Canada land of the ? What?
They rely on Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which defines hate speech as “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” The formulation is so nebulous that it can be successfully applied against almost anything in print, which indicates that the tribunals are akin to kangaroo courts and show trials. There are always people, after all, ready to feel misprized by something they may happen to see, hear, or read. As a result, human rights are materially abrogated by Human Rights, rendered hollow by the very bodies created to uphold them. When one of the commission’s investigators, a certain Dean Steacy, was asked what value he ascribed to freedom of speech, he replied: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”
We should keep in mind that these commissions are unelected tribunals with no accountability under law, are not bound by the presumption of innocence or the rules of evidence, are ready to accept unqualified witnesses for the prosecution, permit uninvolved third parties to file complaints, admit hearsay, are staffed by untrained and incompetent judges, do not require that the willful promotion of hatred be proven or that plaintiffs be present, are consistently unfavorable to the objections of the defense, accept anonymous posts on YouTube as evidence, and, in sum, do not operate under the normal procedures of the criminal justice system.
But although these tribunals are not real courts, they wield real power: the right to impose fines, to prohibit the defendant from speaking out, to demand formal apologies, and to prescribe jail sentences if these conditions are violated. The Human Rights Commission is essentially a contemporary revival of the notorious Camera Stellata, or Star Chamber, which sat at Westminster until 1641, enacting its arbitrary rulings on politically motivated charges.
The latest CHRC sally into the theater of the absurd is its prosecution of a former member of Parliament, Jim Pankiw, who was harshly critical of the high First Nations crime rate in his home province of Saskatchewan. One of the commission’s sock puppets, Derek A. Smith, an assistant professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, found that the color of ink used in the MP’s correspondence indicated discrimination and latent racism. Pankiw has now learned to his cost that black and red ink on white paper constitutes a mockery of aboriginal iconography and is tantamount to a cultural offense. “One could hardly claim,” Smith charged, “that the symbolism in this pamphlet is not inflammatory.” Monty Python could scarcely do better. That particular parrot is surely dead.
Thankfully, several high-profile cases were recently aborted. The imam who lodged a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission against the editor of the Western Standard, Ezra Levant, for republishing the Danish cartoons, thought better of it and withdrew his claim, though not until Levant, harassed for almost three years, was $100,000 out of pocket. The Muslim-instigated case against political writer Mark Steyn andMaclean’s current affairs magazine, which ran an excerpt from Steyn’s brilliant America Alone, was dismissed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, after much adverse publicity, on the flimsy pretext that it lacked jurisdiction over printed material (which did not prevent it from issuing a statement that it “strongly condemns the Islamophobic [sic] portrayal of Muslims”).
Further details regarding these ludicrous proceedings, which I have only sketched out here, can be gleaned from Levant’s new book Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights. More recently, the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, which spent five years investigating a hate speech complaint against B’nai Brith Canada, prompted by an anonymous and absent tipster and based on the secret report of an equally anonymous “expert,” eventually concluded there was “no reasonable basis in the evidence” for the case. In this way, our so-called Human Rights Commissions cut their losses in order to live and persecute another day.
Clearly, considerable and entirely unnecessary damage is done by so skewed a parallel legal system, essentially a form of secular Sharia. These tribunals continue to stress that group rights retain precedence over other human rights and do not recognize that freedom of expression is a Charter value. Nothing daunts a Human Rights Commission. Its latest bit of mischief is the attempt to influence the courts to accept a Muslim woman’s right to be veiled during a judicial proceeding. It has no compunction allowing a masked plaintiff or witness to trump the Charter right to a fair and open trial.
We are truly in danger of losing many of our cherished rights and freedoms in this country. A working group of American university and college professors, members of the American Political Science Association, think so too. They have objected to Toronto as the site for the Association’s 2009 conference, having come to believe, in the words of spokesman Bradley Watson, “Canada to be a problematic destination.” Cognizant of the “Canadian attacks on freedom of speech,” he feels it is “unacceptable … to risk exposing [our] members to them.”
“In the hands of barbarians,” writes Andrew C. McCarthy in Willful Blindness, the law “is an offensive weapon.” As brandished by “our swelling nomiocracy,” it has become a dangerous liability. “In the war against radical Islam,” he warns, if we fail to understand how the law can be manipulated to our disadvantage, “we are shrinking from our highest duty: to protect lives.” And, as it should go without saying, to defend “the core aspects of Western liberalism: self-determination, freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, equality under the law.”
Similarly, when asked in an interview what radical Islam portends for America, Joseph Hakim, vice president of the International Christian Union, replied: “Radical Islamists will never be integrated into American society. They will grow like a cancer, but let us not be fooled by them. They are well educated and lavishly funded. And they know when to wear suits and pretend to conform while seeking to destroy our economy [and] to exploit our system of government.” Hakim knows whereof he speaks, having observed firsthand the systematic abuse of Christian populations in Arab lands and the various methods by which radical Muslims are able to infest the body politic. According to this authority, what is at stake is the integrity of government and the health of the economy, but these are undermined most effectively through the subversion of our judicial system.
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This Human Rights Commission can be used by the Canadians against the JAHIDDIES.
Or burn up its resources with junk complaints till its fixed.
"defines hate speech as “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
Some deserve to be held up for contempt.
Many of the terrorist actions are contemptable.
The legistator who wrote this is contemptable, ignorant.
Can the Mounties get me in USA?
Tune back in and see if the Mounties will find Gerald
Will he be indicted for holding this law, the CHR, a cross
on the backs of Free Speech, IN CONTEMPT?
For calling the the CHR contemptable, for holding it
up to comtempt?
He has friends in town that will alert him to anyone
coming into town on a horse and red coat.
Gerald
Anthropologist
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