September 2009 Archives

On September 2, the vice-chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Athanasios Hadjis, declared the censorship provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act illegal. That was quite something, given that Hadjis himself has brutally enforced that section as recently as two years ago. But declare it illegal he did. Here's paragraph 295 of his lengthy ruling:

For all the above reasons, I find that s. 13(1) infringes on Mr. Lemire's freedom of expression guaranteed under s. 2(b) of the Charter, and that this infringement is not demonstrably justified under s. 1 of the Charter.

Hadjis is reflecting the growing bi-partisan consensus against both section 13 (the censorship provision) and the CHRC in general. Hadjis is a Liberal, appointed by Jean Chretien. He is supported by a Conservative appointee, Edward Lustig, who indicated in his ruling earlier this year that he would abide by Hadjis's findings here. (Lustig also called out serial CHRC complainant Richard Warman for his online anti-Semitism, calling it "disturbing and disappointing."

It's been 28 days since that ruling -- which means there are just two days left in which a party may make an appeal. I am not an expert in the CHRT's procedure, but I would imagine that such an appeal could be made by the CHRC, the Justice Department, Richard Warman or even Marc Lemire, the complainant.

It was one thing for the Justice Department to defend the law from an accusation that it was unconstitutional. That's pretty much standard operating procedure. But for Rob Nicholson, the Justice Minister, to positively appeal such a loss, to revive such an illiberal law, is a whole different thing. It would be a positive act of censorship, no longer a passive act of defending the legality of a law on the books. It would make a lie of Nicholson's own public statement against section 13, namely his publicly voting against the section at a party policy convention last year.

Nor would it be acceptable for Nicholson to stand down but let his agency, the CHRC, appeal it -- for the same reasons.

That leaves Warman and Lemire.

Warman, despite attempts to publicly portray himself as a human rights martyr, has actually had his expenses paid for his CHRC complaints even since he left their employ. (This is in addition to the tens of thousands of dollars of tax-free award payments he's won before the CHRT.)

To be clear: the CHRC has paid for Warman's hotel, travel, meals, parking and incidentals -- and even a modest daily honorarium -- for him to file complaints against people. As far as I know, Warman's sweet deal is the only case in Canada -- no-one else is paid a bounty to drum up complaints for the CHRC.

This is relevant because the CHRC might try to finance Warman's appeal, using tax dollars, just as they have financed his complaints. And, if the CHRC is forbidden from paying Warman to litigate, it is doubtful that Warman would actually spend his own money. That's just not his style.

Which leaves us with Lemire. Would he appeal?

I can think of a reason not to: he won, and he's done now.

But I can think of a few reasons for him to indeed appeal. If he appeals -- and I haven't given sufficient thought to the grounds upon which he could appeal his own acquittal, but I imagine there are a few in a 107-page ruling -- he would force the matter into a real court, before real judges, who would surely confirm Hadjis's ruling. (Real courts with real judges tend to care about the Charter more than kangaroo courts do; and the Supreme Court of Canada has given strong indications in recent years of the importance to be given to free speech.)

A real court decision wouldn't just have a "declaration" that section 13 was illegal. It would likely strike the section out -- thus commanding the bullies at the CHRC to stop enforcing it. (They are actually continuing with it, despite the CHRT's ruling. They share Bernie "Burny" Farber's contempt for Hadjis the the tribunal; they respect him only when he agrees with them; when he disagrees, they ignore him and mock him as impotent. I think that says a lot about their character, don't you?)

So a victorious appeal by Lemire would shut down the CHRC for good. And it would also carry more persuasive weight in other HRC jurisdictions where censorship is currently being challenged before the courts, such as Alberta (where a court ruling on the Boissoin appeal is imminent).

I also think a Lemire appeal is a good idea because it will keep the CHRC's bad behaviour in the news for months or years to come. It will take up time and money from CHRC lawyers. And, though that is actually our tax money, at least it won't be used in harassing other Canadians. Jennifer Lynch has already whined that defending section 13 censorship monopolizes her time and energy. I think that's great. She's a horrific violator of personal freedom in Canada, which is why she ought to remain on the defensive, and not left to her own devices.

Finally, an appeal would be an interesting political IQ test for Canada's Official Jews. They suffered an enormous loss of credibility with Hadjis's ruling. Are they stupid enough to double down on an appeal? Again, if they are stupid enough to do so -- and with Mark Freiman as the new figurehead president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, himself a former section 13 prosecutor, they probably are stupid enough to do so -- it will have the same deleterious effects on them: burn up their time, efforts and money, and further discredit them in the public eye.

I don't want Rob Nicholson to appeal -- it would be immoral for him to do so.

I don't want him to allow his agency, the CHRC, to appeal -- it would be a cowardly attempt by him to avoid the political blame, if he let them do so.

I don't want the CHRC to continue to finance Warman to appeal the ruling (though I don't much mind if he appeals on his own -- but I'm pretty sure someone who bills the CHRC for every little expense won't do so on his own.)

But I would like the thing appealed so that it could be trashed with even greater gusto and authority by the real courts.

And frankly, I wouldn't mind if it went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, so that Beverley McLachlin, who wrote the dissent in the Taylor ruling 19 years ago, could have another whack at censorship in Canada, this time as the Chief Justice, writing for a unanimous court.

None of which should be necessary, of course: Stephen Harper's Conservative government should stop avoiding this disgrace, and should repeal section 13 immediately, instead of outsourcing their responsibilities to the courts.

Fire. Them. All.

P.S. Here's proof of how malicious the CHRC is -- and how disrespectful they are of Hadjis, Lustig and the CHRT. They are still prosecuting section 13 cases, even though the law has been declared illegal. They are literally using a law that is not functional, to censor Canadians in disregard of our Charter.

That's malicious prosecution territory; that's abuse of office territory; that's piercing the corporate veil and suing Lynch and her mob personally territory. I have no idea who has given them that legal advice, but if I were a section 13 victim still being hounded by Lynch, I'd sue her and every staffer involved personally for illegal conduct. Here's what I mean:

From: "DANIEL POULIN" <DANIEL.POULIN@CHRC-CCDP.CA>

Date: September 30, 2009 2:00:46 PM PDT (CA)

To: <nancy.lafontant@chrt-tcdp.gc.ca>, <registrar@chrt-tcdp.gc.ca>, <dougchristielaw@shaw.ca>

Cc: <abromberg@bnaibrith.ca>, <Marvin@dsklaw.com>, <habrams@pacificcoast.net>, <paul@paulfromm.com>, <radical@radicalpress.com>

Subject: Abrams and BBC v. Topham and Radical Press - Position of the Commission

Dear Tribunal and Parties,

We write further to the correspondence that has been exchanged by the parties in regards to the impact of the Warman v Lemire decision recently rendered by the Tribunal.  

It is the position of the Commission submits that the Tribunal should proceed on hearing the matter pending before it in the present case.  Consequently, the matter should neither be adjourned sine die or simply dismissed.

In Warman v. Lemire, the Tribunal found that the penalty provision in s. 54(1)(c) was not a reasonable limit on freedom of expression under the Charter.  In the instant case, the Commission will no longer be seeking a penalty under 54(1)(c) of the Act as was originally included in its Statement of Particulars.  The Commission therefore respectfully submits that the Tribunal ought to proceed with a hearing of the Complaint to determine if section 13 has been infringed, and if so, to exercise its discretion under s. 54(1)(a).   

Yours truly,

Daniel Poulin
Legal Counsel
Canadian Human Rights Commission

Richard Warman, the hate speech complainant who is personally responsible for all but two section 13 censorship prosecutions this decade, is now being investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for hate speech himself.

I know. It sounds crazy. Just like it sounded crazy when it was revealed that Warman and the CHRC were members of neo-Nazi organizations.

Warman is a former CHRC investigator himself; and even after he left the CHRC they continued to pay his expenses to file and prosecute complaint after complaint. All this, despite the fact he's been under investigation for hate speech for three years.

At the same time as Warman was a complainant, he was a defendant.

At the same time as the CHRC was cutting him cheques to cover his expenses, they were probing his conduct.

At the same time as he held himself out to be an anti-hate crimes activist, his own hateful speech was being probed.

Are you dizzy yet?

Maclean's magazine has a persuasive call for the repeal of section 13, the censorship provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I'd encourage you to read the whole thing, here -- it's one of the clearlest analyses I've read of the decision in Warman v. Lemire, and it explains why the law is so rotten.

The tribunal decision in Warman v. Lemire focuses on the "aggressive" and "confrontational" nature of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. No kidding. What was supposed to be a conciliatory Oprah-style forum has turned into a case study of government brutality, corruption and abuse.

The worst excesses of the CHRC were committed by, or in the service of, Richard Warman. He's the serial litigant-of-fortune who is responsible for more section 13 complaints than anyone else -- in fact, all but two of the cases prosecuted this decade have him as the complainant. Funny: you wouldn't think that a privileged, white lawyer, working for the Canadian government, would face so much discrimination. Of course, he hasn't -- he isn't gay, or black, or Jewish. But he files complaints in the name of gays and blacks and Jews, and receives tens of thousands of dollars in reward money, extracted from his victims -- tax free.

(The fact that Warman himself has joined several neo-Nazi groups, and published hundreds of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay comments -- including while working for the CHRC! -- is even more perverse.)

The CHRC was bad enough before Warman started using it as his personal vehicle for vendettas and prosecutions. But he made the CHRC worse. He infected it with his own personal philosophy called "maximum disruption" -- where he called for the use of "(almost) any means necessary".

And sometimes Warman even counseled violence, as he did when one of his victims, David Icke, was speaking in Vancouver. Warman encouraged a group of street urchins to invade a book store where Icke was giving a speech, and pelt him with pies. They did -- destroying books in the process. You can see a ten-minute excerpt from a British documentary on the subject, here:

Those are the actions of a radical, amoral activist. Amoral is too lenient, actually; when Warman and his friends laugh about "humiliating" their opponent, it's not amoral. It's despicable. This is the culture that Warman injected into the veins of the CHRC -- and Jennifer Lynch hasn't done a damned thing about it, other than try to cover it up.

But there's a little thing called the Charter of Rights that forbids all that.

Section 2 of the Charter of Rights protects freedom of speech. Of course, many government laws violate that section -- the law against forgery, for example, could be seen as a limit on what we can write or draw. But section 1 of our Charter says that some limits on freedom are acceptable in a "free and democratic society". But the government has to prove that the infringement on our freedoms is "rationally connected" to the public policy goal; the goal is "pressing and substantial", and that the means used "minimally impaired" the freedoms in question. It's part of the Oakes Test. 

Under our Charter of Rights, as interpreted by our courts through the Oakes Test, a government must infringe upon us in a minimal way. Richard Warman believes in harassing his opponents in a maximum way.

It was Warman's abuse of the system that made the system illegal. In the end, Warman killed the goose that laid so many golden eggs for him.

I'd call it poetic justice, but Warman's many victims would surely agree that we're still far, far away from justice yet.

Here's a report in the Canadian Jewish News about the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's decision to declare the censorship provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act unconstitutional. That newspaper -- which depends financially on the Official Jews -- is showing increasing skepticism about the OJs' decision to double down on a losing hand of censorship. The censors have been losing in the court of public opinion for two years; now they're losing in the courts of law. But Bernie "Burny" Farber doesn't give a damn. He'll go down with the ship -- and take the tattered credibility of organized Canadian Jewry with him.

Some excerpts (I've put some parts in bold):

A human rights tribunal last week ruled that a section of the the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) that imposes quasi-criminal penalties is unconstitutional...

...Canadian Jewish Congress – an intervenor in the case, along with B’nai Brith Canada and Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – called for an appeal.

...Congress CEO Bernie Farber said “what the decision has done is confuse everybody.”

...Ezra Levant, author of Shakedown, a critique of human rights commissions, called Hadjis’ decision “enormously significant.”

The issues were thoroughly debated by phalanxes of lawyers and took years to be resolved. “This is a major treatment of the law” decided by the vice-chair of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) tribunal. Though “not technically binding [on other tribunals], it is effectively binding,” Levant said.

Furthermore, the judgement shows how the temperament of the commission has changed since the Taylor decision. It has become “aggressive and bullying, entrapping people,” Levant said.

The case continued even after Lemire removed the postings in question and agreed to mediation – remedies that were contemplated in the Taylor case.

“They [the CHRC] refused,” Levant said. “They wanted to grind him down.”

Levant was even more blistering in his critique of Jewish community organizations, which he dubbed “the official Jews.”

Congress is making “a strategic error” in calling for an appeal, he said. “You have domino after domino falling” with pressure building in media editorials, legal opinions and even in the commission itself to end Section 13 cases.

“Human rights commissions have been denormalized. They’re laughingstocks,” he said.

Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to push for appeals, in effect calling for the censorship of expression. Jews are coming across “as whiners who want to shut you down, not debate you. Is this the image we want to project to 33 million Canadians, that we’re thin-skinned whiners?” Levant asked.

Burny says everyone's confused. But I'm not confused: the law has been declared unconstitional, by the vice-chair of the tribunal, Athanasios Hadjis. What's confusing about that?

We have at least one other sitting tribunal member (Edward Lustig) who wrote earlier this year that he would abide by Hadjis's ruling. And last week, in Calgary, Alberta's censorship law was appealed from a kangaroo court to a real court on constitutional ground. Is there anyone out there who truly thinks the barbaric abuse of the law in that case won't be overturned -- and that it won't mention Hadjis's ruling as persuasive, if not formally binding?

Everyone's running away from censorship -- including Hadjis himself, who just two years ago was a brutal enforcer of it.

But not the fools at the CJC. Not Burny. He's called censorship his "business" before, and he has too much invested in that lucrative business to let it slip away because of some trifle like the Charter of Rights.

If you wanted to create a perfect caricature of a villainous Jew for anti-Semites to point to, you couldn't do better than Burny and the CJC.

They despise our freedom of speech. They demand censorship of their political opponents. They disparage any jurist who disagrees with them. And they do all this in the name of "the Jews".

Controlling. Bullying. Censoring. Refusing to submit to the rule of law. Demanding Canada import foreign ideas of censorship. Excusing -- or even celebrating -- the corruption and abuses in the Canadian Human Rights Commission. If I weren't a Jew, I'm afraid Burny would turn me into an anti-Semite. Nobody likes a bully telling you he wants to take away your freedom. And that bully says he speaks for all Jews. If Burny didn't exist, Stormfront would have to make him up.

In January, the Council for Israel and Jewish Advocay, the CJC's chief funder, called Burny in for a special meeting, and ordered him to stop conducting his personal censorship vendetta in the name of the CJC. And, for a brief moment, he actually complied.

But it's been eight months, and the salutary effects of that disciplinary meeting have worn off. Burny's at it again -- using money from Jewish donors for his own cause, rather than in the interests of the community.

It's time that CIJA reins him in again, before he humiliates the community further. Censorship and human rights commissions are despised in Canada. Burny's job is to make Jews less hated, not more hated. He's making Jews more hated.

If Burny lacks the wits to slowly back away from Canada's imploding HRC, he should be fired and replaced by someone who cares more about the community than his own sense of vengeance.

I have just learned that, at my speaking event in Toronto on the evening of Sept. 26, Lindy will be there, and he'll be playing an "unplugged" version of his song, Shakedown! I can hardly wait to hear it live!

You can get your tickets here.

Here's Lindy rocking it out at Peter Jaworski's Liberty Summer Seminar:

And here's another fun one with Lindy as lead singer of Major Maker -- a little less political:

The summer's over, and I'll be visiting six provinces and one U.S. state this fall, to talk about freedom of speech and political correctness. I'm particularly glad I'll be going to Montreal, which I didn't visit in the spring. Here is a list of some of the public events that are in my schedule. If you're nearby, please come by to say hello.

Friday, September 11, Edmonton

Edmonton East Conservative Association, Chateau Louis, 6 p.m. Ticket order form here.

Saturday, September 26, Halifax

ECP Centre Ignite our Culture conference, Trinity Anglican Church, 11 a.m. More info here.

Saturday, September 26, Toronto

Ontario Libertarian Party meeting, U of T, St. George Campus, 6:30 p.m. More info here.

Friday, October 2, Nashville, Tennessee

American Association of Physicians and Surgeons convention, Sheraton Downtown, 7:30 p.m. More info here.

Wednesday, October 21, Montreal

Beth Israel/Beth Aaron meeting, 7:30 p.m. More info to come.

Thursday, October 22, Montreal

Fraser Institute reception and dinner, Café Ferreira, 5:30 p.m. More info here.

Friday, October 30, Saskatoon

National Pro-life conference, Hilton Garden Inn, 6:30 p.m. More info here.

Wednesday, November 4, Toronto

Fraser Institute student seminar, 1491 Yonge Street, 2 p.m. More info here.

Fraser Institute reception and dinner, The Fifth Grill and Terrace, 6 p.m. More info here.

Friday, November 13, 2009, Calgary

Calgary West Rotary Club, lunch. More info to come.

Wednesday, November 25, Vancouver

Jewish Book Festival, 7:30 p.m. More info to come.

I've added a few pages with my take on some of the developments since the first edition -- including Jennifer Lynch's McCarthy-style enemies list, and Athanasios Hadjis's surprising ruling declaring HRC censorship illegal.

Watch for it on bookshelves!

Yesterday, Pearl Eliadis, who has been at the trough of the human rights industry for an awfully long time, wrote a letter to the National Post declaring that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal did not, in fact, declare section 13, the censorship provision, unconstitutional. Here's Eliadis's letter:

Re: Tribunal Backs Off Hate Provision, Joseph Brean, Sept. 3.

Warman vs. Lemire does not, actually, declare Section 13 to be unconstitutional. What the decision says is that Section 13 is constitutional (following the Supreme Court's Taylor case), but that punitive payments, which go to the government instead of the victim, are inconsistent with the constitution. This is not a "technicality" -- it is the central issue.

Practically, this means that Section 13 cases that only seek cease and desist orders or personal damages to the victim, are still constitutional within the meaning of the ruling.

Given the remedial nature of human rights laws, the legality of the punitive remedy will have to be sorted out in appeal. It is worth mentioning, though, that there are cases from the tribunal going the other way. The constitutionality of punitive damages does not or should not affect the legality of the hate speech law itself.

This is where tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis has erred: Linking the constitutionality of punitive damages to the hate speech law provoked confusion and this is a reason in itself to appeal. The media headlines trumpeting the decision as a blow to hate speech laws are evidence of how badly the reasons were interpreted.

It is one thing for the media -- or anyone else -- to make an honest mistake about a long and complex decision. It is quite another to have a journalist like Joseph Brean, who was specifically told everything that is written above, to distort the central reasoning of the case and misconstrue what I said to him.

Pearl Eliadis, human rights lawyer, Montreal.

Nice try. Here's my short reply in today's Post:

Re: What The Tribunal Ruling Really Means, letter to the editor, Sept. 4.

As a former human rights commission employee, Pearl Eliadis can't bring herself to admit that censorship is a violation of Canadian values. It's understandable -- it must be embarrassing to know that you're part of an industry that has been illegally prosecuting Canadians for years.

In her letter yesterday, Ms. Eliadis is in full denial mode. She writes "Warman vs. Lemire does not, actually, declare Section 13 to be unconstitutional."

Really? Here's the full text of paragraph 295 of the tribunal's landmark ruling this week: "For all the above reasons, I find that s. 13(1) infringes on Mr. Lemire's freedom of expression guaranteed under s. 2(b) of the Charter, and that this infringement is not demonstrably justified under s. 1 of the Charter."

Perhaps Ms. Eliadis thinks she can censor that, too.

Ezra Levant, Calgary.

I think I can do better, though. Eliadis signs her letter as a "human rights lawyer". That's about as accurate as calling the Canadian Human Rights Commission the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Both Eliadis and the CHRC are on a mission to destroy real human rights like freedom of speech and replace them with counterfeit human rights, like the fake right not to be offended.

In other words, I ought to sign my letter "human rights lawyer", too. I think it would be more accurate than when Eliadis does it -- and it would drive her crazy.

Here's my Op-Ed that ran in today's National Post on the subject. I haven't read them yet, but the column generated over 100 comments on the Post's website.

Yesterday, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal did something its never done in its 32-year history. It acquitted somebody of "hate speech" charges. Until now, the tribunal had a 100% conviction rate.

In a 107-page ruling, tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis didn't just throw out the case against Marc Lemire, he threw out the law, too, calling it an infringement of the free speech guarantees of the Charter of Rights.

Hadjis is no wild-eyed civil libertarian. In the recent past, he himself has convicted people under this same law. And, before Jean Chretien appointed him to the tribunal, Hadjis was the boss of one of Montreal's largest multicultural lobby groups, which thrived on ethnic identity politics. But even Hadjis has had enough of the human rights industry and their fetish for political correctness. He ruled that allowing Canadian citizens to express offensive ideas is preferable to living under a government that prosecutes people for expressing those ideas.

As of yesterday, it's no longer illegal to write politically incorrect things on the Internet. Now it's illegal to prosecute someone for it.

This will have an immediate impact on the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), which maintains a large censorship department and has other cases under investigation. If the CHRC were a real police force, and the tribunal were a real court, all existing censorship cases would be dropped, and anyone who was previously convicted would have their convictions voided. Dozens of lawsuits against the government for wrongful prosecution, and compensation for costs, wouldn't be far behind.

But the tribunal isn't a real court, and Hadjis acknowledged that he doesn't have the power to strike down the law, only to declare it unconstitutional and to refuse to apply it. The CHRC has ignored the tribunal before: In this same case, Lemire was routinely denied his procedural rights by the CHRC, including its outrageous tactic of waiting until the trial was over before disclosing all of its documents to him. Even worse, some bizarre CHRC conduct came to light, including confessions by their staff that they joined neo-Nazi organizations and published bigoted comments on the Internet to entrap their targets. A real court would have thrown the case out years ago, and a real police force would have disciplined such rogue conduct.

Still, it's a great day for Charter values like freedom of speech. But how long will it last? The human rights industry knew this was an important case, and over the past six years it spent millions of tax dollars fighting Lemire. The federal government had six lawyers on the case--four from the CHRC and two from the Justice Minister's office. And there were five lawyers intervening on behalf of Canada's tax-subsidized Jewish groups, the B'nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC).

Yesterday, the CJC issued a bizarre press release in which it states that, despite the tribunal's clear ruling, it believes the censorship law "remains constitutional." In the next few weeks, the CJC and the rest of the human rights litigation industry will clamour for the government to appeal this decision.

It was one thing for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson to defend the constitutionality of a government law that was under attack -- that's standard operating procedure. But now that the law has been found to be illegal, it would be quite another thing for Nicholson to positively act to revive such an illiberal law. Nicholson must also put a leash on the disgraced CHRC, and order it not to appeal either. They've already done more than enough damage to Canada's civil liberties, at great expense to taxpayers.

In fact, just leaving Hadjis's ruling intact isn't enough--his ruling illustrates a deeper rot in the CHRC. Hadjis found that the CHRC has become much more aggressive and confrontational in recent years, and at the same time it started applying punitive sanctions -- such as issuing fines of tens of thousands of dollars. That toxic mix of abusive conduct with criminal-style punishments was specifically forbidden by the Supreme Court when it last reviewed the censorship laws in 1990.

It's that bullying corporate culture that Nicholson needs to address. Nicholson should start by ordering Jennifer Lynch, the CHRC's chief commissioner, to stop her expensive campaign of demonization against the commission's critics. And then he should call in a retired judge -- or the auditor-general -- to do a thorough biopsy to find out how Canada's human rights agency became such a threat to our human rights.

Two years ago, Athanasios Hadjis was a human rights hack, sitting on the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal full of other hacks. He mindlessly rubber-stamped the censorship litigation oozing from the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its complainant of fortune, Stormfront member Richard Warman.

Here’s a section 13 censorship case, less than two years ago, where Hadjis happily condemned a young woman to a lifetime publication ban, ordered her to pay Warman $3,000 for his hurt feelings (tax free to him), and then fined her another $1,500. That’s a heavy punishment for a woman earning just above minimum wage, and too poor to hire a lawyer.

(It’s been a while since I practiced any criminal law. I’d be curious to know what kind of criminal conviction these days would yield a $4,500 fine and no time in custody. Would a first offence for an assault with a weapon get that heavy a penalty? If you’re a criminal lawyer who knows, tell me in the comments section.)

Hadjis didn’t mind his lifestyle one bit. He was part of the human rights industry – near the top of the food chain, actually – and it was easy work. No-one really cared about the people he sentenced for thought crimes. 90% of such victims were too poor to have lawyers there, and only murderers and rapists get legal aid – not people who write rude things on the Internet. The news media sure didn’t give a damn about the petty racists Hadjis bravely brought to, uh, justice.

What a difference a couple of years makes.

Today, Athanasios Hadjis issued a 40,000-word ruling – that’s almost as long as my book, Shakedown! – denouncing the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its aggressive style and its punitive powers. He rejected almost all of their “evidence” that Marc Lemire published “hate”, pointing out the curious fact that their five-year prosecution of him involved nothing that Lemire himself wrote, and nothing that was actually on Lemire’s website at the time the complaint was filed.

Hadjis called some of the comments that others wrote on Lemire’s website “offensive”, some of them “xenophobic” and some of them merely “pessimistic”. In other words, almost all were political views, not hate speech. What more proof is needed that the CHRC is a political vengeance machine, with Jennifer Lynch and Richard Warman deciding who is allowed to speak and who isn't?

I laughed out loud when I read that one of the things that the Canadian Human Rights Commission spent millions of dollars prosecuting was the comment that French Canadians were “cheese sniffers”. I’m not even kidding, the CHRC thinks that it should be against the law to call someone a cheese sniffer. Gentle reader, I swear I am not making that up – read the ruling yourself; just search for the word cheese. Or sniffer.

So two years after being a censor himself, Hadjis now calls censorship un-Canadian, un-constitutional and illegal. He says he will have nothing more to do with it, and he will refuse to implement it.

Wow.

Hadjis isn’t the first tribunal member to put down the Kool Aid and slowly walk away from the human rights cult. This March, Hadjis’s colleague, Edward Lustig, issued an equally stunning ruling, when he refused to punish the target of Warman’s last inquisition, and instead condemned Warman and his tactics as “disturbing” and “disappointing”.

Lustig was appointed by Stephen Harper. But Hadjis was appointed by Jean Chretien. And before Hadjis was a censor, he was the head of Montreal’s Greek lobby – a master practitioner of multicultural ethno-politics. His conversion from fascism to freedom has been a long journey indeed.

First Richard Moon, the professor who was paid $52,000 to whitewash the CHRC’s censorship, turned against them. Then Lustig. Now Hadjis. Pretty soon the last dozen supporters of censorship will be Jennifer Lynch, Richard Warman, and ten of Richard Warman’s anti-Semitic personas on the Internet.

Last December I wrote that Lynch was a “jet-setting lawbreaker”. It was not an exercise in hyperbole, but rather a legal analysis of her corrupt behavior: it was contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights, and contrary to the express ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada when they last considered censorship laws in 1990.

Lynch was a scofflaw, but she didn’t give a damn, because nobody was going to stop her.

As I wrote in December:

Section 13 -- the censorship provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act -- has been before the Supreme Court of Canada already. In 1990, John Ross Taylor, then 80 years old, appealed his section 13 conviction all the way to the SCC. The seven judges split, four saying the law was constitutional, three (including Beverly McLachlin, now the Chief Justice of the SCC) saying it was unconstitutional.

But the four who let section 13 slide were strict about its application. Here's what they wrote in their judgment (I've bolded a few key words):

In sum, the language employed in s. 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act extends only to that expression giving rise to the evil sought to be eradicated and provides a standard of conduct sufficiently precise to prevent the unacceptable chilling of expressive activity.  Moreover, as long as the Human Rights Tribunal continues to be well aware of the purpose of s. 13(1) and pays heed to the ardent and extreme nature of feeling described in the phrase "hatred or contempt", there is little danger that subjective opinion as to offensiveness will supplant the proper meaning of the section.

Take a look a that just for a moment.

Three judges said the law was illegal. Four said it was legal, but only if it remained focused on truly evil hatred, that was ardent and extreme. Subjective opinions about offensiveness weren't permitted -- and, said those four judges confidently, there was little danger of that happening.

Well, those four judges hadn't met Jennifer Lynch and her corrupt crew of political inquisitors.

Nineteen years ago, the Supreme Court said section 13 was constitutional, but only to be used against “evil” – seriously, they used that word. Today, the CHRC is prosecuting people for calling each other cheese-sniffers, and they’ve added the power to fine people $30,000. Hadjis made the point today that I made back in December: even under the Supreme Court’s old rules, the CHRC is acting illegally. Imagine if today’s much more pro-free speech court got its hands on the CHRC.

Which brings us to what happens next: will there be an appeal of Hajdis’s decision?

It was one thing for the Conservative government to defend the Canadian Human Rights Act from Lemire’s constitutional challenge. That’s pretty much the default state for any Justice Department: uphold their laws. But now that we know their laws were unconstitutional, to positively send in lawyers to appeal Hadjis’s ruling would be an elective, willful demonstration of support for illegal censorship. It would make the Conservatives “own” this illiberal beast in a way they haven’t before.

If you look at the bottom of the ruling, you’ll see the disgusting fact that there were eleven lawyers prosecuting the case: two from the Justice Minister’s office; four from the CHRC; and five from the tax-subsidized Official Jews – B’nai Brith, Canadian Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Who knows how many millions of dollars it took to investigate and prosecute this matter – and, again, Lemire had to fund his five-year defence on his own.

Will Rob Nicholson, the Justice Minister, send his lawyers to appeal? If he does so, he risks a backlash within his own party’s base, on the eve of an election. But it is not acceptable for him to stand back, while his lackey, Jennifer Lynch, sends her CHRC lawyers in for the appeal. It’s essential that Nicholson – or the PMO, if Nicholson lacks the political judgment – orders Jennifer Lynch to stand down. (Frankly, it’s staggering that she hasn’t yet been ordered to just shut up and get on with her job as a bureaucrat. Seriously, as Peter O’Neil reported the other day, Lynch flew all the way to Dublin, Ireland, to beg for political help, admitting that her campaign to demonize her opponents, collect names on her enemies list and save her censorship powers “monopolizes our energy”. Why is she not fired yet?)

Oh – and it’s not enough for both Nicholson and Lynch to not appeal. Lynch has been paying Warman’s expenses in all of his complaints before the tribunal. She must be ordered not to pay his expenses to appeal. Let him pay his own costs for once, rather than soaking taxpayers for his private vendettas.

There are a lot more little items in the 107-page ruling that I might dig into in the next few days if I have time.

Today is definitely a day to celebrate. The celebration should be tinged with the reality that this battle is far from over though; the book-burners at the Canadian Jewish Congress have already announced that they will simply ignore Hadjis’s ruling, and act as if the law is still legal. I really don’t care that Bernie “Burny” Farber is a foolish buffoon; I just care that he’s doing it in the name of all Canadian Jewry, and that Nicholson might actually listen to such soft fascism, and think that we Jews are all thin-skinned, hypocritical whiners who can dish it out but can't take it, and want the state to bully our political enemies for us.

What a loser.

Burny was momentarily put on a leash earlier this year, when the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, the CJC’s funder, ordered him to shut up about censorship, and focus on issues that actually reflected the community’s political agenda, such as Iran, Hamas, Jewish schools, etc. Burny’s obedience lasted for a few weeks. It was awesome while it lasted, actually – I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Burny on CTV Newsnet actually saying that David Ahenakew’s acquittal for “hate propaganda” should not be appealed. But.you can’t ask an old book-burner to give up his pyromania for long, can you? If an election is indeed afoot, look for CIJA’s election guide to have censorship as one of the top “community” issues, as it did last year, when they made the mistake of letting Burny write it, without any grown-up supervision.

But let me close how I opened: with a reflection on how far things have come in two short years.

Two years ago, Athanasios Hadjis was sentencing girls to lifetime publication bans and huge fines. Now he’s calling that conduct illegal and unconstitutional.

Two years ago, Richard Warman had a private little racket going, where the CHRC funded his complaints, and he got to keep the tax-free cash awards. Now he’s publicly disgraced, condemned by the very tribunal that used to fill his bank account.

Two years ago, Warman’s neo-Nazi antics were known to only a few dozen people – his CHRC bosses, his victims, and the Official Jews, who knew about it and abided it. Now Warman’s Nazi activities – and those of half a dozen other CHRC staffers – are widely known. (The Official Jews still abide it.)

Two years ago, Jennifer Lynch was an absentee manager, jetting off to five-star galas in the third world, on taxpayer expense, learning third world-style approaches to human rights.

Today… oh well. We still have some work to do!

But seriously, kudos to everyone who has helped to shine a light of scrutiny and accountability on these corrupt, abusive HRCs. I credit the blogosphere, and talk radio, and some of the more open-minded reporters in the mainstream media, for turning “HRC” into a four-letter word. And, of course, there’s Marc Lemire himself who has labored in the face of a relentless, tax-funded inquisition for nearly six years, as the state prosecuted him with an illegal law, using abusive tactics. He – and everyone else ever charged under this illegal law – deserves compensation for the abuses they’ve suffered.

Sacking Jennifer Lynch would free up $300,000 or so for reparations. That’s probably a good place to start.