The Canuck
New member
Hey all, Wildalaska came up with an interesting idea on another thread and I am gonna run with it.
Some ground work...
Up here in the GWN (Great White North) we have a tribunal called the Canadian Human Rights Commission. These fine people are responsible for ensuring that peoples rights are not violated and that they enjoy a world free from hate. Good idea, huh? Well, you may think I mislabeled it a tribunal, but not in my opinion...
Some ground work...
Up here in the GWN (Great White North) we have a tribunal called the Canadian Human Rights Commission. These fine people are responsible for ensuring that peoples rights are not violated and that they enjoy a world free from hate. Good idea, huh? Well, you may think I mislabeled it a tribunal, but not in my opinion...
Nigel Hannaford said:Nigel Hannaford
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart is alive and well, and works for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. And under an assumed name, it seems.
Even those of us advocating human rights commission reform, and thus inclined to think the less of them, have been amazed this week by what goes on at the CHRC, as revealed by a tribunal prosecuting alleged hatemonger Marc Lemire.
There we were, making abstract arguments about free speech and quoting Voltaire.
There the federal snivel servants were, logging onto Internet hate sites under assumed names, trying to conceal what they were up to by using the wireless Internet account belonging to a young woman who seems to be completely uninvolved in any of it and, according to Lemire, trying to entrap people who visited his site.
Only the unusual circumstance of these people being publicly cross-examined brought any of this to light.
Boy, did we ever not quite get it. We thought this was a high-minded disagreement over fundamental principles. Instead, we find the CHRC tolerates sleazy behaviours among its investigating officers that have no place in a free society.
A quick backgrounder.
Marc Lemire is a computer whiz, and also past-president of the late Heritage Front, a neo-Nazi organization. That is to say that while a quick glance at his freedomsite.org looks mostly concerned with free speech, he is not the ideal poster boy for it.
Enter Richard Warman, a former CHRC employee but now a serial complainer to it with a seemingly boundless vulnerability to offence. He complains about offensive comments on Lemire's web page.
Lemire is then charged under Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which makes it illegal to disseminate material on the Internet "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
For Warman, it is a familiar evolution; he has done this a dozen times before with other people, and is so far 12 for 12.
Lemire, however, suspects the commission itself may be the source of some comments.
Sure enough, at the tribunal, two CHRC employees admit logging in under false names to post provocative comments.
So, how do you feel about the Canadian state using agents as provocateurs? That is, people who will pretend to think like you, egg you on until you say something you might not otherwise have said, then haul you before a human rights tribunal? Is that the role of government?
Maybe it was in the Soviet Union, maybe it is in China.
But in Canada? That's assuming you accept the Canadian state has any business having an opinion about what you think in the first place.
What high and mighty servants we Canadians do have who, having cloaked themselves in a fake identity then presume to appropriate the Internet address of a private citizen, and use it to post messages to a site most people wouldn't want to have anything to do with.
If the police set up their radar camera in your driveway, you'd have a legitimate beef. It's like that, except these people aren't even policemen investigating a real crime, they're bureaucrats trying to convict somebody of a crime that's only "likely."
Yes, police go undercover to catch drug dealers. CSIS also has covert powers. But how many agencies do we really need spying on Canadians?
There is a totalitarian feel to this. The CHRC is not a secret police, but some of its people are playing at things secret police forces do. They are not necessarily even bad people, but the KGB and the Spanish Inquisition, to name a couple of enforcers of orthodoxy, have this in common: They all believed what they were doing was a good thing, even as they trampled all over liberty. Warman, for instance, is on record: "It's imperative individuals and groups take steps as strong as they can to defend human rights in Canada, because if they're not defended, they get undermined."
But of course, the same is true of free speech.
George Orwell: "At any given moment there is ... a body of ideas of which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing."
At times in Canada, it's been the Catholics, the Jehovah's Witnesses, trade unionists, Communists and gays whose views were thought beyond the pale. Today, it's people like Lemire.
But who's next? Victoria lawyer Doug Christie, who famously defended Jim Keegstra, once remarked to me that those who would limit speech should realize one can be in the saddle today and under the horse's heels tomorrow.
Live and let live is better. The CHRC has censored Canadians long enough. It should be confined to dealing with discrimination. And, if someone must play cops and robbers, let it be the real police, under the criminal code, not some guide to what's politically correct today.
Nigel Hannaford writes for the Calgary Herald.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
Last edited: