deeply enough, you'd find the hundreds of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay comments written by CHRC staff. You'd find about troubling violations of the rule of law. You might even read Shakedown (thousands have) and say, "those are some pretty big accusations. Let me get to the bottom of it."

And then what?

I don't know how many people were in that room in Dublin. I didn't see Lynch on their official program, and the official conference blog didn't mention her. I'm guessing she had an early morning slot, and a few folks were a little bit late getting to the conference, between jet lag and some fresh Kilkenny.

If 200 people heard her, how many would be motivated to take up her cause, and become her truth squad? Ten?

And of those ten, do you really think that a single one of them, when conducting an independent, neutral survey of the facts, wouldn't be appalled by what he or she would find? Has Lynch even thought this through?

“For the moment the obligation to defend our existence monopolizes our energy.”

That is the most awesome line in Lynch's whole speech, and I'm glad O'Neill got it precisely enough to put it in quotes.

That's a firing offence in itself.

Here you have a woman tasked with the implementation of the entire Canadian Human Rights Act. She says that "hate speech" accounts for just 2% of her commission's activities. (I never believed it -- we know her hate squad is much larger than 4 people (which would be 2% of her total staff); seven of her hate squad are neo-Nazi members, and there's probably a half dozen who aren't. But she tells Parliament it's only 2% of her work.

But now she says her political campaign "monopolizes our energy".

She's consumed by it. Her personal vendetta against Steyn, me, and the 1,198 others on her enemies list has taken over her mind. Sorry: not just her mind and her energy, but "our energy". That's plural. She's talking about her tax-paid staff.

The purpose of the CHRC, according to Lynch herself, is now "monopolized" by the improper, abusive purpose of running Lynch's political campaign of hatred and contempt for her critics.

That's not what Parliament directed her to do.

That's not what taxpayers pay her to do.

That's not what the law requires her to do.

That's not what her public service ethics code (for there is no CHRC ethics code) demands that she do.

But it's what she's doing.

Jennifer Lynch has taken a $25-million organization and has deployed it to her own political vendetta. That's more money than the Tories or the Liberals spent in the last election. And she's using it for her own election campaign.

Paging Guy Giorno: you've got a rogue on your hands here.

She should have been fired for keeping neo-Nazis on staff.

She should have been fired for her vicious anti-Christian campaigns against clergy like Fr. de Valk.

She should have been fired for creating the public spectacle of lying to the country.

She should have been fired for refusing to attend Parliament, despite Russ Hiebert's request that she attend -- and then attacking Hiebert later, once Parliament had broken.

She wasn't. For some weird reason, this hateful, vengeful woman was allowed to continue -- and to create a massive, public sore for this government. Had she done all this in silence, it would be one thing. But she has done it flagrantly, publicly, and to the great detriment of the government.

Had Lynch been a cabinet minister -- and many cabinet ministers have smaller departments and budgets -- she would have been sacked for her insubordination, for corruption and for embarrassing the government.

Why is this hateful woman still cashing taxpayers cheques?

Why is this contemptuous woman flying around the world on her political campaign?

Fire. Them. All.

And then bring in the forensic auditors.