Final thoughts

Jennifer Lynch's exceedingly uncooperative approach today will hurt her. If this had been a court, she'd have been deemed a hostile witness. She cranked out pre-fabricated cliches and spoke as slowly as possible in the face of embarrassing questions. Does she forget that she works for these people?

Philip Dufresne was at his best today -- he didn't say a word.

Bernie "Burny" Farber was not quite as eloquent as Dufresne, but he was clearly put on a leash. He left most of the talking to Mark Freiman. Freiman's hairdo was a little distracting for me -- sorry, I just have to say it, it's pretty weird when a Jew wears his hair like, well, like Hitler did. But putting that aside, his remarks seemed uninformed of the facts of the CHRC. It's like he was caught in a time-warp, talking about how section 13 would save us from hate, as if the Internet had not rendered it practically impossible, as if the ruling in Warman v. Lemire had not rendered it legally impossible, and as if no-one had seen the bad behaviour of the CHRC exposed over the past two years. His one suggestion -- to give the CHRC more discretion -- is laughable. Just how much more discretion could they have? They don't have an ethics code, they don't have an operations manual, they don't have an oversight or internal affairs committee. What more discretion does Freiman want to give them?

I must note Burny's embarrassing flourish, to show pictures of swastikas on graves. What relevance does that have to section 13? Section 13 is a censorship law that applies to the Internet; swastikas on graves is a Criminal Code matter. Why didn't Burny just show pictures from the liberation of the concentration camps? There is no logic or law to his stunt; it was just a pure pull on emotion: if you disagree with me, you hate Jews. What a buffoon. I'm sure that when someone honks at Burny on the highway, he thinks they're anti-Semites, too.

Richard Moon was a pleasant surprise. He didn't make a single reference to the falsehoods contained in his Saskatchewan speech. Rather, he stayed focused on his central recommendation: to abolish section 13, and he unpacked that a bit for the MPs who bothered to ask him.

On the opposition side, I was impressed with questions from Brian Murphy, Serge Menard and Joe Comartin. Each of them asked about internal corruption matters, Comartin so much that he forced Lynch into lying that she had made a "detailed investigation". Sorry, I call B.S. on that. I don't think Comartin was fooled, do you?

On the government side, I thought Brent Rathgeber showed a commendable feistiness on the issue; Stephen Woodworth gave an outstanding comment about how Canadians value freedom; and Russ Hiebert, who did such fine work in the spring, was back with very practical questions for Moon.

In short, I thought it was great.

I've never been more optimistic about the prospects for reform. Now, the only question in my mind is, how much reform is enough?