The Defilers News

Maranatha News publishes story of my faith journey.
April 19, 2007 The National Post published my testimony.
If you hit the subscriber wall, go here.
Christian Week Feature article "Giving the devil his due."
Read what people are saying about The Defilers here. An excerpt here.
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IMPORTANT TO NEW READERS: The site was designed to look its best and works well if you use Firefox.

If you must use Explorer, and the links don't work, try navigating away from the site, then coming back. The links may work. Sorry about that, folks. And if you are wondering why the date for this post is way in the future, it's so it will stay at the top. It's here that I put the latest news about booksignings and other events.

This spring, I will be published again in an amazing anthology called Hot Apple Cider: Words to Stir the Spirit and Warm the Soul put together by the wonderful folks at The Word Guild. I'm privileged to be part of this effort with some amazing Canadian writers who are Christian.

MP Keith Martin asks justice committee to investigate

The Catholic Register has picked up my story on Liberal MP Keith Martin's request that the Commons justice committee take a look at the Canadian Human Rights Act and the operations of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Meanwhile, check Ezra Levant's site regularly for examples of what CHRC investigators have admitted under oath to postingposted while operating under false identities. You will hope Martin is successful in getting televised hearings as the appetizer to a full-blown Royal Commission. Here's an excerpt from the Register story.

OTTAWA - Liberal MP Keith Martin has asked the House of Commons justice committee to hold televised hearings on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the law that governs it.
“I’m almost certain that they will take a look at all of those and do a very profound dissection of the Canada Human Rights Commission, of what they’re doing, of what they’re not doing in the defence of the true rights of our country,” Martin said.In late January, Martin introduced private member’s motion M-446 to remove subsection 13 (1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act. This controversial so-called “thought crimes” section says no person shall publish anything that “indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate” against any person or persons of various protected groups or material that is “likely” to expose them to “hatred or contempt.”There is no need to prove the speech or publication actually caused any adverse effects; nor is truth or fair comment a defence as they are in libel or defamation civil actions.

Human Rights conference POSTPONED!!!!

I just received an email from the Public Policy Forum that the June 3 conference examining the future of human rights commissions has been postponed. No date has been set, but the email said,
it will be rescheduled "likely next spring."

I had a feeling it would be canceled, since as late as last week, there was no word on who would participate on the panel discussion and go head to head with Warren Kinsella that afternoon. It also looked like it was shaping up to be a snore-fest, at least from this former television producer's point of view.

Most interesting.

Pope's UN talk a wake-up call to Canada

Pope Benedict's speech to the United Nations last month serves as a reminder to Canada that human rights discourse stems from a world view based on universal truths and an objective notion of right and wrong.

"Either we recover some of these assumptions and make a serious course correction," McGill University professor Douglas Farrow said, "or we begin to encounter quite rapidly the consequences."

Farrow sees Canada's human rights commissions as a sign the country is in a transitional phase, because increasingly the Canadians are seeing human rights as what we say they are.

"Thus laws can be written concerning human rights that have nothing to do with universal standards."

SNIP

"Our human rights commissars may fancy themselves gods of a sort, but their time is short," he [Farrow] said. "Events, I suspect, will pass them by. But these may well be events in which we lose more than our freedom of speech.

"You can't expect the culture that we have to simply evolve slowly and in a natural sort of way when you change quite radically the world view and the underlying assumptions."

What it was like to cover the papal visit

When I was in New York City for the Pope's visit in April, I tagged along with the Salt and Light TV team. Here's a slightly shortened version of the story I filed that gives some idea of what it was actually like to cover the event, given the overwhelming security.

NEW YORK - Salt+Light TV producer Kris Dmytrenko thought covering the Pope’s visit to the United States April 15-20 would be like “being a pilgrim with access.”

“It was very different than what I imagined,” Dmytrenko, 28, said. “I thought I’d have free access to roam around, a ‘backstage pass.’ ”

“I was very excited about this trip to cover Pope Benedict XVI’s first trip to the U.S.A.,” said Salt+ Light TV camera operator Wally Tello, 43.

Tello remembered Pope John Paul II’s visit to his native Peru in 1984. Since the nunciature was a few blocks away from his home in Lima, he got to see him up close.

This time however, Dmytrenko, Tello and fellow producer David Naglieri, 27, found themselves swept into a gruelling round of 18-hour days that started with dogs sniffing all cameras and laptops for explosives, hand searches of briefcases, hair-raising bus rides under police escort and Secret Service or diocesan minders keeping everyone in assigned locations.

The Public Policy Forum devotes day to HRCs

The June 3 conference entitled Next Gen Human Rights: the future of Canada's human rights commissions begins with a keynote speech by the Canadian Human Rights Commission's chief commissioner Jennifer Lynch.

The policy panel afterwards gives no names of participants. It is interesting, however, that the panel's billing includes these words: "The panel will also look at the challenges of moving Canadian society in the direction of greater respect for individual and group rights, and will consider whether the commissions are the appropriate tools for that policy goal."

The former television producer in me is going Ack! Ack! Boring alert at the questions this panel will consider. Among them: "Can HRCs be made to be more effective? How?" The other questions will drown the morning in the details of process.

The afternoon features a debate between Warren Kinsella and . . . ? Liberal MP Keith Martin is invited. But not confirmed.

If I were Keith Martin I would not accept the invitation. Martin should debate another MP, not a spinmeister. Have you ever noticed how most panels on television do not mix apples and oranges?

They do not put journalists or columnists up against spin doctors. They do not put politicians up against journalists. They reserve special debates within these various groupings and seldom mix people up outside their genres.

The best person to debate Kinsella is fellow lawyer, blogger and Conservative spinmeister Ezra Levant.

The only reason why Mark Steyn debated the Socks was because they are the public face of the complaint against him.

I have a feeling this gathering is going to be a preaching- to- the- converted fest.
It is awfully expensive for a day so it will discourage various bloggers from attending.

Did Obama really say this?

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

Does he expect people in Arizona to turn off their airconditioning when it is 116 F outside?

Does he expect people in Minnesota to turn down their thermostats when it is -30 F in the dead of winter?

Is he going to create a bunch of thermostat police with extraordinary powers to break into peoples' homes to make sure they have it down to 50 F in the winter and up to 90 in the summer? Is Michele Obama going to monitor whether we eat too much?

Is he going to bring in a Carbon Tax like Stephane Dion promises?

Is that the kind of leadership he's talking about? As much as I'd love to see a black president of the United State, please, not Obama. I wish McCain would choose a viable black candidate for president as his running mate.

h/t ffof

via sda

I loved it when this guy was U.S. Ambassador to the UN

John Bolton is terrifying to pompous asses, the intellectually effete, and the feminized nice people who think Jimmy Carter was a great president. I loved it when he was U.S. ambassor to the United Nations and cut through the b.s. with his simple, forceful, principled stands. How refreshing.

In today's Wall Street Journal he writes:

Mr. Obama hopes to characterize the debate about international negotiations as one between his reasonableness and the hard-line attitude of a group of unilateralist GOP cowboys.

The real debate is radically different. On one side are those who believe that negotiations should be used to resolve international disputes 99% of the time. That is where I am, and where I think Mr. McCain is. On the other side are those like Mr. Obama, who apparently want to use negotiations 100% of the time. It is the 100%-ers who suffer from an obsession that is naïve and dangerous.

Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. Saying that one favors negotiation with, say, Iran, has no more intellectual content than saying one favors using a spoon. For what? Under what circumstances? With what objectives? On these specifics, Mr. Obama has been consistently sketchy.

Like all human activity, negotiation has costs and benefits. If only benefits were involved, then it would be hard to quarrel with the "what can we lose?" mantra one hears so often. In fact, the costs and potential downsides are real, and not to be ignored.

I love the clarity and precision in this op ed. Read it all.

And check out Mark Steyn's latest on the talk/talk policy approach. He's another one who makes those without backbones shudder.

Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

Robert Sibley's prescription: recover the virtue of real tolerance

Robert Sibley wraps up his excellent Ottawa Citizen series on tolerance today in part three entitled: A Return to Tolerance. Please read the whole series. Link to it. Save it. Refer to it often. And get a subscription to the Citizen to support this kind of great, thoughtful contribution to the ideas in the public square. If only, if only, our politicians sounded like this in Question Period and in Commons debates.

Sibley sums up the problem:

Indeed, dissatisfied with tolerance as a virtuous habit of patience and forbearance, we've tried to sidestep the need for it though various attempts to overcome our flawed nature. Whether through politics or pills, biotechnology or behavioural modification, we seek to order human experience in terms of safe, comfortable and passive contentment. As philosopher John Gray puts it: "Grounded as it is in accepting the imperfectability of the human lot, (classical) toleration is bound to be uncongenial to the ruling illusions of the epoch, all of which cherish the project of instituting a political providence in human affairs whereby tragedy and mystery would be banished."

Isn't this a wonderful picture of the kind of inherent utopianism animating the likes of Barbara Hall and other purveyors of the new so-called "human rights" regime? If only she could rein us all in through her carrots and sticks, we could all live happily ever after in a hyper-tolerant heaven on earth, brought to you by our tax dollars and our ideological superiors. Does she not realize she is the modern Inquisitor of today, with the state power to root out and suppress heresy?

But Robert Sibley provides a prescription that is an emetic for the ideological constipation that's fogging our Canadian brains:

For nearly five decades postmodern intellectuals have claimed that the assimilation of non-western immigrants is wrong because it presumes the superiority of western culture. These cultural relativists insist that the contemporary West, with its hard-won heritage of the rule of law, political freedom and individual rights, is no better than those cultures that remain tyrannical, violent and oppressive. The result has been a "therapeutic multiculturalism," to borrow philosopher Michael Walzer's phrase, that promotes the relativity of all cultures and values. But this relativistic multiculturalism amounts to a de facto surrender of those values and traditions that are the very source of tolerance. Therapeutic multiculturalism, says Walzer, threatens to undermine "every sort of common identity and standard behaviour," creating "postmodern vagabonds" who "may not be the most tolerant fellow citizens."

Unfortunately, this imprudent thinking has infected the public mind with uncertainty and doubt regarding western values and achievements. So much so, says philosopher Roger Scruton, that "western societies are experiencing an acute crisis of identity." Many westerners no longer conceive of themselves according to the Enlightenment ideal as rational creatures capable of rising above the limitations of birth, culture or geography. Now they assume their sense of identity, their sense of belonging, is tied to a particular religion, ethnic group or lifestyle community. This is a reversion to tribalism. And to the degree postmodern multiculturalism fosters this new tribalism, it threatens the West's liberal heritage.

The retention and continuance of that heritage requires putting an end to the self-flagellating psychology of anti-western postmodernism. One small step in this direction is the recovery of toleration, properly conceived. Genuine toleration presumes disagreement. This disagreement, however, is accompanied a willingness to treat the one with whom you disagree decently and respectfully. That doesn't mean, as the postmodern multicultists insist, that you are required to support, nourish, esteem or validate beliefs or lifestyles with which you disagree.

Amen! Amen! Amen! Great work, Robert Sibley. Thanks for an excellent contribution to the debate and for providing all of us with an intellectual framework to bolster our arguments. May your series be read and reread and studied far and wide.

Part one.

Part two.

Most interesting review of Prince Caspian--the Movie

Thomas S. Hibbs writes a most interesting review of Prince Caspian, the movie based on C.S. Lewis' book of the same name from the beloved Narnia series.

He writes:

A wonderful scene in the second half of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — the second film in the Narnia series, based on C. S. Lewis’s beloved books — highlights the importance of cultivating a memory of the past in the face of strong cultural and political tendencies toward decay and decline. Returning to Narnia after a one-year absence (1,300 years in Narnia time), the Pevensie children — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) — find themselves in a cave whose walls are covered with ancient drawings. The drawings are memorials to them and their heroic feats in Narnia; it turns out that they have entered a sort of crypt built around the stone tablet on which Aslan was murdered and from which he rose to defeat the White Witch.

The sense of the remote past, as both almost lost and yet recoverable, permeates Lewis’s book. Yet, apart from the scene in the cave, the film neglects this theme in favor of grand battles and a budding romance between Caspian (in a rather lackluster performance by Ben Barnes) and Susan. Indeed, devoted readers of Lewis’s books will likely take umbrage at the many changes the filmmakers have introduced. The unsettling question they ought to be asking themselves is whether the film transforms what, following Chesterton, we might call a great romance of orthodoxy into a Hollywood bubble-gum romance.

(. . . )

Hibbs praises aspects of the movie, but goes on to highlight what Lewis was trying to do in his novel that the movie lacks.

Lewis is doing more here than giving us a prolix prelude to a final battle. He is attempting to captivate his audience with the art of storytelling and with the superiority of real history over what passes for knowledge of the past in contemporary culture or in an ordinary academic setting. Lewis is also telling us something about the eponymous Caspian, a royal son, raised by his scheming uncle Miraz — who, it turns out, murdered Caspian’s father, and whose opportunistic desire to care for Caspian dissolves once his own wife gives birth to a son. We also learn that Caspian is from his youth a “lover of the Old Things,” in contrast to his uncle, who actively seeks to suppress the ancient and heroic history of Narnia.

Now, it makes sense to streamline Lewis’s historical narration, but, apart from the scene in the cave, the film fails to find a way to inject its version of the story with Lewis’s sense of devotion to the “Old Things.” Stressing Caspian’s longing to revive a lost way of life would have given his character greater gravity, something needed in the film to counterbalance the boyish good looks of Ben Barnes. His pretty appearance, the lack of character depth, and the filmmakers decision to focus on his innocuous flirtations with Susan render him a less than persuasive embodiment of Lewis’s main character.

I have become a lover of Old Things, someone who desires to recover a lost past. I feel I am walking among the precious ruins of Western Civilization, hoping somehow we can revive what was best about it. I also believe the pivotal moment in human history began with the incarnation of Jesus Christ and culminated in His death on the Cross. That is the history we most need to recover, so that we know He rose again, and because He lives, so can we live forever with Him.

At my little church, we use the King James version of the Bible, and the old Book of Common Prayer, once the glory of the Anglican Church, but now in the dustbins of most Canterbury churches. Instead they have a Book of Alternative Services that has modern inclusive language written by people with a tin ear for poetry and a dead ear for the still small voice of God.

Must read primer on tolerance by Robert Sibley

One of the things I have been trying to do on this blog is to try to sharpen my own thinking about human rights and freedom of speech so that I can be an able defender of our fundamental freedoms now under attack in Canada. I am looking for clear ideas, logical arguments, thoughtful approaches that cut through the confusion and relativism of our present cultural Alzheimer's disease.

Today, The Ottawa Citizen's Robert Sibley, in part two of a series, does such an excellent job of placing what ails us in context in a piece entitled Define True Patriot Love. It's a beautifully-written, philosophically-grounded but accessible look at how we have come to this present pass. Please print it off and read it. Link to it, quote it, and reread it and refer to it often. It is an excellent primer.

Sibley is one of the reasons why the Ottawa Citizen still rises to be a great paper in a post-Conrad Black world. I would also advise those who are interested in pursuing the ideas trail further to check out some of his sources, especially J. Budziszewski, a modern-day expert on natural law and the role of the conscience. His seminal essay Revenge of the Conscience is also a must-read.

Sibley writes:

Postmodern hyper-toleration is arguably a reaction to the decline of what philosophers and theologians call ethical theism. The term refers to the assertion that there are unchanging standards of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. When Christianity held sway over the western mind, these ethical concepts were tied to the reality of God's existence. God was the guarantor of moral standards. This theistic ground provided the moral bedrock of western civilization.

However, as philosopher Charles Taylor argues, the God-based worldview has lost its hold on the western mind since the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Many westerners no longer regard God as the source of truth and morality. Many believe, unreflectively or not, there are no eternal moral truths, that morality is what humans decide it is, while the "truth" of reality is determined by the methods of science. This secular notion that we are the sole determiners of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood, informs the modern project to remake the world according to our will and technological capacity. As secular moderns, we made unencumbered human reason our faith, believing it provides us with the means to create heaven on Earth.

Only it hasn't worked out that way. Trench warfare, concentration camps, crematoria, killing fields and cities obliterated in a flash of light and heat; such phenomena, the unintended consequences of the marriage of science and will, have cast a shadow on modernity. As Taylor observes, the success of secularism depended on science's "disenchantment" of the world, but now there is widespread disenchantment with secular humanism. The narratives of modernity that replaced religion as the West's dominant "social imaginaries" -- faith in rationalism, belief in progress, the pursuit of objective truth, etc. -- are now under attack.

On this point we enter the Alice-in-Wonderland world of postmodernism. To the postmodern mind, "truth" is whatever you, or the group with which you "identify," say it is. In the words of theologian Stanley Grenz, "Truth is relative to the community in which a person participates. And since there are many communities, there are necessarily many truths."

Reason suffers a similar fate. Scientific reason is a "social construct," something we have been conditioned to accept because of the hegemonic power of western technology. Likewise, all this Enlightenment nattering about universal values is merely an expression of western imperialism, an attempt by white men to assert planetary rule under the guise of high ideals. According to the postmodernists, anyone (read: white western males) who tries to claim that what he says is objectively true, and uses this "truth" to judge the values, beliefs or lifestyle of another culture or group, is engaging in a power play to dominate that culture or group.

This deconstruction of the western cultural heritage produces the postmodern claim that all cultures are equal -- cultural relativism, in short. This idea, in turn, radically inflates the concept of tolerance. It is no longer sufficient to "tolerate" or endure the views of others for the sake of civil peace. Now you must accept different views as equally valid, equally worthy of respect, and equally legitimate in terms of social function. Everything and everyone must not only be tolerated, but also recognized, esteemed, valued and validated regardless of content or consequence.

Part one of Sibley's series is here.

The great sleight of hand that stole our rights

The editorial writers at the National Post get it. They have a deep enough philosophical and legal grounding to give them a clear-sighted view of the crux of the problem facing Canada today.

That vision comes out in today's editorial entitled Mangling the Charter on the most recent Supreme Court of Canada decision the editors find troubling. The money quote:

Justice Abella's reasoning on publication bans goes against what we had thought was the first rule of Canadian public law: The Charter of Rights is there to protect citizens from the government, not from private actions. Citing a heap of tendentious sociological evidence, the majority in D. B. argues that "lifting a ban on publication makes the young person vulnerable to greater psychological and social stress. Accordingly, it renders the sentence significantly more severe." As newspaper editors, we are startled to learn that our reporting could be logically considered part of a judicial sentence against a criminal.

In case you missed it: "The Charter of Rights is there to protect citizens from the government, not from private actions."

This is such an important concept and it lies at the heart of the whole debate concerning so-called human rights commissions. The Human Rights Commissions are acting as if the Charter is there to give them extraordinary powers to trample foundational human rights in the name of alleged victim groups, often through complaints on behalf of these groups by persons who are not themselves members of that group.

What gives the state the right to come in and trample on fundamental civil rights like freedom of speech in the guise of protecting citizens from speech that may offend them?

Sometime over the past 40 years, even before the Charter, Canadians have missed the sleight of hand that switched our civil rights, based on 800 years of tradition, and replaced it with the Nanny state's bogus, ersatz concept of rights based on the hocus pocus social science propaganda. Shoot, I got my degree in Sociology. It masquerades as a science.

With our eyes focused on the "glittering" social science data, the magicians of an illiberal regime have replaced our God-given rights and freedoms with a power-hungry state that is seizing power to suppress rights in the guise of protecting vulnerable citizens. Yet when real civil rights are being trampled by thuggish behavior, sometimes by criminal warlords acting in the name of some disadvantaged group, the state backs off to avoid confrontation. Instead it picks on people who have done little more than express an unpopular opinion but pose no violent threat to anyone.

Thus the latest jerk with a PhD in social sciences riven with materialist and reductionist philosophies gets persuade our secular fundie elites to throw out our common heritage based on titanic thinkers going back to Moses, Plato, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Burke, Locke and on and on.

Wake up, Canada. But given the kind of thinking now dominating our Supreme Court, it may already be too late.

Wow-- A "human rights" decision in favor of a Christian group!

Generally, human rights commissions and tribunals tend to punish Christians. They uphold complaints against them. And they tend to dismiss complaints made by Christians when someone has discriminated against them or defamed them as a group and spread calumnies about their religion.

But the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal accepted a complaint by a campus pro-life group and now this group has reached a settlement with the campus student union. LifeSiteNews.com reports:

VANCOUVER, May 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) –The Capilano College Heartbeat Club and the Capilano Students Union (CSU) have reached an agreement that will see the pro-life Heartbeat Club achieve CSU club recognition, pending they submit an application in the fall. The parties released a joint statement shortly after the agreement had been made:

"The Heartbeat Club filed a Human Rights complaint against the Capilano Students' Union. The Club and the CSU have entered into a settlement agreement which is confidential. The parties agree that there is no admission of liability by the CSU and that the Heartbeat Club will be entitled to CSU club status if they apply."

The summer of 2006 saw the CSU pass a motion put forward by a member of the campus “Women’s Center” that made the group an official “pro-choice” organization. Shortly after, the CSU denied the Heartbeat Club’s application requesting official CSU club status. After a second application was also denied, for the reason that the club would hinder "a woman's right to choose", Heartbeat forwarded a complaint to the British Columbia human rights tribunal, that stated the club was being discriminated based on religious belief.

Har har har, heh heh heh, har har har. This is too funny.

Next time someone says or writes something to hold Christians up for contempt, an emboldened member of my religion might complain, invoking Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act or its provincial counterparts. It won't be me, but frankly, I can understand why some of my fellow believers might be so inclined.

All these lefties who have been upholding Section 13 when it targets legitimate Christian and conservative opinion will suddenly join the cause of freedom of speech because they can't defame Christians anymore if we see more Christian complaints and more being acted upon by commissions and tribunals. Next time some political columnist refers to social conservatives as knuckledraggers, he or she might have to go through the crazy abusive process that Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are going through. Not that I agree with doing that on principle, but a lot of my fellow Christians have decided enough is enough. They have had it with a process that is anti-Christian to its roots and are going to start insisting they get a fair place at the multicultural table if that's the one that is being set.

What's fair is fair. If we are going to have these oppressive laws, then Christians need to be protected by them too. No more discrimination against us, not more defamation, no more holding us in contempt.

No wonder the folks at Rabble have realized they better fight for freedom of speech. They would have been toast for their cartoon of the Pope giving the Heil Hitler salute to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Talk about hate speech and defamation in that thread. Ugh. Disgusting.


DO YOU GET IT YET??????

A negative image of Canada's Justice system

Mark Steyn has called the "human rights" apparatus of federal and provincial commissions and tribunals a parallel justice system. He's right. But it is not only a parallel system, it increasingly seems to me to be a negative image of our criminal justice system. In a film negative, the dark spots will come out light in the developed picture, and the light portions will be dark. The "human rights" apparatus is a reverse image of Canada's criminal justice system. Black is white and white is black.

I belong to Capital Crime Writers, a great writers group for novelists, short story writers and aspiring novelists who work in the mystery, crime and suspense genres. I'm on the committee that books guests to speak at the once a month meetings, and last Wednesday it was my pleasure to introduce an assistant Crown Attorney, who spoke at length about her job.

If the Socks make you discouraged about the present state of our law schools, the bright, pretty assistant Crown Attorney would have reassured you that all is not lost, that some young law students are still being schooled in good principles based on the rule of law. You would have found her intelligent, articulate, logical, idealistic in the pursuit of real justice, committed to principles such as innocent before proven guilty, rules of evidence, and the Crown's pursuit of truth rather than convictions--i.e. the disinterest on the Crown's part of winning a case just for the sake of winning.

She spoke about the good faith that she experiences in the courtroom among all members of the bar and with the police, good faith assumptions that people will be operating according to these same principles.

What a contrast to what is emerging about the ways human rights commissions operate. Would a real Canadian court of law ever allow evidence to be switched at the request of the Crown in cahoots with an alleged victim? The assistant Crown Attorney spoke about the fact that they have to disclose everything they have to the defense attorney, including copies of the police notebooks and all the witness statements, even those of witnesses that might have testimony that is injurious to a possible conviction.

Where are the copies of the notebooks belonging to the Canadian Human Rights Commission investigators? Where are the detailed explanations of when and how they assumed the Jadewarr identity to go online and lurk on possible hate sites? Or do they even keep detailed logs of what they do? Is that the reason why there is so much "I don't remember" and "I don't know" ?

Another thing that is interesting given the Justice Department's brief in support of the thought crimes provision, is the stress on the effect of hate speech on potentially vulnerable groups.
This is why the intent of the alleged hatemonger is not considered relevant, nor are defenses of truth or fair comment.

Think about it. One of the key ingredients in a criminal case is mens rea, or a "guilty mind."

If I bump into someone accidentally that is quite different from my deliberately assaulting them
and Canada's criminal justice system recognizes that.

But if I accidentally publish alleged hate speech, even if I have no intent to publish hate speech--AND DON'T ACTUALLY HATE ANYONE--I'm toast if a designated vulnerable group feels like complaining my words are likely to expose them to hatred or contempt down the road.

As a journalist, I could write about crime statistics that show some groups are disproportionately represented, I could write about various overseas conflicts, I could write about some Catholic doctrines, or I could quote what some radicals within some violent movements actually say and find myself the subject of a complaint and ground to a powder by a process that is so oriented towards potential victims that there is no need to show that an actual crime has been committed against them, only the likelihood of their being exposed to hatred or contempt down the road at some undefinable date.

Another thing that struck me about the Justice Dept. brief was its internal contradictions.

The brief states:

2. Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) prohibits only a very narrow range of speech, specifically expressions of "unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and villification," (the quote comes from the Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor in 1990) There is little or no truth value in hate propaganda to attract the protection of the Charter.

Interesting. The Supreme Court's words would seem to speak to intent, when referring to "unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation".....and the court seems to be speaking to the importance of truth when it uses words like calumny and villification, because both these words basically mean spreading lies with a deliberate attempt to harm.

Yet later in the brief the Justice Dept. states:

37. . . .The defences of truth and fair comment remain available to torts such as defamation and seditious libel, regardless of the medium in which they occur. However, none of the traditional media can avail themselves of those defences in cases of alleged hate propaganda . . .

Frankly, if Section 13 actually had the words from the Taylor decision included, that decision might have provided guidance for various commissioners so that complaints against various Christians and against Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant and the Chronicle Herald cartoonist would have been dismissed immediately.

But it human rights commissions are not interpreting Section 13 and the provincial counterparts to that section in light of Taylor. They have gone way beyond the very narrow parameters the Supreme Court justices envisioned when they upheld its constitutionality. And yet the Justice Dept. brief as the audacity to say revisiting S. 13 in the courts would be an abuse of process.

What was designed with the best of intentions has run amok like Frankenstein.

I might even support some kind of law against group defamation that falls under the Supreme Court's guidelines in Taylor, as long as truth and fair comment remained defenses and one's hateful intent had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And if there was a built-in fairness so that the accused legal bills were picked up (or assigned to the complainant) unless he or she was found guilty under these very limited circumstances. And if I could have a real, impartial, trained judge instead of an ideologue presiding.

The Pro-life Movement is the Civil Rights Movement of today

The pro-life movement is the civil rights movement of today. That was the message of the 11th annual National March for Life that drew 7,800 to Parliament Hill May 8.

"We now treat unborn babies like blacks were treated," Alveda King, the daughter of civil rights activist Rev. A.D. King and niece of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., told a news conference sponsored by the parliamentary pro-life caucus.

Even thought DNA and ultrasound tell us that unborn babies are people, they are treated as if they are not. It is discrimination to get inconvenient people out of our lives by calling them subhuman, or a mere clump of cells, she said.

She decried the growing practice of sex selection abortion that has created skewed populations in countries like China. People want a boy, but they "hide their discriminatory attitudes towards females behind the discrimination of abortion. Blacks and the disabled are also targeted this way.

King (on the right) stands with members of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.

Rob Nicholson sighted in Ottawa

I have had two Rob Nicholson sightings in the past two days! From reports, these sightings are pretty rare. For example, the Justice Minister has not responded to Mark Steyn's requests for interviews, so Mark wondered if he had entered a witness protection program.
I know of at least one other journalist who has tried to find him for an interview and had no luck. Ezra Levant recently urged Nicholson to call his office.

My first sighting occurred on Wednesday. I was walking along the first floor corridor in East Block
and poof! There he was! I was so shocked that all I could muster was, "Hello, Mr. Nicholson."

He's a very nice, cordial man. So, he said "hello" back. He moved by too fast for me to say anything more. I wondered whether he has ever read my blog.

To my surprise---I saw him again on Thursday morning. I felt like a bird watcher who had managed to sight the same rare species twice in a row in different environs. But he was faaaaaar away, up high on a platform at the head table of the Canadian National Prayer Breakfast, while I was seated at a round table in the Congress Centre ballroom way towards the back.

Nicholson sat next to representatives of the three other political parties in the House of Commons and read a Scripture passage selected by Judy Graves, a Vancouver homeless advocate who gave the keynote speech. Bloc MP Raymond Gravel was up there, too, wearing his Roman collar. NDP Leader Jack Layton was up there reading Scripture, too--the only party leader I could see at the packed event that has grown too large to be hosted on Parliament Hill anymore. There were more than 800 people, including MPs from all parties, ambassadors, clergy and religious leaders.

It is my hunch that Nicholson does not agree with the Justice Department brief that has caused such an uproar on the blogosphere, though I do not know Nicholson in the same way I know many of the other MPs and cabinet ministers. Given how busy cabinet ministers are, it is distinctly possible that he had not even read it, though I imagine (and I hope) he has now, or his staff deserve to be fired en masse.

There are others who know me well enough to talk to me off the record, but he's not one of them. Nicholson is caution personified. I think that's why he was put into the job and Vic Toews shuffled from Justice to Treasury Board. While Toews is eminently quotable , Nicholson is a master of blandness. You'll never catch him making a gaffe (which is why he was put in the post during the controversial marriage debate), but you're pretty unlikely to see him quoted anywhere either, because journalists are looking for spicy 7-second sound bites, or quotes that zing off the page. Nicholson deliberately does not provide them.

Ezra Levant has a good overview today of the growing momentum to end the abuses of so-called human rights commissions.

He writes:

It's tough to gauge political momentum in Ottawa, especially from 3,000 kilometres away. But I think that the campaign to abolish section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the thought crimes section, is positively buzzing.

Well, I'm here in Ottawa and yes, it is positively buzzing. But a lot of the buzzing is still behind the scenes. My tally of MPs who support MP Keith Martin's motion to axe s. 13 continues to grow well beyond the number whose support has been identified publicly.

But the press gallery has not picked up on that buzz. For example when Keith Martin scrummed yesterday at the microphone in the House of Commons foyer and called the Justice Department brief "shocking," the size of the scrum was not exactly huge and bristling with microphones. CP's Joan Bryden drifted by as did the CBC's Julie Van Dusen, but I don't think they stuck around long. CPAC was there, but asked a question on something else. Mostly it was CFRB Radio bureau chief Brian Lilley and myself.


As Ezra points out, now that the Justice Department has filed a brief in support of the controversial thought crimes provision, the mess has landed on the Justice Minister's lap and he is going to have to respond:

But the chemical reaction really heated up when the Department of Justice released its outrageous legal brief in support of section 13. The kind of junk arguments in that memo -- that slavery and the Holocaust wouldn't have happened had there been hate speech laws; that the legal defences of truth and fair comment ought not to apply to "hate speech"; that Jews rely on hate speech laws for their self-esteem, etc. -- are the sort of thing one encounters all the time at human rights commissions. But what made this so stunning was that it was a memo written by two of the Justice Minister's own lawyers, Simon Fothergill and Alysia Davies, not some arms-length commission. These weren't CHRC nutbars. They were Rob Nicholson's own nutbars. And 50 pages really lets a guy and a gal express their nuttiness well.

That memo caused a buzz on my own website, spiking traffic, and not just from outraged readers (including appalled conservatives and Conservatives). Judging from my visitor statistics, plenty of folks in Parliament, the Justice Department, the Federal Court of Canada and various human rights commissions were very interested in the public reaction the memo got -- including that it got a public reaction at all. I understand that Blazing Catfur, who has done a particularly good job at rebutting the junk law in that memo, has received a spike in nervous visitors from both the Justice Department and the CHRC, too.

But the memo (which you can read here if you have the stomach) has caused a ruckus bigger than the blogosphere. I have had two reporters -- who haven't reported on HRCs before -- e-mail me to get background on the memo. One reporter -- to his credit! -- didn't even believe the memo was real, asking me for corroboration that it wasn't a "forged document". That's exactly how I reacted to so many of the insane details about the CHRC when I first encountered them: I simply didn't believe they were real. (I mean, if a Hollywood screenwriter came up with this, it would be rejected by test audiences with a "yeah, right!")

This document is radioactive. But it is couched in a lot of bromides about human dignity that are appealing on the surface, lulling the unwary and concealing its draconian elements, such as that truth and fair comment are no defense when it comes to alleged hate speech; or that revisiting the constitutionality of s. 13 would be an abuse of process. Or its insistence that human beings are irrational and therefore they need to have hate speech laws. Yeah, and leftwing ideologues know so much more about human nature than the philosophical titans who provided much of the foundational thinking for our traditional understanding of the rule of law and real human rights. The document basically chucks reason out the window and assumes that we need the likes of people like Ontario Human Rights Commissar Barbara Hall or Canadian Human Rights Commissar Jennifer Lynch to monitor our irrational tendencies.

Who is going to monitor their irrational tendencies?

We may not see action immediately. Marc Lemire is not someone I suspect the Tories want to risk making a poster boy for freedom of speech. Taliban fighter Omar Khadr gets more sympathy as a former child soldier experiencing an alleged miscarriage of justice than Lemire does, at least on the front pages of Canada's newspapers.

A response may have to wait until after Mark Steyn and Maclean's Magazine go before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. (If the Commission folks are smart they will dismiss this complaint, like yesterday).

I hope Keith Martin is successful in getting the Commons justice committee to hold televised hearings that will require members of the commission to testify and face examination and also give an opportunity for those pro and con the thought crimes provision to speak. The best bet, however, would be for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to call for a Royal Commission headed up by great nonpartisan legal minds who could subpoena witnesses and make them testify under oath. We need not only an examination of the law, but also an examination of the process.

This independent commission could then make recommendations that the government can put in place, with I hope the support of most parties. Harper was able to bypass the controversy over Afghanistan by a similar move. He might find that calling a Royal Commission the most responsible way to proceed.