Results matching “miller” from Ezra Levant
Human rights commissions are in the news a lot these days. Here are a few items.
Mark Steyn to testify before the Ontario Provincial Parliament
Lisa Macleod is the first elected politician in Canada to actually start the process of reforming Canada’s abusive HRCs. Other politicians, like MPs Keith Martin and Rick Dykstra, have introduced motions. But Macleod actually grilled Ontario’s would-be human rights tribunal chairs – the kangaroos in the kangaroo courts. That was the first time any sort of political scrutiny has been brought to HRC appointees anywhere in Canada.
Now she’s keeping at it, by holding public hearings into the workings of Ontario’s HRC. Incredibly, she has invited Mark Steyn to testify. Steyn, as readers will recall, was the victim of a drive-by character assassination by Barbara Hall, the head of Ontario’s HRC, who saw fit to condemn him of anti-Muslim discrimination without the bother of a hearing into the matter. I can hardly wait to hear Steyn’s testimony. People pay hundreds of dollars for the pleasure of hearing Steyn give a speech on the subject. But now anyone in Toronto on February 9 can simply attend the legislature’s committee room 151 at 1:30 p.m. to hear him for free. I think they ought to get a bigger room.
Alberta MLA’s proposed HRC reform worse than useless
After the abominable case of the censorship of Rev. Stephen Boissoin, I was contacted by a friend in the Government of Alberta, who told me that positive reforms were afoot to the HRC. I suppose the departure of Lori Andreachuk counts, but I was led to believe it would be something more.
The Calgary Herald’s Nigel Hannaford brings news that freshman MLA Jonathan Denis has introduced a motion – a non-binding symbolic vote, not a real bill – to change how Alberta’s HRC would work. But according to Hannaford’s report, Denis’s proposal is worse than useless. I can’t find Denis’s motion on the Legislature’s website, but according to Hannaford, it proposes that:
those found to have filed frivolous and vexatious complaints (including complaints that are found to unreasonably challenge the rights of freedoms of speech, association, peaceful assembly, conscience and religion,) be required to pay a portion of the commission's procedural costs.
So that’s the great reform, eh? Frivolous complainants who use the HRCs to bully victims have to pay a portion of… the government’s costs. Not the victim. The victim can go pound sand, even in a frivolous, bullying case. The government will take the money – as a tax, really.
Of course, as Hannaford points out, the HRC itself decides what’s frivolous or not, and by their own definition they don’t proceed with frivolous cases. So, even the lame proposal above will never actually be used, because it’s a tautology: whatever the HRC investigates is by definition not unreasonable.
What a joke.
Sheldon Chumir Foundation proposes several reforms to HRC
I’ve written about the Sheldon Chumir Foundation before – they hosted a conference about freedom of speech a few months ago out in Halifax, to which I was invited as a speaker (as was the “Journalism Doctor”, John Miller). I was impressed with their devotion to true civil liberties, not the perversion of those liberties, often done in the name of “human rights”.
The list of reforms proposed by the foundation includes the following:
that free speech be protected by amending section 3 of the Act;
that the Provincial Government recruit well-known Albertans with significant experience on human rights issues to serve as Human Rights Commissioners;
that the Alberta Human Rights Commission report directly to the Alberta Legislative Assembly, not to a Cabinet Minister as is now the case;
that the adjudication of complaints be carried out by a fully independent Tribunal;
that legal assistance be made available, on the basis of financial need, to both complainants and to respondents in cases that come before the Tribunal;
Section 3 in the Alberta law is similar to section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – it’s the censorship provision. So in that respect, their recommendation is like that of Prof. Richard Moon, who called for a repeal of that federal law. Naturally, I’m delighted by this recommendation.
The call to have commissioners with “significant experience” hopefully means that commissioners would have a command of civil liberties. Right now, several Alberta’s HRC commissioners aren’t even lawyers, yet they presume to issue startling orders affecting Albertans’ liberties, and meting out fines. Of course, calling for “experience” would likely end up meaning life-long leftist activists, like the anthem-banning principal from New Brunswick, moving in.
Reporting to the legislature, not a cabinet minister, will help with transparency and accountability. Having a completely separate tribunal would add to independence, too. And the final point – providing legal assistance to parties – hints at protecting victims of HRC bullies. Unfortunately, it also opens the system up to more abuse, as complainants will actually receive money for pressing their complaints.
At a philosophical level, I’m opposed to “tweaking” human rights commissions. In short, they’re obsolete (Canada is the most tolerant country in the world – no thanks to HRCs). They’re redundant (everything from employment law to landlord and tenant issues are already covered by other courts and tribunals). They’re procedurally second-rate (unlike real courts) and they’re infested with political radicals, without political accountability.
In other words, they don’t need to be trimmed. They need to be weeded out, by the roots.
That’s the ideal. But it’s clear that Alberta’s governing Conservatives are conservative only in name, and are loath to tackling the abuses of the HRC. It’s unthinkable that such an inert bunch would do anything as dramatic as abolishing the HRC; so abolishing its speech code is an attractive second-best choice. But anything that gives more money or legitimacy to the HRC will doubtless, in the end, give more power to bullying bureaucrats.
I haven’t read the full report, here, yet, but I’ll blog about it when I do. I should note that the Chumir Foundation’s release of their report was well-attended, including by the provincial minister in charge.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, he does. I'm not holding my breath.
Mohamed Elmasry, an immigrant to Canada from Egypt, is a Jew-hating bigot. In keeping with his Egyptian style, he’s the president-for-life of the grandiosely-named Canadian Islamic Congress. Simply put, he wants to import Egyptian values of censorship, anti-Semitism and authoritarian government to Canada. And he knows the best way to do that: through Canada's illiberal human rights commissions.
If the HRCs actually applied their laws neutrally, Elmasry himself would have been charged with “hate speech” when he declared on Michael Coren's television show that terrorist attacks against Jews were legitimate. Instead, he’s used Canada’s HRCs as a weapon against those who would criticize radical Islam -- Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine in particular.
Joseph Brean has an interview with Elmasry in today’s National Post. It’s an interesting read, with all sorts of Egyptian ideas about strangling political dissent. But I’ll just point out one minor detail.
Elmasry admits what useful idiots like John Miller have denied, but what the rest of us have known all along: Khurrum Awan and the other Muslim law students who have been pushing the HRC complaints against Maclean's in the media were nothing but the PR front-men for Elmasry himself. They were his pawns. Elmasry is so toxic politically, he had to find little bigots-in-training who were not quite as discredited as him.
Fools like Miller bought the charade. Today Elmasry revealed he was the puppet master all along. Says Elmasry:
Prof. Elmasry said both those men [Awan and Faisal Joseph], in their numerous public and media appearances, were always acting "upon my instruction."
Like all petty tyrants, Elmasry has an enormous ego (I was on a panel with him in 2006 where he actually took credit for inventing the BlackBerry. Seriously.) Flattered with Brean’s interview, he just couldn’t help himself – he had to “take credit” for the foolish antics of Awan and Joseph, although by doing so he undid the purpose of having surrogates.
There’s not much more to say about Elmasry. I agree with Brean that Elmasry has been a key figure in the battle against censorship laws such as the Canadian Human Rights Act, because it would be impossible to create a proponent (and user) of those laws more odious, more offensive, less sympathetic, and less in line with what Canadians think real human rights are. As Brean put it:
In the evolving history of human rights law in Canada, the Internet has made this review of online hate speech laws necessary. But among those who can take credit for making it possible, Prof. Elmasry has few competitors, save perhaps the blogger and free speech advocate Ezra Levant.
I appreciate the compliment, but as I’ve said before, the illiberal conduct of the Elmasrys and Jennifer Lynchs of this country are what has made denormalizing the HRCs so easy. Any severely normal Canadian who read Brean’s interview with Elmasry would correctly come to the conclusion that Elmasry wants to destroy Canada’s freedoms, and make us more like his putrid Egypt. No, thanks, you foul bigot – but thanks for illustrating what’s wrong with the system.
Dear readers, I promise not to tax your patience much further with the tiresome topic of John Miller, "the jouralism doctor" who isn't a doctor, and doesn't really do a lot of journalism.
Yesterday, in my comments, he challenged me to a debate:
Hey Ezra
So you've taken a couple of shots at me (you went first, remember)and I've taken a shot at you. Where are we at?
The editors at J-Source, a journalism website, have asked me to approach you about the prospect of us facing off on freedom of speech vs. responsibility in an e-mail debate that they will put up on their site.
Interested? I see it as an online conversation, more intense than a long-distance bombardment which we are doing at the moment. It will afford us the chance to actually answer and parry each others' comments.
I am extending this offer with a generous incentive: You get to go first.
Let me know what you think.
John
In my post this morning about John Miller, I made an error. I wrote that John Miller was a PhD in journalism. It was an assumption on my part: he calls himself a "doctor", his website's address is thejournalismdoctor.ca, and he was the head of journalism at Ryerson's school of journalism for some years. So I assumed that he was, in fact a PhD.
He's not. In the sixties, he got a B.A. in English. That's it.
You can see his full CV here, taken from his website.
I think this is delicious. For a year, "the journalism doctor" has been lecturing mere bloggers like me (and mere international best-selling authors like Mark Steyn) about not being real journalists. We aren't responsible; we're not competent; we're not professional. What a hoot to learn that he's not a doctor at all -- nor does he have a master's degree, or even a degree in journalism itself. But he's so snobby about his "craft" that he pretends to have one.
Now don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against folks who aren't official "experts" or who have no formal education. I don't have a journalism degree myself -- and I'm not sure how J-school could teach anyone to be a critical thinker, or to have a sense of curiosity or skepticism. And trust me: having spent seven years in university myself, I can testify that plenty of students there are either on a leisurely holiday from real life, or are pursuing some useless pursuit that should properly be called a hobby, not an academic field. My point is that you just don't usually have Miller's kind of righteous preening from folks whose formal education is an English degree earned at London, Ontario 43 years ago.
I skimmed the rest of Miller's CV, and I had to laugh out loud. I think it's great that he listed every damn lunch talk he's ever given, including to the Rotary Club. They're good people. It's just a little, uh, light for someone pretending to be a "doctor".
This great writer has published one book in his career -- a self-serving whinge about how right wing journalism has become. Fair deal -- that's Miller's niche. But it's pretty sad when the best publisher he could muster was Canada's socialist imprint, Fernwood Publishing. I love their mission statement:
In an era when the restructuring of capitalism seems to be threatening to erase many of the gains that have been made by the oppressed in society, we think that our books have a part to play in bucking the trend.
On second though, I think Miller picked just the right publisher for his mush.
I did learn one more useful thing from Miller's CV: he's part of the taxpayer subsidized grievance industry. I don't see any cash flowing to him directly from any human rights commissions, but he's received about $150,000 of our money for various politically correct projects, including a "survey" of ethnic media in Canada. Nice work, on top of his other taxpayer-funded salary as a professor. He even got $10,000 from the race-hustlers at the Race Relations Foundation to develop a website for them -- who knew he had such talents? You might recall the CRRF; their chief, Ayman Al-Yassini, has his own CV that boasts that he was:
visiting professor at the University of Riyadh (King Saud University) in Saudi Arabia. He published extensively on the relationship between religion and state in Islam, religion and development and religion and foreign policy.
Nice fit. I wonder if the two of them kick back and watch some Al Jazeera together.
Anyways, this blog post is a correction. I suppose Miller's accusation was right: a better journalist than me would never have taken Miller's pretense to be a "doctor" at face value without double-checking to see if it was spin. My apologies to my readers. Despite his propaganda, Miller's no doctor.
I have only been able to identify four journalists in the entire country who support the censorship powers of Canada’s human rights commissions: Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star (despite that paper’s official stance against section 13 “hate speech” laws); Naomi Lakritz of the Calgary Herald (despite that paper’s leadership role in freedom of the press); Susan Cole of NOW Magazine; and John Miller, a journalism professor at Ryerson. Miller has the dubious distinction of actually applying to be an intervener in the Elmasry v. Maclean’s “hate speech” show trial at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal (he was refused). What kind of journalism professor actively volunteers to join in the government’s censorship of a fellow journalist? It’s one thing to be a mouthy busy-body. It’s another to beg the tribunal for permission to fly across the country to condemn one’s peers in a government inquisition. Informant No. 1 would be proud.
(I assume Miller volunteered to testify against Maclean’s at his own expense. But perhaps the professor would be kind enough to confirm it. Would he really have taken time off work, flown to Vancouver and stayed in a hotel on his own dime? Or was someone going to foot the bill for him? His university? The Canadian Islamic Congress?)
When I finally met Miller a couple of weekends ago at a free speech conference in Halifax, I had hoped to find out what made him tick. I was disappointed: There was no grand theory, no complex philosophy at play. As Miller made clear in his opening remarks that day, he pretty much judges people – and their ideas – based on their race. Here’s what he said:
Aside from the other things that I was introduced as, I’m a white male WASP. In relation to the other journalists who have spoken here today, I have the unusual position of being in the minority. It’s very instructive to be in the minority. I’m not asking for sympathy: People like me have had our way far too long to invoke sympathy.
That’s all it was, that’s all there is to him. He’s all about liberal white guilt, and he’s all for reverse discrimination. He judges people, as Martin Luther King would say, by the colour of their skin, not the content of their character. MLK would call him a racist. I call him a sixties hippie who doesn’t understand how condescending he comes across. Not to whites, I mean – to them he comes across as a bore or a fossil. I mean how he comes across to minorities: he treats them like simple children who are unable of achieving success without some sort of hand-out.
Miller has truly taken up Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Miller has made a career out of being a guilty white man. Take this “study” he did fourteen years ago, examining the race of every journalist in Canada. It’s junk science of course. Most Canadians aren’t as race-obsessed as Miller; most newsrooms wouldn’t have an inventory of staff by race; most staff wouldn’t participate in such a degrading catalog; and many people – oh, say, Barack Obama – are of mixed race, and wouldn’t quite fit with Miller’s white=bad, coloured=good way of seeing the world. (Hell, even the Nazis had more thoughtfulness than Miller when it came to lists of minorities: they invented various degrees of “mixlings”. In the U.S. South, they invented words like quadroon, octoroon, etc. If Miller is going to start making lists by race, he really ought to do it right. His friends at the human rights commissions can help him – the CHRC’s investigators are members of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. They could teach him the proper taxonomy, right down to the pronunciation of mischling in the original German.
Enough preamble. As I mentioned in my report from Halifax, Miller’s hatred of Mark Steyn was palpable at that conference. He disparaged Steyn as not a genuine reporter, and “proved” it, by noting that he couldn’t find corroboration for a fact that Steyn had written in a column, namely:
Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.
That’s Steyn’s column. Miller implied that Steyn just made the Khomeini quote up, and he did so to embarrass Muslims. Miller told the audience that the only place he could find corroboration of that quote was on some “right wing” blog.
It was a weird attack, as Steyn says exactly where he got his information – from the late Oriana Fallaci’s book. That’s her in the burka, interviewing Khomeini. I’d call her a pretty good source on what the pervy old Islamo-fascist said.
Miller was so smug, so condescending – and his criticism was so lame – I wondered if anyone was buying it at the conference. As I sat there, I Googled “Khomeini” and “sex” and some other terms, and quickly came across this Harper’s article from 1985, that quotes some of Khomeini’s nuttier fatwas. Check out fatwa 2,631:
2,631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of a horse, a mule, or a donkey if someone has had coitus with the animal.
That took me about a minute to find, and I mentioned it to the conference right after Miller said he couldn’t find it. Harper’s quote is not the exact same translation used by Fallaci, but the point is pretty clear: Steyn hadn’t made up the quote, and demonizing Steyn as a “right-winger” wasn’t enough to change the facts. Khomeini was a pervert, and Steyn got his facts straight. Miller’s debating technique – ad hominem attacks on journalists if they’re conservative – didn’t work so well anymore. Fallaci was a famously left wing journalist when she met Khomeini; Harper’s is the perfectly liberal magazine; and Harper’s source, Westview Press, is an imprint of Perseus Books Group. How liberal are they? Look at some of the other titles published by another Perseus imprint.
Mark Steyn doesn’t need my help proving that his facts are accurate and frankly, listing other liberal sources for that quote is ridiculous – that’s Miller’s game. But the reason I Googled the Khomeini quote – literally while Miller was talking – was to show just how laughable are Miller’s own pretensions about being some keeper of the journalistic flame. I’m no “doctor” in journalism like he is, but I could find the quote, in an impeccably liberal source, in two minutes. Another few minutes could find Khomeini’s book of fatwas itself, in English and the original Persian version. But, as Nova Scotia Scott has pointed out, any facts that conflict with Miller’s world view are discarded. I agree with Steyn: I’d hate to be a journalism student in Miller’s class.
Anyways, after my original blog post on the subject, Miller submitted a comment to my website. I waited to approve it, because I wanted to address his contention that the Harper’s quote wasn’t on point – and, as the Harper’s citation shows, it clearly was. Here’s his comment in full:
Hi Ezra Your little Google stunt in Halifax seems to have worked -- even you believe it. Only trouble is, you didn't know what quote I was talking about, and it isn't on any of the sites you refer to here.The quote, which Steyn used in a Maclean's column, was allegedly Khomeini saying it was okay for a man to have sex with animals, as long as he kills the animal after orgasm and doesn't feed the meat to his village.I suspected this was made up. Khomeini may be a nutbar but this is too way out for any religious leader, surely.Besides Steyn's column, I only saw it referred to on one right-wing blogsite. Your stunt was just a stunt, devoid of any substance. Of course I know how to Google thoroughly. I actually thought the most significant moment of the panel was when I asked you if you consider yourself to be a journalist. You didn't answer me. Which makes me ask your readers .... surely you don't take all that appears on this site to be factual, do you? Please tell me you don't.As for me being pro-censorship and a guilty white man ready to bend over backwards for minority rights, I never said I thought Khurrum Awan should have won his case in B.C. I was relatively happy with the ruling. I was trying to intervene to argue that Steyn did not practice responsible journalism. Perhaps, like you, he even has difficulty with the term "JOURNALIST."Aside from that, I enjoyed the debate. Hope we do it again sometime.
Let me touch on a few more points quickly.
I don’t recall my exact answer when I was asked if I regard myself as a journalist. I’d probably answer “yes”, simply because that word is so vague – a journalist is anyone who writes on the events of the day. I wouldn’t call myself a reporter, for that implies a neutrality that I don’t pretend to have. But I certainly do plenty of reporting in my columns and blog posts. One of my favourite things about blogging is that I can furnish so many primary documents for my readers to see, just by clicking on a link.
It obviously bothers Miller that someone like me would dare to practice journalism, if not positively call myself a journalist. He thinks it’s some sort of guild or profession, and he fancies himself some sort of guru or high priest of it. That’s why he thought that was the key moment of the conference – when he asked me if I dared to call myself by that holy name. What a laugh. But I think that colours his dislike for bloggers, or for great writers who haven’t wasted years of their lives earning meaningless degrees. I mean, really: a PhD in journalism?
One of my favourite moments at the Halifax conference was when a student asked a question, and in his preamble he mentioned that he transferred out of journalism school when he realized all he was being taught was political ideology, like Miller’s – he wasn’t being taught how to truly become a reporter. I thought that was a fascinating anecdote.
One last point in response to Miller’s comment, above. He says he “never said [he] thought Khurrum Awan should have won his case in B.C.” Again, a sloppy factual error for a doctor of journalism – Awan didn’t have a case against Maclean’s; the complainant was the anti-Semitic bigot, Mohamed Elmasry. Awan was not a party at all.
But look at the intellectual dishonesty: Miller didn’t want the complaint against Maclean’s to succeed? He didn’t? Then why was he demanding the right to be heard as a witness – against Maclean’s?
Let me close by showing you all you really need to know about Dr. John Miller, and how he sees the world. I think it’s perfect proof of my thesis that he’s nothing more than a self-hating white liberal who is a useful idiot, a pawn for those who would destroy the western liberal values Miller enjoys in his own life. Check out this book review he wrote about Al Jazeera.
He is willfully blind to Al Jazeera’s role as the media voice of Al Qaida. Miller positively has a crush on Taysir Alluni, an Al Jazeera newscaster who was given exclusive access to Osama bin Laden, and other convenient “scoops” that Miller calls “riveting”. Miller calls Alluni “courageous”.
Miller wrote his love letter to Al Jazeera in March of 2005. Six months later, a Spanish court convicted Alluni of being an Al Qaida agent, a collaborator and a courier for terrorists. The Spanish Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
John Miller will go to the ends of the earth to discredit an indisputable fact: that Ayatollah Khomeini, and much of radical Islam, believes in things that are abominable to the liberal west. He’ll attack or ignore reporters – even liberals like Fallaci and Harper’s – who contradict his theories. But he’s gullible in the extreme when it comes to Al Jazeera and others, like the Canadian Islamic Congress, who have malign intentions towards the West.
John Miller wants to know if I’m a journalist. I guess I’d call myself one, but it’s not an appellation of which I’m particularly proud, if Miller is its epitome.
I had a ball at the Sheldon Chumir Foundation's conference on the media's right to offend, which took place at University of King's College in Halifax on Saturday.
Binks from Free Canuckistan shlepped into town for the day, as did a number of other Halifax bloggers like Girl in Blue and Nova Scotia Scott, and plenty of friends of this blog and supporters of my fight against the HRCs. It was also great to see allies from the MSM, including Michael deAdder, the editorial cartoonist, and Paul Schneidereit, who has been Atlantic Canada's leading proponent of freedom of speech, both from his post at the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and in his position with the Canadian Association of Journalists.
Scott and Binks have pretty exhaustive reports and analyses from the event, so for now I'll just make a few observations.
As I said when I received this invitation, I wanted to find out what made John Miller tick -- he's the Ryerson journalism professor who tried to intervene on behalf of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn, in the five-day show trial in Vancouver this spring.
What would possibly possess a journalism professor to be pro-censorship?
The answer is pretty simple and boring, actually: he's a guilty white liberal who is willing to sacrifice our ancient liberal values of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of mosque and state, in an act of journalistic affirmative action. That's it. You can see a near-transcript of his remarks here, where he essentially opened with an apology for being a white man.
It was nothing more thoughtful than that: he's white, Maclean's magazine is white-ish, so any brown-skinned Arab who complains against it has moral authority, even if they have no legal or moral case.
Pretty lame.
Miller didn't seem very familiar with the depth of the anti-Semitic bigotry at the Canadian Islamic Congress; over dinner, he expressed surprise when I told him that, at a Canadian Association of Journalists forum in 2006, Elmasry repeatedly condemned the "zhoos" who owned the media in Canada, and abused their zhooish powers to keep down good Muslims.
There was a weird moment during the panel when Miller said that Mark Steyn simply wasn't a good journalist -- compared to him, one presumes -- because Miller couldn't find corroboration for one of Steyn's quotes about Ayatollah Khomeini's weird fatwas about sex.
Those quotes were from Khomeini's famous Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, his Iranian version of Mein Kampf -- his master plan for the world, right down to how to have sex with chickens -- the part Miller thought Steyn was making up.
I went to Google as Miller was talking, and found a ton of references for it. There's even a reference to it in the bestselling novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Harper's magazine referred to it; there's a whole Iranian feminist foundation dedicated to repealing Khomeini's rules, including his sex rules.
It was pretty sad: an ageing journalism professor, looking down his nose at Steyn and accusing Steyn of sloppiness (and disparaging mere bloggers, too), while half the kids in the room could have found what Miller couldn't in about five minutes on the Net. Some "expert" witness.
Oh well.
Perhaps the weirdest person at the conference, though, was Krista Daley, the boss of Nova Scotia's Human Rights Commission. You can read Scott's near-transcript of her opening remarks, here. They're scary enough. But in the question and answer session that followed, Daley went further. She said that freedom of speech was all well and good, but only once she and her fellow human rights commissions had done their work, making Canada "completely non-discriminatory", a "fully equal society" and my favourite: "almost a utopia."
The obvious question being: why only almost a utopia? Why not go for the whole thing? Why so modest?!
I mean there's nutty, and then there's David Koresh nutty. She's going to bring Canada to the doorstep of utopia, through her human rights commission? And, until then, our freedoms will have to be curtailed?
That's almost Unabomber nutty. It will not surprise you, dear reader, to learn that before gracing Nova Scotia with her presence, High Priestess Daley worked at the United Nations on human rights matters, picking up all sorts of tips from those leading lights, China and Iran. Now she's back in Halifax, with the little people, trying to elevate them. And how ungrateful they are!
There were other speakers, too -- most of them being pretty full-throated defenders of freedom of speech. And I was impressed with the Chumir Foundation's own staff, who are quite true to Sheldon Chumir's own personal style: liberals, but civil liberties liberals, liberals who understand that value of our culture and its heritage of freedom. I started talking with Chumir Foundation boss Janet Keeping about the Magna Carta, and she told me that, whenever she goes to London, she makes sure she visits the museum where she can look at that great old document with her own eyes -- an impressive anecdote.
I enjoyed the conference, and Peggy Wente's lunchtime talk was great. I was pretty scrappy, and I couldn't refrain from calling Daley "David Koresh" in my speech and the question and answer session. But that's me -- always getting between some bureaucrat and their Valhalla.
My favourite part, though, was meeting so many supporters who had been following this issue for the past year. For 125 people to show up on a gorgeous Saturday morning for such a conference was a very encouraging sign that freedom of speech is deeply cherished in the great city of Halifax.
I am delighted to be one of the participants in the upcoming public conference on the media's "right to offend", being held on November 1st at University of King's College in Halifax. (I'll try to visit the world headquarters of Free Mark Steyn while I'm in the neighbourhood!)
Even more delightful is that the symposium is sponsored by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. The very first politician I ever met was Sheldon Chumir; he had donated a "lunch with Sheldon Chumir" to a charity auction that my father bought. Chumir took my sister and me to lunch, and we peppered him with so many questions that he hardly had time to eat a bite. Even back in high school, I knew I was a conservative, but I also knew that Chumir was my kind of Liberal -- he was a contrarian who deliberately chose to be a Liberal in Tory-blue Alberta, precisely so that he could be in opposition. That's not the usual reason most people get into politics. He was a civil libertarian, too, of course, which is why the foundation named after him is focusing so much on the threat posed to civil liberties by Canada's imposter "human rights commissions".
I'm excited that the keynote speaker of the conference is Margaret Wente. She has been one of the most effective journalists in the country at exposing the insanity of Canada's HRCs. Her column about the Ontario Human Rights Commission trial of a plastic surgeon who violated the "human right" of a male-to-female transexual who wanted, uh, intimate female surgery remains the most hilarious and outrageous editorial I've read on the subject.
Of course, there will be censors on the panel, too -- including John Miller, the journalism professor who tried (unsuccessfully) to intervene in the BC HRT kangaroo trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine. I'm looking forward to meeting Miller. I've never met a pro-censorship journalist before, but I'm just a small town boy.
I'm glad the symposium will be held in Halifax. Not only is it a gorgeous city, but it's also home to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, currently under siege by that province's HRC for daring to publish the cartoon to the left. They've been accused of violating human rights, too. I wonder if any folks from the paper will be in attendance (maybe) or the radical imam who filed the complaint (I'm thinking, probably not).
The title of the conference says it all: the right to offend. Free speech is meaningless if it applies only to inoffensive speech. The meaning of free speech is that it must be free from other things, including other admirable things, like good manners, political correctness, or the ideological fashions of the day. That's not to say there is no antidote to offensive speech. There are plenty, ranging from ignoring the offender, to rebutting him, to condeming him to socially ostracizing him. But none of those remedies involve the government and its unlimited power.
If I prepare my remarks in advance, I'll post them here on my blog. If you're in Nova Scotia, please stop by.
