
I guess because there's been a lull in commentary about the egregious overreach of "human rights" commissions, the Canadian Human Rights Commission's chief commissar is wading back into the fray with efforts to preserve the detestable censorship provision Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Scaramouche, Five Feet of Fury and Mark Steyn are all over it. Mark writes:
Kathy Shaidle makes another point - that the CHRC is now Canada's largest publisher of racist commentary: It's the one-stop shop for all your racist needs. To take another point I made to Parliament:
Let me take the most recent example of a section 13 conviction. The sole charge on which Marc Lemire was found guilty a month ago was for a post that appeared at his website, written by somebody else. That piece was read by a grand total of just eight people in the whole of Canada, which works out to 0.8 of a Canadian per province, or if you include territories, 0.6153 of a Canadian. And almost all those 0.6153s of a Canadian going to this website and reading this piece were Richard Warman and his fellow dress-up Nazis at the Human Rights Commission, salivating at the prospect of having found another witch to provide more bounty.
In other words, no one in Canada saw this post. No one in Canada read it. Nothing could be less “likely to expose” anyone to hatred or contempt than an unread post at an unread website. Yet Canadian taxpayers paid for Jennifer Lynch and the Nazi fetishists at the commission to investigate this unread bit of nothing for six years.
In the course of securing this itsy-bitsy single conviction, these psychologically disturbed employees of the Human Rights Commission wrote and distributed far more hate speech of their own.
By the way, Kathy is absolutely right to reprint one of the "hate poems" helpfully anthologized by the CHRC. Aside from the fact that the author should have been prosecuted for his appalling false rhymes, the notion that material deemed not only criminal but dangerous if printed on a private unread web site can be disseminated perfectly legally by a far more widely read government website exposes the lie on which Commissar Lynch's lavish sinecure rests - that, if exposed to this material, the moronic citizenry would be rampaging down the 401 from one pogrom to the next.
No, they wouldn't. It's wholly irrelevant to the Queen's peace, but it's vital to control-freak conceptions of state power.
What's interesting is that under Section 13 as written there is no defense for truth and no defense for motive. The speech is deemed to be harmful because of its impact on designated minority groups, not on whether it is factually true or whether the person making the expression was inwardly motivated by hatred.
So, Jennifer Lynch et. al. could argue that their posting the tacky poem that got Mark Lemire into trouble is okay because their motivation is to show how hard they are working to rid the world of hate speech. But no, she is in violation of Section 13 as it is written.
If a magazine or a blog posts the poem for journalistic reasons, those motives would not count for a hill of beans under Section 13 and the latest postmodern "human rights" thinking if some interest group decided to make an example of you. Mark Steyn got hauled before three jurisdictions for accurately quoting Imams and citing accurate statistics about demographic trends. Truth is no defense, neither is motive under these various "human rights" codes. And clearly there are people out there who like filing complaints merely for the hassle it causes.
Yeah, yeah, the CHRT has "written in" Taylor and Jennifer Lynch has smiled her Cheshire-cat smile in agreement, while at the same time appealing the CHRT Lemire decision. What other reason than to back the previous status quo? Or to say that Lemire's poem was so hateful that it did fit the definition.
You see, the open-ended Section 13, even interpreted by the penumbra of Taylor, (which does speak to motive and narrows what constitutes hate speech) gives power to folks like Lynch that makes her the chief arbiter of what one is allowed to say or publish in Canada. It also gives activists of various stripes can use to punish their political opponents through lawfare.
Here's what the CHRC is saying now:
5.1 Definition of hatred and contempt - The Commission applies the restrictive definition of hatred and contempt established by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Taylor case. Applying this definition ensures that the exercise of the Commission’s mandate does not offend the Charter.
This means that in order to come within the ambit of section 13, the communication that is the subject of the complaint must be so excessive and extreme in nature that it suggests that a given race, sex, religion or other group identifiable in relation to one or more grounds in the CHRA is devoid of any redeeming qualities as human beings. If the message does not meet this threshold, it will not be found to come within the ambit of section 13, notwithstanding that the message is offensive, controversial, shocking or disgusting to some.
But then it thought Lemire's poem fit the bill. You can read the poem on the CHRC site here.
It goes on to talk about non-whites and people with turbans etc. displacing whites. It's the kind of stuff that would make me not want to read Mark Lemire's site and possibly explains why his readership was so low.
But should this be against the law?
Do you want Jennifer Lynch deciding? What about a legitimate news story on how some ethnic groups might be using welfare and Canada's generous family class programs to abuse our system?
Where does it end?
And then, how come you never see any human rights commission taking action against signs in downtown Toronto or Calgary talking about killing the Jews?