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COMMENTARY
May 3, 2008
Reclaiming Canada
In my five weeks of absence from this space, I was saddened to learn, the assault on free speech and the free press in Canada has been escalated. In addition to the very ugly cases that have been brought before various so-called “human rights commissions,” to silence such “politically incorrect” Canadian writers as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, frivolous lawsuits have now been brought against several prominent journalists and bloggers for their efforts in exposing how the human rights commissions work, and for their audacity in mocking ludicrous behaviour by members of the HRC’s “Anti-Hate Teams.”Barbara Hall, the leftist former mayor of Toronto, who now presides over the Ontario Human Rights Commission, publicly pronounced Maclean’s magazine guilty of spreading anti-Islamic hatred (by publishing Mr Steyn), while declining to review the complaint which the radical Canadian Islamic Congress brought against the magazine. (The case had already been accepted by the federal and B.C. “human rights” commissions.) So to the HRCs’ existing repertoire of star chamber tactics -- no due process, no standards of evidence, crimes defined and punishments assigned at the commissioners’ whims, etc. -- Ms Hall has now added the obscenity of conviction without a trial or hearing. Meanwhile the Canadian Islamic Congress has graduated to shakedown tactics, calling a press conference Wednesday to announce the settlement terms on which it might cease to harass Maclean’s with “human rights” complaints. Updates, and links to sources, for these and many other developing cases, may be had through the blogs. I especially recommend that of Ezra Levant, a lawyer by training, and a magnificent aggregator and explicator of the details and arguments involved in each case. I would also put him at the top of any current list of those who actually deserve the Order of Canada, for valiant action of permanent value to our country. Mark Steyn’s website posts, and Kate McMillan’s “Small Dead Animals” blog in Saskatchewan, also belong on the shortlist of essential sources of information from day to day, and my reader may follow their links to more. The whole issue is proving too complex for conventional media reporting, although the National Post in particular has done an impressive job of trying to keep up with it. At a time when “human rights” commissars such as Barbara Hall can make us deeply ashamed of our country, it is important to remember there are Canadians like Levant, Steyn, McMillan, and many others to make us proud. I have been referring only to headline cases -- those of which the better-informed general public will be aware, already. But many others are currently defending themselves against Kafkaesque prosecutions, in dark places where media lights never shine, that require them to raise far more money for lawyers and other legal expenses than they could ever afford, against plaintiffs whose costs are paid by the taxpayer. Moreover, a large and necessarily expensive effort is needed to exhume and document the long record of past miscarriages of justice, performed by Canadian “human rights” tribunals, in the hope that eventually their numerous unpublicized victims may be vindicated, and that the rights and property wrongfully stripped from them may be restored. The notion that “freedom of speech is an American concept” -- I am quoting Dean Steacy, principal “mediator” (i.e. thought-crime investigator) for the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- is proving sadly true in the limited sense that most of the money donated to the various legal defence funds has come, via Internet, from citizens of the USA, outraged upon learning what has happened up here, and acting proactively before the same kind of moral and intellectual garbage spreads across the border. It is a further shame that the decisions of Canada’s human rights commissars have received more publicity in the States than up here. On the other hand, mainstream Canadian journalists do seem to be waking, gradually, to the realization that what has been done to their “conservative” colleagues could be done to them some day. Our Conservative government’s cowardly failure to intervene in defence of free speech and press, by e.g. immediately withdrawing the egregious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Code, gives another indication of the Canadian sleepiness and complacency. (This is the section which empowers the “human rights” commissions to go trawling for political incorrectitude on the Internet.) In light of which, perhaps the most effective way to help, is for people who have given money to the Conservative Party in the past, to make all future donations to the legal defence funds for Canadian authors, journalists, and bloggers instead, until Prime Minister Harper and company get the message. Don’t forget to send the Conservative Party a note explaining what you have done, and why. The basic strategy of the enemies of freedom in Canada has been to tie freedom’s defenders up in courts -- the HRC kangaroo courts by preference. They may or may not have erred, tactically, in creating the headline cases I have mentioned above, which have helped rally many against them who are not among the usual friends of Messrs Steyn and Levant. It is a high-risk enterprise for the HRCs, but the rewards if they succeed are substantial: for they will have eliminated the very possibility of dissent, in Canada, against the various fanatic leftist, feminist, gay activist, and Islamist agendas with which they openly ally themselves. This is a battle that absolutely must be won, if Canada is to remain a free country. But it is only one battle in the long war that will be necessary to roll back the front line against the ideologues. Getting rid of Section 13 is a crucial immediate objective. But we must follow it up by finding ways to demolish the whole apparatus of the falsely-labelled “human rights” industry, which has been infecting the Canadian legal system for decades, and has left its toxic sprue in every department of our public life. It will be a task not of an hour, but perhaps of several generations, to reclaim our country. But we must start mobilizing now. N.B. the text above is expanded from the version of the column appearing in the Ottawa Citizen, which had to be shoehorned into my usual Saturday space. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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