The next election will be fought on censorship say Libs

Okay, everyone's back from a two week break and guess what's going to be on the agenda for the Liberals? Bill C-10 and the threat of cutting subsidies for filmmakers who produce material the government deems unacceptable. Oh those censorious Tories! (When of course as Andrew Coyne explained so well, Bill C-10 has nothing to do with censorship.)

Here's what Stephane Dion had to say in a scrum today when questioned why he had moved Denis Corderre to a different critic portfolio and whether it had anything to do with internal attacks on Dion's leadership:

The Hon. Stéphane Dion: Not at all. All this is speculations that have nothing to do with the reality. The reality is the following. The arts is under attack with C-10. Official languages going nowhere and it's my plan, the Dion plan that is in danger to disappear. I'm sending on these files one of my best fighters and I may say to the people of the arts and official languages, with Denis Coderre, you have a strong fighter and we will win.

As you may recall, M. Dion was not exactly forthcoming when it came to supporting freedom of speech, but when it comes to films like Young People F***** and other tax-sponsored crap, he's all for making you and me pay for it, whether we like it or not.

Oh, and more Cadman. Sigh. Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc is making a video presentation on the Cadman "affair" tomorrow.

I'll close with an excerpt from Andrew Coyne's column on the C-10 artistic freedom issue.

Just so we're clear: absolutely no one would be forbidden by Bill C-10 from making any kind of movie they liked — violent, sexual, uneducational, whatever. They just might not be able to get public funding to do it. That's not censorship. It's judgment. The public has every right, through its representatives, to decide how its money is spent. If artists don't want to abide by the rules, no one's forcing them to take the cash. If free speech were really their thing, they'd go after laws that criminalize speech, including the obscenity and hate speech bans. But that kind of censorship they're okay with. It's only when their immortal right to reach into someone else's wallet is imperilled that they mount the barricades.

UPDATE:

Here's Denis Corderre in a post Question Period scrum today:

Question: Mr. Coderre, how do you feel about losing Defence?

Denis Coderre: I'm gaining Heritage and I think that you know, it's a privilege of a leader to define what's your, what's your position after a year and a half. Passionately of course, I took care of that issue, but C-10 and all the issue on censorship will be a key issue for the next campaign. And you know that Mr. Dion is very, very sensitive regarding everything arts and culture. It's a major industry and I think that we need to bring back more sensitivity at that level. There's the Quebec question of course, official languages, Radio-Canada, CBC. So I'm going to, I'm going to take care, I'm sure you're going to cut that on your (laughter)...

I wonder if somehow Keith Martin's message on the real censorship of human rights commissions, abusing human rights and fundamental freedoms, is getting garbled into a fight on artistic license at taxpayers' expense?

The state of human rights thinking in Canada

Can be measured by this reaction to Geert Wilder's Fitna by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour, now UN Human Rights high commissioner.

She said:

Arbour urged all those who understandably feel profoundly offended by its provocative message to restrict themselves to denouncing its hateful content by peaceful means.

"There is a protective legal framework, and the resolution of the controversy that this film will generate should take place within it," she added.

She also urged lawmakers everywhere to discharge their responsibility under Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

"They should offer strong protective measures to all forms of freedom of expression, while at the same time enacting appropriate restrictions, as necessary, to protect the rights of others," Arbour said.

She noted that equally, they should prohibit any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence."

I can live with the Criminal Code hate speech laws, but this statement smacks of the kind of "balancing" that the Alberta Human Rights Commissioner did in the Boisson case, where his rights to freedom of religion of and of expression were balanced right out of the equation.

H/t Ghost of a Flea, who guesses that Arbour hasn't watched Fitna. (I confess I haven't watched it either as I don't wish to see a real beheading on film and I don't need convincing these things are happening), via Jay Currie.

What if there were a Canadian Patriotism Commission?

What if there were a Canadian Patriotism Commission that was designed to be an administrative, low-cost way for Canadians to complain about potentially treasonous acts on the part of fellow citizens?

Instead of difficult to prove and prosecute Criminal Code provisions, there would be a Canadian Patriotism Act that would make it illegal to publish or communicate publicly anything that was likely to expose the government to hatred or contempt. Truth would not be a defense, nor would intent. Your accusers would need no proof that your treasonous communication actually resulted in any rupture of peace and good government.

Normal rules of evidence would not apply. You would be presumed guilty until you spent an arm and a leg trying to prove your innocence, but that is unlikely to happen. Your only hope was to be able to raise enough money to get your case appealed in a higher court.

Do you think the Left might wake up if the government created such a commission?

At last week's Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing, Dean Steacy mentioned CSIS among the agencies, including the RCMP and big city police forces, that Commission "investigators" have looked at cooperating with. CSIS?

Is it a big leap from investigations of hate to investigations of treason? Or substitute another t-word---terrorism?

The Left has raised huge outcries concerning government surveillance of cell phone and electronic communications to stop terrorists. Maybe the Right has been too complacent about government intrusions into privacy in the name of security.

Here's a link to a most interesting interview with Lawrence Wright on the New Yorker's website about electronic surveillance, and the new threats to the West given new technology.

It would be nice to see a convergence of all people of good will on finding a proper balance between security concerns and fundamental freedoms. But setting up administrative agencies that have coercive state powers to snoop, entrap and to punish with the blessing of a law that is so open-ended that legitimate political dissent can be attacked as treasonous is not the way to go.

So why then are human rights commissions, with all the weaknesses of my hypothetical patriotism commission, getting such a free pass from the Left?

The most beautiful boy in the world

Sorry I've been AWOL from blogging lately. I was visiting The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, who happens to be my grandson.

Celebrations mark 350th anniversary of Canada's first Catholic bishop

Canadian Christianity picked up one of my Quebec stories. The picture shows Sr. Lucienne Boisvert and Fr. Jacques Gourde in the courtyard of the Vieux Seminaire that Bishop Laval founded.

OTTAWA -- The upcoming 2008 International Eucharistic Congress coincides not only with the 400th anniversary of Quebec City's founding, but also with the 350th anniversary of Canada's first bishop Francois de Laval and the 300th anniversary of his death.

"He built the church with boldness," said Father Jacques Gourde, who, with Sister Lucienne Boisvert, is organizing a series of special events to mark the Jubilee year begun on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception December 8.

Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980, Laval established the first cathedral in North America as well as the New World's first Catholic seminary, establishing a community of priests to minister to both French settlers and native peoples.

"He was really involved with the people," said Gourde, noting that Laval was not preoccupied by Rome or the hierarchy back home, because letters between France or Rome would take months. Yet Laval maintained a unity with the global Church. He was animated by a love of the Gospel and the people he served. "He built an original Church for Quebec."

Ezra Levant's summary was well worth waiting for

All day yesterday I kept checking Ezra's site, waiting for him to weigh in on Tuesday's Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Well, this morning, I see he had been busy yesterday reading every word written about the proceedings. He then wrote up a summary and analysis that I wish Maclean's or the National Post would publish. Because Ezra's a lawyer, he spotted a number of things that certainly raised my consciousness. What felt squishy and vague and mushy to me, that passive aggression that seemed to reign in the hearing room, Ezra has sliced and diced. The dissection is not pretty.

I want to highlight what Ezra said about rules of evidence, because now that we know that many employees and possibly even the complainant had access to the Jadewarr account but little or no records were kept (or revealed if they were kept) and that other identities have been used as well, how then can anything be proven against hate sites? Especially if these fake identities have the potential to roam around and pick up the signal of some bystander with an unprotected wireless account. Of course if you are guilty before proven innocent, then who cares about a proper chain of evidence. Ezra writes:

No integrity of evidence or other aspects of investigations

Still, a number of questions were put to Steacy. You'll remember him -- he was the CHRC investigator who told the Tribunal that "freedom of speech is an American concept so I don't give it any value". He's also the one who refused to accept a human rights complaint from someone he didn't like, based on gossip about that complainant's siblings. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that Steacy is a former public sector union boss.

Steacy did make a few embarrassing admissions. But the bulk of his answers -- just like the bulk of Warman's answers on cross examination last year -- were "I don't remember" or variants thereof. Some of the things he didn't remember were investigative actions he did mere weeks ago; some of them related to standing policies of the CHRC. No matter; he just brazened it out with forgetfulness.

Stop to think about how important the integrity of investigations is in real courts -- how the chain of custody of evidence is maintained under lock and key; how every test and inspection is documented; the extreme lengths police go to, to avoid giving the accused grounds for objecting to any evidence, including oral evidence like confessions. None of that integrity is present in the CHRC; Steacy, Warman and the others don't even bother keeping notes -- or, if they do, they simply "forgot" to disclose them, like Goldberg forgot to disclose 300 pages until after his court appearance.

It is not reasonable to expect investigators to remember every detail of every conversation -- or, in this case, of every occasion they pretended to be neo-Nazis, and went cruising the Internet. That's why real investigators take copious notes, and that's why courts permit police to refresh their memory with notes taken contemporaneously with the events in question -- and that's why those notes are disclosed to the accused, too. Either the CHRC is lying, and not disclosing their notes, or their investigative integrity is abominable, because it really doesn't matter how shabby a job they do -- they have a 100% conviction rate, and that isn't about to change any time soon.

Mark Steyn oozes into Ottawa

Don't know what it is about Mark Steyn, but it seems when people write about him variations of the word "ooze" pop into mind.

Dr. Dawg writes:

I was one of the first to arrive, followed by John Pacheco of the now-defunct blog SoCon or Bust, and then Mark Steyn, with a two-man entourage. The group of them got into a happy conversation, and like a pot set vigorously aboil, the waiting room was soon splattered by the frolicsome four: "radical secular left," "cultural relativism run amok," "post-modern world," "the mushy middle," etc.

Steyn did not disappoint, by the way. All of my prejudices and preconceptions were borne out. He is an insufferably smug man, his sense of self-importance positively oozing from his frame.

And John Pacheco, who's SoCon or Bust is not defunct, only on a new platform, wrote about first meeting Mark Steyn:

I cordially introduced myself as the blogger for Socon or Bust and he was kind enough to show that he remembered the name. If he did or did not remember it, I don’t know, but Mark is too much of a gentleman and scholar to say he didn’t know my blog from a hill of beans.

We then proceeded to have a wonderful conversation about the whole Human Rights Racket for the next half hour. If you’ve never heard Mark Steyn in person, and you get an opportunity, I highly recommend you go and hear the man speak. He is just as entertaining in real life as he is in print. His humour and keen observations are so natural for him that it is easy to understand why he is such a successful columnist and author. The man just oozes dry wit and soft sarcasm. The fact that he will be the subject of one of these farcical human rights complaints makes Canada look worse than the banana republics that we like to castigate for their “human rights abuses”. The only significant human rights abuse going on right now in this country is the existence of the Human Rights Commissions and their lackeys pimping for and encouraging the attack on the most basic human right which is the right to free speech. It’s a national disgrace that Mark Steyn was covering a CHRT hearing today for Maclean’s. In June, he is going to be the one covered.

As much as I enjoyed Dr. Dawg as perhaps a more civil left-winger, one with whom it seems one can cordially agree to disagree with warmth and good humor, I share John Pacheco's perception. I didn't find Mark Steyn self-important or smug at all. I'm disappointed that Dawg has contributed to WK's smear campaign against Steyn, which is something I would hope he would rise above. Civility in the form of a handshake does not equate with agreement or support. Steyn's defence of freedom of speech even for repugnant speech, does not mean agreement with that speech, only old-fashioned tolerance. I mean, Obama gets a pass on his close association with a racist preacher who thinks AIDs was invented by white people. So, Dawg, give Steyn a break. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The differing reactions to Mark Steyn remind me of a Canadian Association of Journalists' sponsored talk by Conrad Black in the late 1990s, after he had bought Southam and created the National Post. (If my memory serves me correctly). Anyway, the room was packed with journalists and about half the room laughed at Black's wit, recognizing that his big vocabulary words are a form of self-deprecating humor. The other half of the room seethed with rage as if to say, "Who does this blowhard think he is." I guess they were the more literal minded in the group.

John Pacheco has a report AND audio

John writes over at SoCon or Bust:

I arrived at 160 Elgin Street just before 8:30am and proceeded to the 11th floor. As I exited the elevator, I turned right and noticed the glass doors with the “Canadian Human Rights Commission” text glued to them, along with their official looking emblem. (The kangaroo was missing and so was the red star.) I thought I might get a picture of the entrance so I pulled out my cell phone-equipped camera, and was about to quickly snap a picture when the CHRC hall monitor came out of no where and asked me to cease and desist. She looked at me rather sternly and with a cold and hard masculin voice said:

“There are no cameras permitted on this floor.”

“But I have not yet entered the CHRC office yet. I’m just taking one quick picture of your lovely window dressing”, I objected.

“You are not allowed to take pictures anywhere on this floor”, she responded brusquely.

“Holy crap”, I thought to myself, “this is not exactly breaking the stereotype of what these guys are about.” Normally, government is not very efficient in anything it does. It was even a couple of minutes before 8:30am, I think. You’d figure that no star chamber functionary would be out that early, but that was obviously not the case here. Apparently, where protecting Canadians from thought crimes is concerned, government vigilance and work ethic apparently surpass even those of the business world.

Read his whole report and listen to the exchange he has on audio between Douglas Christie and the Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyer with the unfortunate name of Margo Blight. Her strategy seemed to be classic passive aggression, slow down, block, run interference. I guess that's what lawyers are trained to do. By the end of the day her face was bright red. But then Christie was, as you can hear, booming and intimidating.

The picture shows Mark Steyn, CFRB/CJAD Radio's Ottawa Bureau Chief Brian Lilley and John Pacheco out front of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal offices at 160 Elgin St.

The Ottawa Citizen was there

The Ottawa Citizen ran a story this morning on the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing yesterday.

Don Butler wrote:

At an extraordinary public hearing watched by armed police officers, an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission yesterday admitted he has regularly misrepresented himself online to gather information about people accused of spreading hatred on the Internet.

Dean Steacy, who was the commission's only hate speech investigator until 2004, told the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that he has used pseudonym e-mail addresses to access neo-Nazi and other far-right websites.

Mark Steyn may be wrong

The future may not belong to Islam if this is true.

Ya didn't have to be there

UPDATE: Read the Joel Brean's report on today's hearing here in the National Post.

Even though I have probably followed various Human Rights Commission related developments more closely than most journalists, I am not an expert on the Marc Lemire case, nor do I plan to become one. So not having pored over the transcripts of his case, a lot of what I heard today was soporific procedural process stuff that was connected to previous testimony. I have to hand it to Kady O'Malley who live blogged on this for Maclean's. Off her BlackBerry no less. I'm impressed! For a blow by blow account of today's hearings, start with her reports.

There were lot of Tab 3, and Tab13 referrals to various binders and reading aloud of portions of testimony so Dean Steacy could figure out what they were talking about. It made for a long, slow day.

Athanasios Hadjis, the one-man Tribunal member, kept things on track. He seemed alert, fair and good-humored. I have seen actual judges do worse, so nothing about his performance bothered me except in the beginning of the questioning of Hannya Rizk when he said he was not going to enlarge the scope of the investigation. That meant the kinds of questions the various lawyers could ask her were restricted to those few that she had refused to answer in a previous session because it might have given away precious state secrets on how investigators do their jobs. Hadjis ruling prevented follow up questions that would naturally have followed had she answered the original questions. It seemed at that moment the law became a bunch of process gobbledegook with little resemblance to common sense or justice. But aside from that, he tried to be accommodating of all sides. And the rest of the hearing was much better.

As Mark Steyn wrote today, Richard Warman never showed up. At first people were wondering if the bald-headed Bell Canada witness was Richard Warman.

Dean Steacy looks like Friar Tuck minus the brown habit. He even seems to have a tonsure. He was so low key, he seemed like he was on the verge of dozing off through out most of his testimony.

As Kady reported, there was very little mingling among the various groups. I spent a bit of time talking with the representatives from B'nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Simon Weisenthal Centre. Basically they were all singing from the same song sheet that Human Rights Commissions and Section 13 were good things and should get credit for the fact that hate speech from the right has been pretty well marginalized. The CJC guy also talked about the need to regulate the Internet.

They also liked the good work HRCs have done in areas of discrimination. Maybe some tweaking is in order, perhaps funding "respondents" or finding a way to get rid of nuisance complaints like those against Steyn and Ezra Levant, but that's about it.

I sat in between Mark Steyn and Dr. Dawg. A couple of Ottawa police officers also sat in the room. We had to have one of those metal detecting wands passed over us before we entered and leave our cameras (or cell phones with cameras) with the officer minding the door.

Steacy was asked many questions concerning his internet pseudonym Jadewarr that he used to join Stormfront and Free Dominion. The name comes from Jade Warrior, "a character out of novel I read as a teenager," he said.

He needed the identity, he said, to get onto websites to investigate. Though it was pointed out that these message boards are public, he said it was his understanding there was material you could only get access to if you were a member.

He said he did on occasion interact with Stormfront members. But he didn't remember how many posts.

He had no idea who the mysterious Nelly ****** is, the woman the Bell Canada guy identified with a name and address in downtown Ottawa. Apparently she or someone with access to her account posted under the name Jadewarr and 3:29 a.m. Sorry, missed the date.

Interestingly, he is not the only CHRC employee who has the password to post under Jadewarr.
He said four present CHRC people know the password and thus could be posting under that name.

He also revealed another pseudonym: Odensrevenge, but it was misspelled as oldensrevenge.

Some of the troubling information that came out of his testimony was the degree of cooperation between various big city police departments, the RCMP and even CSIS!!!!! in investigating hate.

In one case, a certain city police force had seized the hard drive of some dude after he was charged criminally---with uttering threats or something. Steacy made an inquiry and the police officer sent him a copy of the guy's hard drive, just like that! This bothered me. A police officer gets a warrant to seize buddy's hard drive based on a specific charge with a judge's consent. But that warrant has to be fairly specific, I would presume, to the complaint at hand. The authorities are not supposed to just do fishing expeditions and maybe discover that buddy's also been cheating on his income taxes or selling fake Viagra. But then, this police officer just hands the hard drive over to the Human Rights Commission, which has much mushier standards of evidence, so a totally new agency can do a fishing expedition without having to go through the hassle of getting a warrant. Shoot, even a dystopic novel manuscript or a review of one might get you in trouble if you have one on your hard drive.

Steacy got questioned quite a bit about the relationship of various police forces to the CHRC. Seems police have been out in force posting hate on various sites too, so that between the police officers and the multi-identity pseudonymous CHRC staffers and complainants posting on various sites you have to wonder how many actual hate mongers (on the right) there are in Canada.

At one point he denied that there was any agreement or cooperation between the RCMP and the CHRC or other police forces on Section 13 hate issues, only on matters of discrimination and sexual harrassment. But when the rest of a heavily blanked out correspondence one of the lawyers had obtained through Access to Information showed that in fact the police and the HRC were cooperating on investigating hate crimes, he kept repeating there was no formal agreement that he was aware of.

Some of the proposed cooperation between the RCMP and the CHRC include establishing direct contacts between RCMP and CHRC officers; sharing of information; improving access to information; giving direct access to CPIC for CHRC officers, among others.

He was asked about whether he had access to CPIC, the police computer information, when he contacted police for information. He said he didn't know where the information came from the police gave him. CPIC can have all kinds of information on it that would disturb those who worry about privacy issues. Like any time you have ever had any contact with the police, never mind whether you have been arrested or charged or convicted of anything. It can contain heresay, what neighbors say about you. Do we want CHRC investigators having access to CPIC?

Another interesting thing came up. Marc Lemire apparently tried to launch complaints against the various police and others who were posting hateful comments on his site. Steacy rejected the complaint because he included too many respondents on a double-sided sheet or some such procedural thing. In other words, he didn't fill out the complaint application properly. (Steacy did acknowledge that under the law even police officers could be vulnerable to hate prosecution for hate posts)

However, someone else, whom he adamantly refused to reveal, either casually phoned or emailed a casual complaint and that was enough for Jadewarr to start snooping over at Free Dominion. This complainant did not need to fill out the single-sided form.

Steacy has said that CHRC investigations are complaint driven, but he signed up on FD's message forum as Jadewarr well before a Marie-Line Gentes launched a complaint against FD for material that was not even on the FD site; there was only a link to it.

Gentes withdrew the complaint last summer, but FD has a record of Jadewarr logging on to their site in January of this year, raising questions about whether they are being monitored. Steacy also said Free Dominion was similar to Stormfront. Well, no, Mr. Steacy it is not. FD is run by two members of the Salvation Army who love Israel and are anything but anti-Semitic. Connie and Mark Fournier allow some rather raucous and crusty people to post on their forum, but there are no White Pride "crosses" or positive links to Ku Klux Klan activities or crap like that over at Free Dominion as there is on Stormfront. It is a conservative site and sometimes a bit freewheeling and immoderate.

Here's an example of some of the testimony and why I was almost ready to doze off myself:

Asked if he posted under name of Jadewarr on Freedomsite (Marc Lemire's site)

Steacy: "I don't recall."

Did Sandy Kozak (sp)?

Steacy: "I don't know."

Did Richard Warman?

"I don't know."

Did Richard Warman know you had signed on to site under pseudonym?

"I don't know."

"Did you talk to him about this complaint?

"I don't recall that I did."

Steacy said his manager John Chamberlain was aware of his use of the Jadewarr identity. He said he was not directed to do so. Chamberlain, Kozak and Steacy's assistant also know the password to this identity. It did not seem like there was a clear system of accountability concerning when and how this identity was used. To me, it seems that having the password available to several people makes it easy for any one of the staffers to have plausible deniability when it comes to accountability for posts.

"What I did as an investigator I did not at any time consult with Mr. Warman." But he said he did not know if someone else might have given Warman the password to Jadewarr.

The whole thing had that same kind of banal, bureaucratic, mushy hard to get a handle on it sense to it that Ezra's "interrogation" would have had if Ezra had not seized control and given the event a narrative shape.

The lawyers were playing to Hadjis and not to the gallery, so they didn't bother to create a narrative for those of us who were new to the case, to punctuate it with much drama.

Some of it was ridiculous. When the lawyers had to read some of the heavily redacted information they had obtained through access to information from the CHRC, It sounded like
Blank wrote to Blank, Hello Blank, I want to inform you about blank and the blank we had blank blank.

To his credit, Hadjis questioned why the material was so blanked out, when most of it was clearly "not privileged."

The other thing that bothered me is that the session was digitally recorded and the CHRC is no longer providing transcripts to the parties, just audio. Imagine having to listen to seven hours of "I don't know" and "I don't recall" and Blank said to blank how about blank blank to find the salient quotes you need. It makes the HRC process all the less transparent for the public, in my humble opinion.

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal so far

I can't post much as we have only an hour for lunch and I had to hike up to Parliament Hill.

About 30 people showed up for the hearing. Not the huge phalanx of mainstream news journalists that some had hoped for. Socon.ca blogger John Pacheco was over in the corner with his laptop.
Connie and Mark Fournier of Free Dominion were there, and Dr. Dawg, who is a pleasant, affable chap in person.

Mark Steyn was there of course.

Witnesses included a Bell Canada representative who gave the name of an individual and her address and ISP number but it remains a mystery as to why this person is important, so I will not be publishing her name at this point.

Why this name and ISP is important may be part of an unfolding narrative. We'll see.

The most common answer during today's proceedings has been:

"I don't recall." or "I don't remember" or some variation thereof.

Ezra Levant had some interesting predictions about this hearing that bear rereading.

Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator Dean Stacey, who is blind, came without his assistant. He admitted signing on as a member of Free Dominion a week or two before a formal complaint against the site was filed. That complaint has since been withdrawn. He also admitted to signing on again in early January of this year.

The first witness Hannya Rizk had very little to say. She could not remember much and had not briefed herself on any of the files before testifying. There were also restrictions on exactly what questions she could be asked.

The questioning of Dean Steacy will continue this afternoon. It's already starting so I'd better get back down there.

The picture shows some of the folks at the hearing:

William Reid, Connie and Mark Fournier, Mark Steyn, Brian Lilley from CFRB/CJAD Radio and John Pacheco of socon.ca.

I don't know who the dark-haired woman is in the background right next to Reid, and next to Connie.

Kady O'Malley of Mclean's Magazine is live blogging the hearing here.

On my way to the Human Rights Tribunal hearing

Good morning. I'm on my way to the Human Rights Tribunal hearing.

Not sure how much opportunity there will be to blog today as I will be leaving my computer in the Hot Room on Parliament Hill.

Maybe an update at lunch hour.

Should be interesting, whatever happens.

Ezra Levant has a good update.

And check out Jonathan Kay.

Confusion will reign at tomorrow's CHRC hearing

"Gender" confusion, to start. Because someone is going to go dressed as me! (But maybe really as the Church Lady from SNL) And I was planning to go dressed as Mark Steyn, as are several other people, to confuse the contestants in the WK meet and greet photo contest.

Though it might be easier for me to go as Ezra Levant, since I already have the glasses. Also the height differential won't be so hard to manage. It's been years since I wore platform shoes. Never again. The things one does when young to be "beautiful."

I expect confusion, too, on the identity of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Marc Lemire's on trial but people masquerading as neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been posting hate on his site, and maybe we'll get to see and hear one or more testify under oath tomorrow.

I wonder if the OPP paid a visit to various maximum disruption types on the anti-racist side the way they did to a Free Dominion poster, who tends to be pretty nasty in his invective. (Connie and Mark are far more tolerant than I am on their site.) I wonder if anti-racists will show up dressed in Nazi regalia for the photo op potential.

Hmmm. I wonder if any charges were ever laid in this instance, the last time I saw the anti-racists at work up close in Ottawa.

Does anyone besides me denounce this kind of activity? Why does the Left seem to always get a pass on this kind of thuggery?

As Ezra said about the demonstration in Calgary recently involving white supremacists and anti-racists:

A pox on both of their houses, I say.

And that's the point. I despise them both.

Amen.

I confess to some discomfort and some sympathy

Update: Mark Steyn shares my discomfort. He writes:

Deborah Gyapong has two good posts today, as she does most days. The first examines certain aspects of Joe Brean's front-page story in The National Post; the second confesses to "some discomfort" about "the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case suddenly converging on Ottawa this Tuesday".

I agree with that. Unlike Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, I don't spend my time hanging out on white-supremacist websites, and I get a little queasy at some of the e-mail correspondence I wake up to in the morning. Nonetheless, bad laws usually start out being applied to unsympathetic characters on the fringes of society, and then work their way inwards. That's why it's best to stop them at the outset.

I wish the Mar. 25 Human Rights Tribunal hearing did not involve a white supremacist. I don't like the fact that the presence of mainstream journalists and conservative columnists and bloggers can be and perhaps have already been used as coattails supremacists and Holocaust deniers can try to grasp to gain respectability.

I don't like the fact that the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case will suddenly converge on Ottawa this Tuesday. Yet Marc Lemire deserves a fair hearing. He deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty. He deserves a legal system that does not engage in planting evidence or entrapment. He deserves a legal system where the rules are clear and not made up as we go along.

I have some sympathy for the quandary the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith find themselves in. The very apparatus they helped create to protect their community from defamation is now in danger of being co-opted by groups more virulently anti-Jewish (and far more numerous) than the Holocaust deniers and skinheads they hoped to silence.

As someone deeply sympathetic with the Jewish people, I have great concern that anti-Semitism is becoming fashionable again---on the Left, masquerading as anti-Zionism and anti-racism.

History is in the making. The future of Canada is at stake. Upon what do we base our notions of human rights? Do we revive the civil rights tradition grounded in Western Civilization, in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome? Do we revive the Magna Carta and other developments that are based on a notion of human rights as inherent and God-given?

Or do we succumb to materialist notions of human rights that dismiss the idea of human freedom, even the existence of the soul? God forbid we do that.

The problem with trying to silence false ideas and odious speech is that tyrannies will rush in to silence the truth first of all. Note how in most repressive regimes, that's how Internet firewalls are used.

I think it is no coincidence that the Chinese firewall suppressing information about the Tibetan uprising is happening on the eve of the Lemire case.

Can we tolerate some white supremacism in order to make sure our journalists are free to report on real scandal involving government bodies? Can we tolerate criticism of religions so that people are free to proclaim their faith in the public square?

We need a huge, national discussion about this, free from partisanship, employing the best philosophically grounded legal minds we have. Nothing short of a Royal Commission . . .and a government prepared to follow through with its recommendations....will do.

The sleeping giant is awakening

Update: Ezra Levant dissects Joseph Brean's story here.

Finally. The National Post's Joseph Brean has written the first responsible news report on the abuses of freedom of speech by human rights commissions. Nothing in today's Ottawa Citizen, but I would not be surprised to see other Canwest papers pick up Brean's piece in the next day or two, or publish their own stories.

Hmmmmmm. I wonder whether Canadian Press will send Joan Bryden to the Mar. 25 hearing and what angle she will take. Sadly, her guilt -by- association smear of Liberal MP Keith Martin has been one of the only pieces of actual reportage on the issue until today.

Thankfully, many many columnists have repeatedly raised alarms about the abuses of human rights commissions--the fundamental issue facing Canada right now. The Cadman and Mulroney/Schreiber distractions are mere political posturing. The scandal involving human rights commissions is the real enchilada. What's at stake are fundamental freedoms. The outcome could affect any one of the millions of Canadians who use the Internet.

Some salient points from the Brean article:

Critics of section 13.1 argue that its ostensible purpose -- the silencing of a few fringe racists by means less extreme than a criminal prosecution -- presents a dangerous challenge to the constitutional right to free speech. They say allowing for the type of offensive speech it targets is the price we pay for free and open discourse.

snip

It is as if all the cases, legitimate or ridiculous, are to be represented by this one, a most unfrivolous complaint against a prominent distributor of white supremacist propaganda, which threatens to implode not only because of the alleged unconstitutionality of the law, but because of shady investigatory practices.

snip

B'nai Brith's legal counsel David Matas:

"To me, looking at Steyn or Levant is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope, because the problem isn't that Steyn or Levant are being frivolously accused of something, the problem is that there is a wave now of people doing domestically what we have seen internationally, which is to try to use the human rights system to divert it from its true goal," he said.

Despite the failings, he supports the commissions.

"The mere fact that you've got a legal system that allows for a complaint which is maybe wrong doesn't in itself invalidate the system. If somebody tries to hit you with a chair, you don't blame the chair. I don't think the problem is the human rights commission. I think the problem is the willingness of people to abuse human rights commissions and other mechanisms to pursue what is not a human rights agenda. And I think the answer to it is for the mechanisms to defend themselves against this attack, not to self-destroy."

The Brean piece outlines some of the converging issues that will come to a head starting this Tuesday.

1) The constitutionality of subsection Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act and whether it opens just about anyone to human rights complaints because, as Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says in the article, the truth is no defence, nor is one's intent relevant. This subsection and provincial counterparts are alarming enough on their own.

2) The operation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its most frequent complainant. The key issue in the Mar. 25 hearing is whether an employee and the complainant became members of a white supremacist site and posted hate speech there themselves. Is this a form of entrapment? Planting evidence? Other issues concern whether the HRC operates according to the rule of law and such bedrock principles as "innocent until proven guilty" and standard rules of evidence. The fact that complainants get funded but those accused do not is another issue.

3) The misuse of human rights commissions to advance political causes. Even among those groups like the B'nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress that don't have a problem with the protections against group defamation they believe subsection 13(1) contains, they do see a problem with the complaints against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. Recently B'nai Brith ran a piece by anti-terrorism expert John Thompson of the Mackenzie institute on the rising use of "courtroom jihad."

But where were the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith when gay activists were using the human rights commissions to wage a secular jihad against Christian expression in the public square? (Or perhaps more accurately non-gay gay activists who take it upon themselves to file complaints on behalf of gays the way Darren Lund has. Fortunately, mainstream gay rights groups like EGALE support freedom of speech, even Christian speech.)

The fact that Jewish groups have used human rights law, and gay and non-gay gay supporters have followed suit, has rightly given Muslims groups the argument that suddenly clamping down on them when they try to use it is unfair and discriminatory. What's a multicultural society supposed to do?

We stand at a crossroads. Either everyone is going to get shut down and the nanny state will enforce political correctness on everyone and Canada will invite Google and its Silicon Valley North to create a great Internet firewall like China has. Unfortunately, this seems to be the approach that the Canadian Jewish Congress is taking. Or we could see a move to protect even the more odious speech that has hitherto been illegal in society.

Whatever way you look at this, the system is broken. We need a Royal Commission to investigate this from top to bottom. The law needs a thorough examination, so do the practices of human rights commissions.

So does Canada's approach to multiculturalism. Canada needs a revival of her Judeo-Christian roots, because without that, there is no support in a shared belief system for the civil rights we hold dear such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Without that anchoring in a shared narrative, we cannot welcome with generosity the minority religions in our midst.

Denyse O'Leary makes a good point

She writes:

Our understanding of human rights grows out of our historic culture.

A culture in which words have certain meanings derived from ideas and events. Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights. The Constitution.

If we try to interpret human rights apart from that tradition, we get these "hrcs" whose agendas bear no relation to historic rights and can be dominated by the most intense fanatic available.

Anyone who reads this space regularly will know that I am NO friend of anti-Muslims or anyone who promotes hate.

But our government desperately needs to restore the idea of law - and equality before the law - in its pursuit of whatever its employees and freelancers or other aggrieved parties decide is "hate".

J. Mark Bertrand muses about David Mamet's conversion

It's surprising, when you think about it, that one of a writer's fundamental assumptions about human nature could run counter to the view expressed in his work. We tend to assume that whatever a person believes will reveal itself in their creative work -- which may be true, but it's not the whole truth. Sometimes what we believe shapes the work. But sometimes we're more honest in our work than we are in everyday life. Art gets ahead of us, which is a reassuring thing if you're hoping to capture reality but don't trust your own ability to hit upon every nuance.

When I was a kid, very much enamored with Sherlock Holmes, I used to impress my friends with feats of deduction. I claimed I could tell everything about them simply by examining the contents of their rooms. Looking back, I'm amazed at how perceptive I was. Observing a collection of Star Wars action figures, I'd nod sagely.

"I deduce that you like Star Wars."

They stared back wide-eyed. How did he know?

"And that's not all." I'd notice a night light by the bed. "I also deduce you are afraid of the dark!"

The whole post is delightful. Read it all. Then check out the other great posts at this site.

The outrageous response of the Canadian Human Rights Commission

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has responded to requests from Maclean's Magazine, Mark Steyn and others for access to a crucial Mar. 25 hearing in Ottawa that is going to be held in camera.

The Commission cites security concerns of staff members who will testify. It proposes having members of the public---and members of the media like myself I presume--sitting in some room with a video feed of the proceedings that will pixilate the fearful witnesses the way the media pixilates the Motoons or shoot a blank wall or something.

I am a member of the National Press Gallery. Checks have been run on me to ensure I am not a security threat to anyone, otherwise I could not do my job on Parliament Hill.

Yet the CHRC has the audacity to tell me and every other press gallery member that we cannot attend this proceeding? I hope the Tribunal decides otherwise.

Many of my colleagues have been rather asleep to this whole issue up until now. This is going to wake them up for sure. They better plan on a BIG holding room. Perhaps had the CRHC been smart they would have 1) dismissed the complaints against Maclean's as soon as they arrived on their desk, but they are not smart 2) opened up this hearing as soon as they heard Maclean's wanted to come because then at least they could claim transparency. Then the press corps could remain asleep, thinking the process must be working.

Ezra Levant writes:

Of course I want the hearing to be opened to the public, because I don't believe in secret trials -- especially to hide the antics of some rogue government clerks who think that anonymously trolling racist websites constitutes some sort of crime-fighting in this post-9/11 era. I want the hearing open, because I want the world to see what goes on in the name of "human rights" in Canada these days. Shining sunlight into these star chambers is key to their denormalization.

But, I confess, I would be almost as happy if the tribunal accepted the CHRC's whiny demand, and kept the reporters cooped up in some holding room, barred from even looking at Steacy and Hannya Rizk and the other CHRC witnesses. I can only imagine the simmering anger that would boil in that room. Some of the country's best reporters, who are used to access to the highest Prime Ministers, Presidents, Supreme Courts, titans of business -- and uninhibited access to the lowest of society, from accused murderers to disgraced politicians and industrialists -- being told by some petty, counterfeit court that they are not allowed to watch "justice" be done. Oh, the CHRC doesn't know what "a great deal of anger being expressed" looks like until they do that.

We're winning.

I'd like to see what Rick Mercer's rant will look like if this happens. Maybe Rick will join us in the holding pen.

Ezra "outs" the human rights commissions

Here's a link to a story I wrote early on about the complaints against Ezra Levant. It has been widely picked up by the Catholic press, but not published electronically until relatively recently by Canadian Christianity.

Borovoy said he finds especially troubling the fact that the law includes material “likely to expose” people to hatred or contempt. He noted the lack of any requirement for intent to foment hatred. The truth or a reasonable belief in truth is not a defense. That means news coverage of world hot spots such as Rwanda, the Middle East and Northern Ireland could be seen as subjecting any of the ethnic or religious groups involved to contempt or hatred under this law, he said.

In his opening statement, Levant argued the “interrogation” went against 800 years of common law, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

He also described it as “procedurally unfair,” adding:“Unlike real courts, there is no way to apply for a dismissal of nuisance lawsuits,” he said. “Common law rules of evidence don’t apply. Rules of court don’t apply. It is a system that is part Kafka, and part Stalin. Even this interrogation today . . . saw the commission tell me who I could or could not bring with me as my counsel and advisors.”

Levant and others have also argued that even principles like “innocent before proven guilty” do not apply. While the complainants’ costs are covered, the defendant has to pay legal fees in most provinces. Levant told the AHRC that even if he wins he loses thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of wasted time. In his closing argument (also on YouTube) he said he hoped to lose his case so he could appeal to a “real” court.

The Centre for Cultural Renewal’s executive director Iain Benson said the widespread viewing of Levant’s videos will “in effect ‘out’ the kind of things that are implied when we begin to adjudicate for ‘hurt feelings.’”

“That is good for Canada where so many Canadians seem satisfied that all is right with human rights generally and tolerance in particular,” he said. “It is far from all right.”

Why isn't freedom of speech on the CAJ agenda?

Well....I can understand the chill that journalists might feel if they get hauled to court for not revealing their sources. But a much greater chill is the threat that looms over every journalist who covers controversial issues and that's the threat of getting hauled before a human rights commission the way Maclean's Magazine and Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, and Catholic Insight Magazine have been.

There is also the chill of nuisance defamation lawsuits.

Well....the CAJ is going to give a primer on defamation law and how to avoid lawsuits at its big annual do in Edmonton.

But there is nothing on the program about the biggest threat to journalists and freedom of speech--the rising abuse of hrcs by political activists of various stripes to silence political debate and intellectual freedom.

Are the conference organizers asleep? As Alan Borovoy told me, any journalist writing about hotspots from Rwanda to Northern Ireland to the Middle East could potentially run afoul of the Canadian Human Rights Act's vague language in subsection 13(1) that makes it illegal to publish material that is likely to expose an individual or group to hatred or contempt. Remember, truth is no defence.

The revival that is starting in Quebec

A couple of years ago, when I interviewed Rob Parker of the National House of Prayer, he told me that those with prophetic gifts across Canada have been saying that revival is coming to Canada, that it is going to start in the Catholic Church, and it is going to start in Quebec. (scroll down at the link for an excerpt of the story I wrote).

I asked him then if he knew about Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Archbishop of Quebec, or the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress June 15-22 that will coincide with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, the gateway to the evangelization of the whole continent. At the time, he did not. These good folks at the National House of Prayer have been praying for revival, and praying for politicians. Not only that, they train people in intercession, and bring intercessory teams into Ottawa for that purpose. But I digress.

Last week, I went up to Quebec City to work on some advance stories on the Congress. I have to write them up this week, hence the scanty blogging. The trip felt like a pilgrimage because I prepared by reading up on the first accounts of the Jesuit missionaries, and finding out what I could about Mgr. Francois de Laval, the first bishop of Canada.

What a sense of the Communion of the Saints I had as I read these luminous accounts by men who were on fire for the Gospel and who willingly faced martyrdom---the real kind, not the blow yourself up to kill as many as possible kind. And Laval faced so many obstacles in his missionary work---imagine having to travel when there were no roads, only rivers and scattered settlements and hostile tribes and English troops.

Cardinal Ouellet has said many times that he hopes this Congress will revive an awareness of the Christian roots of the continent. Canada and the United States needs this reawakening. Otherwise we could lose all the rights and freedoms we hold dear, because they are predicated on a Judeo-Christian understanding of our being made in the image of God. If we lose that, and human rights become based on Darwinist materialism, then, we might as well wave them goodbye. We will all have human rights commissions in our futures.

I hope he is right. And not only that, I have a sense that something extremely profound and beautiful is awakening in the Catholic Church.....in Quebec. I returned from the province refreshed and renewed. If the infusion of faith and joy I have experienced is a foretaste of what attending the Congress in June will be like, then I urge you to go. It is not too late to sign up. Come just for the closing weekend if you can't make it for the whole week.

I got a chance to interview Cardinal Ouellet while I was in Quebec City. His communications director Isabelle Theberge snapped the photo.

Dr. Sanity diagnosis the problem in the West and writes a prescription

She has been on a roll the last couple of days. Read the whole post. It is a good antidote to some of the recent offerings that hold the view that the "war on terror" is largely a police operation against Al Qaeda. In other words, looking at the problem through the wrong end of the microscope. It's similar to the view that Israel is the bully against the poor victim Palestinians, without viewing the larger picture that Israel is surrounded by hostile nations sitting on huge oil wealth, nations that are fighting against her through proxies.

Dr. Sanity writes:

Perle is correct that understanding the larger picture--both in looking retrospectively at the Cold War, as well as right now at the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan for that matter) is absolutely essential. It is in our national interest to be seen by the Arab world as willing to do what is necessary to protect ourselves even when the cost is high; it is in our national interest to take terrorism and terrorist states seriously; it is in our national interest to make sure that we speak softly (i.e. diplomatically) and carry a big stick. The "innefective international institutions on which we once relied" are practically useless--and in many cases worse than useless--in the age of terrorism. These idealistic institutions have been infected with the same disease that was thought to be eradicated once and for all when the Soviet Union and other communist states ignomoniously collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions.

Let us take a moment to examine the political left here and abroad who are wholly committed to these mostly useless institutions and the utopian "internationalism" they promte; and who have, both consciously in some instances and unconsciously in others, worked in parallel to Muslim fanatacism, continually enabling and encouraging its extremism and rewarding its pathological behavior, because it suited their own utopian agenda. Thus has the terrorist/jihadi agenda has escalated and expanded over several decades unrecognized and unopposed and culminating in Al Qaeda's unnoticed declaration of war in the 90's.

snip

This pervasive nihilism is promulgated and promoted by the West's own intellectual elites as postmodernism. But there is nothing modern about it, and in its own way it is as primitive and barbaric a philosophy as that which drives the Islamic extremists.

Today's left is a nothing more than the hallow shell of what was once known as "liberalism"; and it is held together by the empty and meaningless rhetoric of postmodernism, a sort of intellectual nonsense, otherwise known as political correctness and multiculturalism (or, cultural relativity).

The danger of going after contemporary anti-Semites

It's interesting to me that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has so far decided to hold its March 25 hearing in Ottawa behind closed doors out of the security fears of the commission staff and a frequent complainer, who will be cross-examined on that day.

I have no idea how dangerous the small number of white supremacists and neo-Nazis remaining in Canada are. I don't doubt that some members are potentially dangerous. But I do not imagine they are more dangerous than the group that Michael Ross, a former Mossad agent, writes about in the National Post.

He writes:

Within the Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service, there is a small department of intelligence analysts who monitor and report on incidents and trends relating to anti-Semitism and violence perpetrated against Jewish communities worldwide. During my 13 years with the Mossad, I was privy to the reports of this department. They invariably concluded that modern anti-Semitism has very little to do with the reawakening of National Socialism, and everything to do with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Western countries -- with occasional collusion from elements of the radical left, not the radical right.

He also points out that the recent complainants against Ezra Levant and Maclean's Magazine for Mark Steyn's America Alone book excerpt had said and published hate speech against Jews that is far worse than the trumped up charges of Islamophobia.

One had claimed previously that Israel treats Palestinians worse than Jews in the Holocaust. Another claimed that all Israelis (read: Jewish Israelis) over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for terrorist groups. If that kind of discourse doesn't expose Jews to hate and contempt, I'm not sure what does exactly. In fact, Levant himself has been subject to a disgusting anti-Semitic internet hate campaign launched by certain elements (we'll call them "youths," in keeping with the euphemism used to describe those who burn cars in France) within Alberta's Muslim community.

Yes....I wonder where those who "protect us from hate" were when a group of youths set up a Facebook group Ezra Levant the POS Jew?

I wonder. If the human rights industry is cowering in fear before the scanty number of neo-Nazi skin heads, no wonder we are not seeing any complaints against fundamentalist Islamists who present a real threat. No one knows better than Canadian Muslims the kind of threat these people pose.

As some complainants in Calgary found out, you could be taking your life in your hands if run afoul of this element.

No, instead many of those who defend the human rights industry are encouraging the complainants against Steyn and Levant by trumpeting their falsified charges of Islamophobia and by deliberately "bearing false witness" through unattributed quotes and ridiculous assertions masquerading under the guise of "paraphrases."

As Mark Steyn wrote recently, this activity is life threatening. Does anybody care? Or is everyone stuck in appeasement mode, like a group of hostages with Stockholm Syndrome, hoping if they are nice and identify with the "nice captors," they won't get shot or blown up?

I am surprised the home-grown spokeschildren for these complaints never learned what a paraphrase is, or the correct use of quotation marks. God forbid they ever become lawyers or journalists. But there may be a future for them in the human rights industry!

Muslim family's house firebombed in Calgary

First there was a home invasion, leaving a woman bruised and cut, now a firebombing of a family's house in the wee hours of the morning while children were asleep inside.

This is very, very serious.

The suspects hurled two Molotov cocktails at the home, one which ignited grass and another which bounced off a window, setting the exterior of the house on fire, said Sampson.

"If he wasn't up, the house would have gone up," Sampson said.

Cops are investigating several other attacks against members of the Muslim community with the help of RCMP, Services Alberta and the National Security investigation section.

Police have not ruled out other attacks may be related to the ongoing dispute among Muslim community members which involves human-rights complaints and allegations of misappropriation of funds.

Najeeb Butt says his wife was attacked during a recent invasion at their northeast home, her hands slashed as she put them up to defend herself.

Does Salman Rushdie know about Canadian human rights commissions?

The Canadian Tulip Festival, a big festival here in Ottawa in May, has invited Salman Rushdie to be one of its keynote speakers:

"Salman Rushdie is so brilliant and we'll have him speak on key issues that are important to him in shaping society, like where is the world going," said Mr. Armour. He plans to finalize the exact nature of the speech with the author this weekend.

It is the first visit to Ottawa by the Indian-British author of such books as Shame and Midnight's Children -- which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 as the best of all winners in the first 25 years of the prize.

Most famously, he wrote The Satanic Verses, the novel that provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to declare a fatwa -- a death sentence -- on Mr. Rushdie that stands to this day.

Tulip Festival officials said they're aware that heightened security concerns come with Mr. Rushdie, but they did not discuss details yesterday.

This takes guts. I wonder how long it will be before some self-appointed pressure group, claiming to supremely represent every single member of Canada's diverse Muslim community complains. I also wonder whether Rushdie is aware of the way Canadian Islamists are using human rights commissions to issue their fatwas for them against people like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. If he is aware, and if Tulip festival organizers do not back down against whining from the easily affronted crowd or mounting security concerns, I bet he will talk about them.

I hate to admit this, but the fatwa against Rushdie was not one of those dots I connected until after 9-11. At the time, I remember being disturbed by the fact that the Ayatollah's death sentence could extend into Western civilized countries. It's even more horrible that several people--some translators of the book, for example--have died as a result.

No, like everyone else, I drifted back into my slumber.

MP Keith Martin wants Mar. 25 tribunal hearing opened to public

Liberal MP Keith Martin is troubled by the fact that an upcoming hearing of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Mar. 25 is going to be held in camera.

"I think it speaks to the fact that the tribunals themselves have to be examined, writ large," Martin said in a telephone interview today from Parliament Hill.

On the 25th, commission staff, as well as a frequent complainant, will be cross-examined on whether they have used assumed names to plant hate messages or entrap other posters on websites and message forums under investigation.

Earlier this year, Martin introduced private member's motion M-446 to cut Subsection 13(1)--the thought crimes provision-- of the Canadian Human Rights Act. He recognizes, however, that is only a first step. He thinks all the activities of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) have to be examined, not just the controversial subsection that allows the CHRC to investigate speech that may be likely to expose a person or group to contempt of hatred.

Martin thinks an investigation is necessary "to make sure that they have not wandered far from their original mandate, as I would claim, but that they are serving the public interest and Canadians’ human rights, not the trampling all over them, which I would maintain that they are."

Meanwhile, Martin is hoping to crack open the operations of the CHRC by persuading the parliamentary committee for human rights to do a public examination. He has spoken to one member of the committee so far and that individual thought it was a good idea.

"We can’t let the commission go on as it is now," he said. "The issue is much larger than 13.1," he said, describing his motion as a mere "springboard" to examine the CHRC. He hopes that a thorough examination of the federal commission will prompt provincial legislatures to look at their own legislation and commissions.

"It’s one of those things that operate under the radar screen," he said. "Most Canadians aren’t aware unless of course they are confronted by the wrath of a human rights commission.

The case on March 25 involves Marc Lemire, who is accused of being a white supremacist. That makes his cause unpopular and poses a danger that those who defend him will experience guilt by association. When Canadian Press wrote about Martin's motion, the first line of the story described him as a poster boy for neo-Nazis because some far-right sites applauded the move. Martin, who is an immigrant with a mixed East Indian background, shrugged off the initial smear.

Aside from that story and one with a similar angle on CBC Radio, mainstream journalists have barely covered the human rights complaints involving Maclean's Magazine for running an excerpt of Mark Steyn's book America Alone and Ezra Levant for republishing the Mohammed cartoons. However, columnists and editorial boards across the country and in both national newspapers, as well as talk radio hosts, have been almost uniformly outraged by HRC abuses, especially in their overreaching in the Maclean's and Levant cases.

Martin sees some important rights at stake in the Lemire case as well.

"Somebody may have allegly committed an odious act, but people are still innocent until proven guilty until proven guilty in a court of law," he said. "If we don’t protect everybody’s rights to due process then nobody’s protected."

Catholic MPs react to Archbishop Prendergast's stand on Communion

The Ottawa Citizen story is here.

Here is Archbishop Terrence Prendergast's interview with CFRA where he explains his reasons why those politicians who persist in promoting pro-abortion views are not in communion with the Catholic Church.

Naomi Lakritz at the Calgary Herald wrote a great editorial March 12 in the Archbishop's defence:

This necessary absolutism grates on the sensitivities, of course, because religion, like everything else in this post-millennium era, is supposed to come easy, with no moral strings attached, no value-ridden fuss, no muss. And it's hardest of all on politicians who have learned that to survive, you have to maintain a fine balance of bafflegab so you can glide as effortlessly as an eel through the murky waters of public policy.

Liberal MP David McGuinty, who is Catholic, claims his pro-choice position arises from a reconciliation of his "public duties and responsibilities . . . I, like many politicians, keep those things separate. I don't just represent Roman Catholics. I don't just represent people of any faith."

Now there's a cop-out position if ever I heard one. Since the federal government is far too timorous to revisit the issue of this country's non-existent abortion laws, it is not necessary for McGuinty to adapt his personal views to those of his constituents. Furthermore, as abortion has not been a campaign issue since long before McGuinty was first elected in 2004, it is highly unlikely that he even knows where the majority sentiment lies among his constituents in his riding of Ottawa South.

Read the whole thing! And listen to the CFRA interview. The picture shows Archbishop Prendergast at the recent Theology on Tap in Ottawa where he first answered a question concerning whether he would deny pro-abortion Catholic politicians communion.

If tweaking were enough, here's one small start

Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress admitted on Cross Country Checkup last Sunday that human rights commissions and human rights law needed some tweaking and correcting so that cases like Ezra Levant's and Mark Steyn's did not put them into such bad repute that Canadians threw the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't think tweaking is enough. But here's one major tweak that would have an immediate positive impact: No more complaints from people who are making complaints on behalf of gays, Muslims, Jews or blacks or any other group to which they do not belong.

It would cut the case load considerably.

Why is it that liberals--ungay, white bread as you please, United Churchy do-gooders find it so easy to get so offended on behalf of assorted victim groups? Isn't it a form of appropriation of voice or something racist like that?

Archbishop Prendergast defends the sanctity of human life

Archbishop Terrence Prendergast explains at length why he might refuse a pro-abortion Catholic politician communion on CFRA Radio.

What a refreshing breath of fresh air he is, standing up for Catholic teaching, knowledgeably, aware of the political context.

Great stuff. Listen to it.

Quite a contrast to this article which gave equal time to Catholics for a Free Choice, a marginal organization of aging Baby Boomers.

A link to the article I wrote on the subject and my reaction to the Ottawa Citizen story here.

The open-endedness of the danger to freedom of speech

I remember back in the early 1990s, discussions with some CBC colleagues or guests for programs I was booking, talking about how words like "equality of opportunity" or "free markets" were code words for racism.

In other words, anyone who did not support outright such things as affirmative action was by definition racist. Equality of opportunity did not take into consideration historic discrimination and deprivation, so only equality of outcome would do.

This is one of the problems with the galloping scope of human rights commissions and hate speech. Now one not only has to consider whether one has incited violence against a particular group or called for their extermination the way Hitler called for the extermination of the Jews, but also whether one has inadvertently inserted some so-called code words into one's public writings or speech that will brand you as a hater.

For Christophobes, merely saying one believes marriage is between a man and a woman is code for hatred against gays and lesbians, when it is not.

But it's going beyond code words into fabrications, prevarications, and false witness.

In the case of Mark Steyn, for example, critics such as Elmo's spokeschildren, Johann I-shag-Islamists Hari make up vile writings, attribute them to Steyn and accuse him of hatred he has never spewed. It's as if they think they spot code words, so they supply what they assume is the interpretation. This is slanderous and disgusting.

It can really get ridiculous, as the latest machinations about the so-called underlying racism of Hillary Clinton's anti Obama ads, showing sleeping children and a red phone ringing at 3:00 a.m.

It reminds me of that guy who saw subliminal sexual imagery in pictures of ice cubes and plates of Howard Johnson's fried clams.

What is so weird to me is that, just as in Hitler's day, no one took him literally until millions had died, few seem to be taking the literal hatred spewing from the mouth of the Iranian president or Hamas or Hezbollah or their agents in the United States seriously. Yet we have all kinds of faked hate crimes and planted evidence and "code words" getting people all upset.

Unbelievable.

My battery is dying and I'm on the train, so I'll supply the links later. Bye

Blogging from the train station

I am in the Ottawa train station, waiting to embark on a trip to Quebec City, where I will work on several stories in advance of the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress that will take place Jun 15-22.

I feel like I am on a pilgrimage. The Congress coincides with the 400th year of the founding of Quebec, where the first missionaries entered North America and began spreading the Gospel as they traveled down the riverways and lived among the aboriginal people. So I have been reading up on some Quebec history. This year is also the 300th anniversary of the death of Francois de Laval, who was the first Catholic bishop of Quebec.

Over the weekend, I was reading some of the Jesuit Relations, the first hand accounts of what these Black Robes were thinking and experiencing as they arrived in the New World and encountered the various native peoples.

These writings are by no means politically correct. They paint a picture that is far from the air-brushed romantic images of the noble Indian whose religion and practice maintained a perfect balance with Mother Earth. Yet at the same time, these writings are infused with love--of Christ and of the peoples they came to serve. The hardships they endured are amazing. The lives of the warring native tribes were also harsh, frought with danger from attacks. They frequently faced starvation.

The "relations" seem to give honest accounts that show that human nature is human nature, whatever the race or culture. But they also show there is something especially enobling about the Christian faith when it is lived to the full.

No wonder some of these men---who were martyred--have been declared saints.

So, as I travel, I feel a sense of communion with them, the communion of the saints, and I ask for their intercession for Canada and for the Congress.

Thank God they were not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Wish I could have been there

For those of us who wished we could have attended Kathy Shaidle's talk in Toronto, Eye Weekly does some interesting and fair, it seems, coverage.

(H/t Girl on the Right)

“I’ve been libeled frequently, and I’ve never sued anyone, let alone called the cops," Shaidle says. "On principle, if I want to be free to say what I want, I have to extend that right to others. It’s like that classic headline in The Onion: "Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids." In a world of frivolous lawsuits and ‘hurt feelings,’ some of us have to man up, or we’ll lose everything.”

For that reason, Shaidle encourages visits to FreeMarkSteyn.com, where even the most passive supporter can rally against the human rights commissions: “I hope you do something. And, if you don’t, at least send us money.”

The article is strangely dismissive of the right wing blogosphere. I guess this author has no idea of the role blogs played in Rathergate and in Swiftboating John Kerry's Vietnam War claims, to mention a few.

More evidence of planted hate

This time in the United States on Little Green Footballs. (H/t FreeMarkSteyn).

Yesterday I asked Abdur-Rahman M to send me the IP address of the person who was dishonestly posting antisemitic comments at his site using my name, and he emailed it to me today, for which I’m grateful.

Lo and behold, the same person has two accounts at LGF, one of them already blocked, and the other registered and confirmed but so far unused; presumably holding it in reserve for some kind of future sneak attack. The second account is now blocked as well, of course.

And the pathetic creep has visited LGF 6 times already today. (That’s why we call them “stalkers.”) The referring page for one of its visits is here, and you’ll never see an uglier den of antisemitism and hatred: Anti-Neocons :: View topic - 49 Palestinians killed in Gaza today.

UPDATE at 3/9/08 6:29:18 pm:

Checking back through our archives, I made an interesting discovery. This stalker was using one of its accounts to post really extreme anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. Comments like this one (now deleted):

When you put your life on the line to protect worthless scum like terrorist scum like all Palestinians are, you get what you deserve. I don’t want to hear any of the PC police come here and say that not all Palestinians are terrorists, yes they are ! Those people are the absolute scum of the earth. It’s like they have some genetic mutation in all of them. We need a final solution to the “Palestinian question ”, if you know what I mean.

That comment was deleted within a few minutes of being posted, of course. “Final solution,” indeed.

But the important thing to note here is: this creep was what we call a “moby,” calculatedly posting over the top comments to discredit LGF. In truth, as you can see by following the link to the “Anti-Neocons” site above, this stalker is rabidly pro-Palestinian—but it was posting rabidly anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. This is solid proof that at least some of the comments at LGF are being planted with deliberate intent to deceive and defraud.

It is interesting to me that the Canadian Islamic Congress' spokechild yesterday on Cross Country Checkup spoke of blogs that are urging the deportation and extermination of Muslims, influenced by the writings of Mark Steyn. If such blogs exist I denounce them. But maybe they only exist in her mind, given the way the contents of Steyn's book excerpt have been misquoted, missrepresented and miscontrued. Mark Steyn's book DOES NOTHING OF THE KIND and good for Rex Murphy in doing his homework and challenging her on the spot.

But now it would seem that any posts in the comments sections that say such things are suspect.

We need a Royal Commission with powers to subpoena people and records to get to the bottom of all this.

Darren Lund sounds off in the Glop

Update at FiveFeetofFury:

Not content with tying his blankie around his neck, jumping off the couch and pretending to fly...

a grown up Darren Lund leaps to the rescue of gay men everywhere, unasked. Also he's straight.

But he has such deep feelings for "teh gays" he had to bravely appoint himself their martyr/protector from the evil "conservative Christians". At other folks' expense of course. "Welcome to Sherwood" (big boy!)

Of course, Lund would never include himself in his notion of "dangerous people out there." Do-gooders never do.

Now back to my post, which is a lot less funny.

The Glop and Mail posts an op ed by Darren Lund, who was the complainant against Alberta Pastor Stephen Boisson.

Of course, he paints the letter according to his interpretation, that it was in effect a call to violence against gays and lesbians, when the letter specifically referred to gay activists, not gays in general.

And, the letter did not call for the gay activists to be harmed either.

The evidence that the letter had anything to do with the beating of a gay youth is circumstantial at best. The victim, according to Lund, felt less safe after reading the letter, but is there any evidence the person or persons who beat him had read it?

I agree with Lund that "gay" is a schoolyard taunt. But it's not originating from kids who go to Sunday school. It starts among school kids before most of them are of an age to even know what it means. At least I hope at that in elementary school kids are not even aware of certain sexual practices that I didn't know about until well into my teenaged years and later. I am sure most good Christian parents are teaching their children not to use epithets or bullying of any kind against anyone.

Lund's op ed reminds me of a conversation I had with a gay activist in the proverbial "green room" years ago, after I'd booked him to appear on a CBC program for a debate.

This man told me the Bible, or parts of it anyway, should be banned as hate literature because of its stand against homosexual behavior.

He said that while he supported freedom of speech, he thought the Bible was directly responsible for the higher rates of suicide amongst gay youths. Therefore, because of the harm its moral stand produced, society had an interest in banning it or at least excising those parts that were responsible for the harm.

I personally do not like Pastor Boisson's letter. I think it was intemperate and over-the-top.
But I do not think it advocated hatred or violence. It attacked gay activism, not gays and lesbians as a group. He did it in a ham-fisted way. But he should have faced censure, not censorship.

In a way, attacking a kind of gay activism that seeks to silence Christians and impose its sexual dogmas on all of society (making it virtually illegal to say heterosexual sex within marriage is morally superior to homosexual sex and preventing parents from opting their kids out of such morally relativistic sex education sessions), has some similarities to criticisms of Islamic extremists who aim to impose Sharia on the West. Those criticisms are being misinterpreted as a general attack on all Muslims, when that is far from the case. Attacks on the tactics and aims of some gay activists are not the same thing as a general attack on gays and lesbians--the vast majority of whom just want to live and let live.

And while a small minority of Christian Constantinians or theocrats might want to see gays and lesbians stuffed back into "the closet," I repudiate that view. My Canada includes space for "out" gays and lesbians as well as for "out" Christians, who are now in danger of being stuffed into a new closet.

It is interesting that EGALE did NOT support the complaint against Boisson. The EGALE folks I have run into on the Hill are the epitome of civility and I have great respect for the likes of Laurie Aaron, even though we disagree. People like him are fighting for their rights but not trying to trample on the rights of others.

REAL Women of Canada's Gwen Landolt writes:

Significantly, according to the homosexual newspaper, Xtra West (December 6, 2007), the complaint against Pastor Boissoin was opposed by the homosexual lobby group, EGALE, which issued a press release on the case stating “that debate was the best method for dealing with homophobia (sic)” and that “sunshine is the best disinfectant.”

Also, Pink Triangle Press (PTP) which publishes the homosexual newspaper, Xtra West, opposed the complaint in its editorials and opinion pieces.

Ken Popert, executive director of PTP stated:

People may or may not be safer as a result of the ruling, but they certainly will be less free to speak their minds. By supporting this complaint we’d be creating grounds on which someone could take action against us for speaking out against ‘homophobes.’

If gay people are allowed to invoke safety when it comes to homophobes then homophobes will be allowed to invoke safety when it comes to us.

Well....not yet. But if Christians can effectively make the case that we are a vulnerable minority (and believing Christians are) then human rights commissions will have to start taking our complaints seriously. They don't now because Christianity, due to the high number of nominal Christians, is seen as the oppressive majority and therefore not protected.

And in a multicultural universe, Christianity and the Western Civilization of so-called dead white men, is the only culture that is seen as uniquely evil. But....gee, watch how fast the multiculturalists would start defending freedom of speech if HRCs started to clamp down on anti-Christian defamation and hate speech. My oh my, could you see the outcry in the arts community?

Another disappointing spectacle is the applause Lund received from a fellow Albertan at the University of Chicago' Martin Marty Center's site.

A satisfied Lund says the ruling sends a clear message: "It confirms we all have rights to free speech in Alberta , but there are also responsibilities that come with these privileges if we want to keep this a safe place for everyone. It reminds us that people in positions of authority have a special responsibility to protect the dignity of especially vulnerable people." For his part, Chandler was quoted as saying: "(The Conservative brass) told me my faith in Jesus Christ would interfere with how I could be a good member of the legislative assembly. Is that fair?"

The Chandler-Boisson episode suggests that Alberta 's human rights standards are evolving for the better. But Chandler 's assertion that his religious rights are being curtailed illustrates how variously "for the better" can be understood, and suggests that such evolution cannot be taken for granted, as there will always be those who challenge it. Thus, freedoms require vigilance if our province is to mature as a safe place for everyone.

Interestingly, Lund is described as a Lutheran and the author of the above doctrine of "evolving human rights standards" is from the United Church. Well, some in these churches are evolving away from such doctrines as the Resurrection, and of Jesus as the one and only Son of God, through whom we are saved.

Sad. Some words pop into my mind. Some scriptural verses. But it is Lent so I will refrain.

It is sad to see how liberal Protestantism has embraced the illiberal multicultural ethos of moral relativism. No wonder their churches are emptying.

Years ago, I got accepted to a PhD program at the University of Chicago in a fledging feminist studies program. Thank God I decided not to go. I remember going to visit the University for a weekend, and met with my then hero Mircea Eliade, since even then my real interest was religion. He was pretty awesome, but thankfully, I have let the scales fall from my eyes and shed the crazy feminism of my youth.

Don't forget Catholic Insight and Ron Gray

Paul Tuns at The Interim has a must read report.

The issue goes beyond gays and Muslims. As Borovoy has noted, it is impossible to draft speech regulations that silence certain (perceived) odious views without endangering all speech. In our news briefs this month we note that the Hamilton, Ont., transit authority has removed pro-life ads from its bus shelters. The ads featured a pregnant mother and a simple, implied question about whether there might ever be limits on abortion. The ads were taken down because of a handful of complaints from the public, and one city councilor said he found the ads offensive. How long until disagreements over any political messages are resolved not in our parliaments and public debates but before human rights tribunals? What views will have to be explained before the inquisitors of tomorrow?

Every day that the human rights tribunals continue to operate under their existing mandates, our freedoms are imperiled. If a Canadian citizen can be hauled before an HRC to defend his right to express himself, he is not truly free. The survival of Canadian democracy is at stake.

Listening to Cross Country Checkup

Time for me to pour a Jack Daniels and soda.

Bernie Farber on Cross Country Checkup

Bernie Farber is on, talking about fears that the Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn's cases



On that issue I couldn't agree more.

Both the Steyn and the Levant cases should not have made it to any human rights commission.

We need to take a look at law

we ought to have a safety valve. There ought to have been a law or civil servant
should have dismissed them right away.


Ezra Levant not called an actual tribunal, was the primary investigative procedure

Many cases that are supremely serious.

Costs borne by person who is the subject of the complaint.

There is a definite imbalance. This is where we have to do some more tinkering so we have no more Levant or Mark Steyn cases.

WE have to look at its application, applied properly, and those complained against not have to jump into their life savings to protect their good name.

But something needs to be done to protect against hate speech and its destructive effects on society.

It has not been my experience that the marketplace of ideas is as balanced.

Very often it is the extreme or exotic kind of hate speech that gets covered.

hate speech is speech that has to be dealt with
created a sense of protection for vulnerable minorities

look at ways of cleaning up the law

Live blogging Cross Country Checkup

First guest is Alan Borovoy.

HRCs came into being to administer various human rights laws. "The whole idea was to ensure that there would be a proactive and vigorously responsive mechanism in the event of that kind of discrimination."

"It never occurred to any of us that this vehicle would ever be used against the free expression of opinion."

When did free speech and publication of magazines and cartoons become the subject over overview of Human rights commissions?

One of earliest ones was a response to various telephone hate messages. Dial a number and response to hate message. Federal Act was amended to have a mechanism against that. That jumped to provincial levels.

How successful? How quick a response for complaints under original intent?

A lot of the administraiton has become very slow. People have had to wait a long time to have complaints processes. Over time built up pretty severe backlogs.

Do you agree Macleans?

No I don't. HAve to look at the terms of the legislation.
That formulation likely to expose: there is no requirement there be an intent to foment
hatred or contempt and no defense for truth

Imagine articles written about Rwanda, Kosovo, Northern Ireland or the Middle East. Indignation against any warring parties, to what extent might it fall within terms
Danger of
wide pervasive censorship powers

Ezra Levants raises issues of procedural fairness. On balance procedurally

I think that can create great problems. It stems from the totality of what HRCs are supposed to be doing and not to di
Now that this has been applied to speech it really does compound the problem.

What do you think of Keith Martin's

I think it is a good idea. Nothing is good enough.
Will it make the situation less bad than the status quo and I think the answer is yes.


EVery generation has this. There are always challenges to free speech. One of the things that has to be borne in mind. Measures to restrain speech come from some constituency that feels aggreived, often justifiably aggrieved. Tend to be parochial, narrow view of self-interest, do not adequately weigh the price to be paid

Bill c-10?

WEll of course people can argue that oh well that just matter of government spending public money, not restricting

I think there's a real problem with that kind of approach. To whatever extent we grant tax credits for election expenses, permissable to grant way this or that spending it is contrary to public interest? This approach C-10
raises great dangers, government effectively curb creative expression in this country.



4:12 p.m. Rex's intro has good detail and sets up the issues and latest examples well, but it is way too long.

1 888 416 8333 is the call in number
checkup@cbc.ca for email

The scary legacy of secularist fundamentalism's moral relativism

In listening to Richard Warman's (Google "Richard Warman University of Victoria speech" to find it on YouTube) primer on human rights law and its opposition to discrimination---well---I can't help wondering whether multicultural moral relativism underlies Subsection 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Is it evidence that the "separation of church and state" has indeed morphed into the "separation of morality from politics"? Is that good?

Then as I ponder this, it seems odd that a law that opposes any discrimination whatsoever in thought word or deed allows the power of the state to come down with crushing fines and draconian measures like forced apologies or prohibitions against ever going near the Internet or publishing or speaking publicly on certain subjects on those who publicly display any form of discrimination.

And these days, discriminating among behaviors and moral positions, not just old-fashioned garden-variety racism and Anti-Semitism, is targeted. The state, via this law, is discriminating in a pretty heavy-handed way against those who dare to discriminate, and the definition of what it means to "discriminate" seems to be getting wider and wider and wider. Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry faced complaints for defending the traditional definition of marriage---something that half the Canadian population agrees with.

Back in the old days when human rights commissions were first set up, they were designed to protect people against discrimination for characteristics they were born with and could do nothing about, such as the pigmentation of one's skin, or one's sex. Keeping a qualified individual from a job because he or she is black, or a woman was deemed--and still is--morally wrong.

But now something else seems to animate the law and its interpretation. Even criticizing the religious doctrines or behaviors of some groups (except Christians) runs one the risk of complaints of hateful discrimination. Even factual accounts or fair comment puts one in danger. The truth is no defense.

What is going on?

In my experience, those who oppose making any moral judgments tend to make the harshest moral judgments against those who do. I sure found that among certain individuals I worked with at the CBC. Though I believe in absolute truth I am not an absolutist. As a Christian I believe freedom of conscience is paramount and conversion to my faith must never be forced. Even those who evangelize must never shove the truth down someone's throat. Jesus Christ wants us to freely love him. That's why He has not terrified us with His glory to force us to worship Him, but instead came into our world as a lowly infant, as one of us, so we could choose to love Him.

Some of the worst absolutists I have ever met are secular relativists. So what are some of the logical consequences of the ideas of secular relativism?

Father Richard John Neuhaus reveals this scary bit of information regarding Holocaust denial and today's university students. (Emphasis mine). These students provide a scary glimpse of where the West is headed if morality is not brought back into the picture.

Dacey has quibbles with Pope Benedict’s analysis of moral “relativism,” but he admits that “secular liberals find it had to shake the lingering feeling that there is something to the pope’s diagnosis. Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” He writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.” Who are they to say that the Nazis were morally wrong? And so it is also with apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. For these students, passing moral judgment “is to be a moral ‘absolutist,’ and having been taught that there are no absolutes, they now see any judgment as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian.”

Secularists, says Dacey, need to recover the courage to make frankly moral arguments. “The conventional view that genuine conscience requires religion has it precisely wrong; genuine religion requires conscience.” To which one might respond that the likelihood of having a well-informed conscience is greatly enhanced by religion that is attentive to truth, but Christians should have no problem with the second part of his assertion, that genuine religion requires conscience. And it is certainly true that the religious have no monopoly on conscience. The moral truths that we cannot not know are universal and, as St. Paul says, are written on the human heart.

There is so much that is great about Western Civilization---its fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech for one--that are just and good and true because they have corresponded with those truths written on the heart. It took a lot of bloodshed to work out the proper relationship of church and state and of the role of the state in protecting inherent freedoms. But that fight was not meant to make way for moral relativism.

We must find out moral compass again. Or we are in danger of losing our freedoms. If indeed secularist moral relativism is the animating principle between Subsection 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, then that's all the more reason for the law to be reexamined, especially considering the potentially disastrous logical consequences.

Ezra Levant on the closed Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Ottawa

Erza Levant weighs in on the fact that the March 25 Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Ottawa will be closed to the public, and the fact that the "accused" in the case would have been barred from being able to sit in the same room with HRC staff while his lawyer cross examines them.

Ezra writes:

So it should come as no surprise that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing on March 25th -- where human rights commission staff themselves are to be cross-examined on their dubious tactics of anonymous infiltration of websites, entrapment and even the bizarre practice of commission staff themselves planting bigoted remarks on websites -- is going to be closed to the public.

It is hypocritical in the extreme that HRC staff who scrutinize every public utterance and private thought of their victims will be exempted from public scrutiny themselves. There is no legitimate reason for this blackout, other than the HRCs simply being HRCs and engaging in censorship and the restriction of public debate. Usually they censor political expression they disagree with; this time they censor their own embarrassing conduct from being seen and heard by taxpaying Canadians. I don't blame them, frankly -- the more their inner workings are publicized, the greater will be the demand for politicians to rein in their excesses.

He also speculates--convincingly in my opinion--about what drives these staffers. But of course, I'm a journalist, so I try not to engage in mind-reading and as a Christian I try not to jump to conclusions or to judge. Not judging, however, does not mean not discerning.

Canada's human rights commissions have fostered a sick culture of obsessive secrecy, unfairness towards the accused and un-Canadian procedures. But this is more than that: it's a psychological clue as to how the commission's staff regard themselves. They don't see themselves as thin-skinned busy-bodies, or politically correct censors, or bureaucratic bullies, strangling marginal and oddball citizens with red tape. They see themselves as stars in a James Bond movie, or an episode of 24, where they are the fearless protectors of all that is good, fighting against powerful, evil, violent men -- and if they need to break a few rules along the way, well that's a price we have to pay. It would be laughable if it weren't destroying the lives of innocent people -- and the reputation of justice.

These aren't counter-terrorists, or even real police. These commission staff aren't Jack Bauer or Horatio Kane. They're civil servants who sit in their government offices, surfing the Internet under fake names, posting bigoted comments to chat sites, and then complaining about it. Comparing them to Pee-wee Herman is more accurate.

Ezra Levant on Cross Country Checkup

Ezra Levant will be on Cross Country Checkup this afternoon for a program on censorship. Is Mark Steyn going to be on too? Checkup bills the program as follows:

Two separate events are raising cries of government censorship. One, is a proposed law (C-10) that will deny government funding to films considered in poor taste. The other involves complaints made to Human Rights Commissions against certain journalists and their publications (Ezra Levant, Western Standard; and Mark Steyn, Maclean's).

Perhaps less known are two other cases where censorship is either being requested or decried. A new video game called Bully: Scholarship Edition (it's made by the same people who make Grand Theft Auto), has raised the ire of teachers and they want it banned. Also, an attempt by the York Debating Society last week to discuss the pros and cons of abortion at York University was shut down by those who said such debate is not acceptable.

I plan on listening in, maybe emailing or calling, but I know my mind is going to hurt after listening to the program, because it is going to deal not only with the real censorship of human rights commissions, but also the false censorship decried by the arts community concerning the the amendments in Bill C-10 that affect whether film makers will get tax credits if they produce a movie that the government does not like. As for the shutting down of the abortion debate, I think it is shameful on a university campus where academic freedom is supposed to prevail but it is not censorship because the power of the state was not invoked to crush the debate.

I hate the conflation of Bill C-10 with censorship. Andrew Coyne has a great column in this week's Maclean's that, unfortunately, I cannot find online. He gets the difference. And it is this: censorship criminalizes speech; withdrawing a subsidy does not.

Yet in the TVO debate on Steve Paikin's The Agenda, the conflation and confusion that drives me crazy is precisely what happened. Charles McVety did a pretty good job of defending my point of view. The guy from the Canadian Jewish Congress and the woman from Little Mosque on the Prairie almost gave me a migraine.

And why, oh why, oh why is freedom of speech always associated with smut? The Left seems to have no problem with the shutting down of political speech they don't like, or Christian speech they find moralistic and offensive, but don't touch their freedom to make porn.

John Pacheco at Socon-or-bust has a good post this morning on the difference between freedom and license.

The exercise of authentic freedom, as opposed to the legal, civil construct we are accustomed to arguing for, recognizes the boundaries that the truth has made around it. So, we must always remember that just because we can say something and we have the civil right to do it, it doesn’t mean it is moral to do so.

Stepping outside those moral and conscientious boundaries changes the very nature of an act from genuine freedom to license. The difference between the two is the truth. Lose the truth and you are not arguing for the exercise of freedom any longer but rather being a pimp for sin.

snip

The corollary to rejecting the truth and upholding freedom as a god unto itself is to descend into a meaningless and arbitrary existence at the service of rank egoism and an ultimate loss of identity and purpose.

True freedom is the servant of the truth which, in turn, sets us free to understand the meaning in life, to live for something more than putting in our bleak days on this earth.

Don't discredit your arguments by your behavior

I wish some of the people people who are angry about the abuses of human rights commissions would cool down their rhetoric.

It is not helpful to call human rights commissioners "thugs" or to compare them to the jackbooted Nazis or the Stalinist secret police who came in the middle of the night to haul people off to death camps or the the gulag. When you do, you cheapen what happened to those who did experience those horrors. You discredit your arguments when you are over-the-top.

It's like crying wolf too often and too loudly. Then when and if some real abuses are uncovered, no one will believe you because you will be dismissed as someone who continually blows things out of proportion.

Some of the Christians spouting off sure make our religion look like the home of some angry, cranky and even nasty people. You make me want to distance myself from you. We are called to love, even our enemies. Yes we must also speak the truth. But in love.

Even that might run you the risk of a human rights complaint, as it did Calgary Bishop Fred Henry. Don't get me wrong. There is something really wrong with the system. It needs to be fought.

But let's fight with wisdom and courage and humor. If you are going to be a free speech martyr, you would make it easier for the rest of us if you did not end up with complaints against you for being an intemperate jerk.

If you are going to engage in some hyperbole, make sure it is employed for the sake of humor not character assassination or angry overblown venting. Make it funny. Mark Steyn strikes the right tone. So does Binks. Mean-spiritedness is ugly, no matter where it is coming from.

I am for freedom of speech. But I am also for civility and basic human decency. I don't want government controlling our speech, but I do think a modicum of self-control would go a long way in ensuring that we can, in our great diversity of beliefs, share this common space here in Canada with peace because were respect each others' basic human dignity.

Upcoming Human Rights Tribunal hearing closed to public

The March 25 Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Ottawa is closed to the public.

Connie Fournier of Free Dominion posted this email exchange with the HRT registrar. Connie wrote:

Dear Ms Hartung,

My name is Connie Fournier and my husband and I were administrators of
the website Free Dominion when a person named jadewarr signed up as a
member.

It has come to our attention that this matter will be discussed at the
March 25th tribunal hearing of Warman v. Lemire, and we would like to
request permission to sit in on the hearing since the evidence concerns
a website that belonged to us.

Please let us know if this is agreeable. Thank you in advance for your
consideration.

Connie and Mark Fournier

Ms. Hartung wrote back to say the meeting is in camera.


In fact, according to this ruling, there was an attempt to block Mark Lemire, the "accused" (not sure what the right word is in HRCs/HRTs lingo), from being in the same room with the commission staff he has won the right to have his lawyer cross examine.

This ruling says he will be allowed into the room. That's good.

Yes, Marc Lemire has a bad reputation as a white supremacist. I abhor those views, just as I abhor the anti-Semitism of those who are celebrating the massacre of teenaged students in Jerusalem.


But as Binks so eloquently explains:

Fast forward to 2008. On the political scale of Canadian society, white supremacists, white anti-semites, and white Nazi-types are the expendables. You can comfortably be an immigrant or Muslim with almost these exact views– but that’s another matter.

Yet– do they not have rights? Are they not Canadian citizens, however stupid, marginal, or utterly wrong-headed their views?

This hearing is pivotal because it will examine the whole question of whether human rights commission employees and/or complainants have done any posting of hate themselves under assumed names in order to either entrap or plant evidence.

Whoever Marc Lemire is, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence and due process, which includes not having false evidence used against him.

According to the ruling, the commission staff fear for their personal safety if their identities are made public.

The ruling states:

13] The option being proposed by the Commission would result in Mr. Lemire being denied the opportunity to be in the hearing room while these witnesses testify. Section 52(1) states that the Tribunal's inquiry shall be conducted in public.

Given some of the material on the web about Richard Warman and the fact that his home address has appeared online with comments from a U.S. based site that sounded like not so veiled death threats, frankly I don't blame them for being concerned.

But I still think that in the interests of justice, with proper security measures, human rights proceedings should be opened to the public in the same way a court of law is open.

Laugh out loud funny Mark Steyn column

The Democratic primary season seems to have dwindled down into a psycho remake of Driving Miss Daisy. The fading matriarch Mizz Hill’ry (Jessica Tandy) doesn’t want to give up the keys to the Democratic-party vehicle but the dignified black chauffeur Hokey (Morgan Freeman) insists it’ll be a much smoother ride with him in the driver’s seat, full of gear change you can believe in, etc. Yet, just as he thinks the old biddy’s resigned to a nomination as Best Supporting Actress, the backseat driver plunges her hat pin into his spine, wrests the wheel away and lurches across the median.

Thankfully Mark Steyn, a Canadian citizen, lives in the United States where freedom of speech is still respected as a fundamental right. So, even if Maclean's Magazine loses and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal or the Canadian Human Rights Commission hands Steyn and the magazine a permanent order to never publish anything of his again that mocks or satirizes or remotely subjects any identifiable group to laughter (seen by the humorless as contempt and hatred?)--somewhere, somehow, we'll be able to find him through various published venues in the United States and on his website.

That is until the Internet is subsumed under government control via the CRTC and Google supplies Canada with the template it offered China that blocks the searches for words like democracy.

Oh that would never happen?

Let's hope not. It could if Canadians are not vigilant in protecting their fundamental rights.

Some good ideas for keeping Dan McTeague's plan

Dan McTeague's private member's bill to allow tax breaks for RESPs is a great conservative idea, even though the Tories are not happy that it has passed the House of Commons.

The National Post has some suggestions:

We have an even better idea. The Conservatives should allow the private member's bill to receive royal assent. They should make the first $5,000 in RESP savings tax deductable, and keep the 20% matching grants, as well. Assure the provinces that Ottawa will make up whatever monies they lose and take the entire $900-million to $1.3-billion out of useless holdover Liberal initiatives such as multicultural grants, status-of-women funding, the gun registry and Kyoto measures.

Heh heh heh.

And Being Right is Not Wrong, a Blogging Tory, has another suggestion:

Wait a second, won’t more money being saved by families to invest in RESPs for their children… Never mind.

Chop the gun registry or the HRC funding and keep this tax break.

Yeah Dan McTeague!

Move on folks, nothing to see here

Some on the left have declared the great free speech debate is over.

WK writes from his Florida vacation:

In the Great White North, it's been raging for a couple months now, and - for me, at least - it's gotten kind of boring. Everyone has made their points, in some cases multiple times. No one has changed sides, and nothing has really changed.

Boring? That's interesting. He links to Werner Patels who says:

When blogs first became popular, it did not take very long for bloggers to start using their sites for nefarious purposes, such as spreading lies about others. It may have started with some school kids who figured that using a blog for bullying mates off school property made perfect sense. But it certainly did not stop there.

Soon people who should know better would start acting like schoolyard brats slinging mud at each other. And not too long thereafter, the first few lawyers began cashing in their retainer cheques from clients seeking legal redress for having been libelled and defamed.

Yet, it would seem Mr. Patels engages in some of the same kind of name-calling and mudslinging he derides. I guess it is okay if you are labeling a conservative message forum "extremist."

I can think of many reasons why this story is not going to go away.

Big new developments will take place March 25 in Ottawa. Stay tuned.

And when the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal actually follows through with the audacity of putting Maclean's Magazine on trial, you can expect this to become a firestorm that will sweep the whole country.

No, we are just seeing some preliminary skirmishes now. The real battle is looming.

Is Barak Obama the Messiah?

There's a new site dedicated to collecting all the "evidence"

Groups applaud bill raising age of protection

Christian organizations are praising the passage of legislation that raises the age of protection for children to have consensual sex with adults from 14 to 16.

"This is a very welcome step in the right direction towards the stronger protection of children and young teens from sexual exploitation by adults," said Michele Boulva, director of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF).

Boulva said the legislation helps address the rising vulnerability of children through the Internet, where child pornography is on the increase and adult predators try to lure young people through teen chat rooms and online friendship networks.

She welcomed the new law as an invitation to Canadian teens to think more deeply about the purpose and meaning of sexual activity.

"Sexual activity is not merely a recreational sport to be engaged in as soon as a youth has physically matured," she said. "This law now better recognizes that sexual activity also requires a certain emotional and psychological maturity, because it is an act with profound consequences on every level of our being."

Society casually dismissive of Humanae Vitae

Pope Paul VI's controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae has often been dismissed because of its unpopular stand against contraception.

Forty years later, however, when fresh eyes examine the document in light of present realities, Paul VI's document has gained a new relevance.

In Ottawa Feb. 28-29, biotechnology experts and representatives of family groups gathered for a seminar organized by the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF) to reexamine Humanae Vitae in light of developments biotechnology, human reproduction, sexuality and the plight of marriage and the family.

"What came out was the inspiration and vision that someone like Pope Paul VI had 40 years ago in writing Humanae Vitae," said London Bishop Ronald Fabbro in an interview following the seminar.

Church wants balanced story of residential schools

Catholic bishops and the leaders of religious orders will help to promote the upcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools.

But they are doing it with a concern that the commission not only tell the stories of Aboriginal people who suffered in the schools, but also those of the men and women religious who made great sacrifices while working in the schools for decades.

-snip-

At the March 2 kickoff event, Anglican, Presbyterian and United church representatives apologized for their churches' roles in the schools.

"As churches in Canada we acknowledge and confess our failures in the Indian Residential schools, which aimed to socialize and Christianize First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples," said Anglican primate Archbishop Fred Hiltz.

Archbishop Terrence Prendergast

"We failed them. We failed ourselves. We failed God. We failed because of our racism and because of the belief that white ways were superior to aboriginal ways."

United Church Moderator David Guiliano pointed out that while First Nations people are "aware of their need for healing" they are "calling us to acknowledge our need for healing, too."

He said Church people "need to be healed of tunnel vision and cultural superiority."

The Catholic Register has a slightly different version of my story here. (WCR combined two stories for the piece they ran)

What does separation of church and state have to do with this?

Recently, I broke a story about Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast's views concerning whether Catholic politicians who publicly take pro-abortion stands should receive communion.

A shortened version of the piece I filed appeared in the Western Catholic Reporter.

Today, the Ottawa Citizen picks up the story.

Rosemary Ganley, co-ordinator of Catholics for a Free Choice Canada, said Archbishop Prendergast's position is wrong in canon law, and wrong in a country like Canada where church and state are separate.

"This is disappointing in the extreme, and there are many other church leaders in this country who wouldn't go as far as he did on this because they know this position isn't supportable," she said.

Her group is made up of Catholics who support a woman's right to choose and a person's right to use birth control.

She said canon law gives church officials the right to deny sacraments or even excommunicate if people procure or provide abortions, but it is silent on people who support the right to choose.

"There's nothing in there saying he could deny communion to people who are pro-choice," she said. "So even within the church's own terms, he's on very, very shaky ground." Furthermore, she said Archbishop Prendergast should realize he's in a country with a charter of rights that has been interpreted to protect a woman's right to choose, and that politicians are sworn to uphold the Constitution, which contains the charter.

Rosemary Ganley knows more about canon law than the Jesuit scholar who happens to be Archbishop of Ottawa?

I don't think so.

Thankfully, the group that she speaks for is mostly made up of Baby Boomers in their 60s. It annoys me when the MSM uses people like Ganley as their "go to" contacts for commentary about the Catholic Church. Kinda reminds me of how, moments after Pope John Paul II died, the CBC ran to ex-nun Joanna Manning with her negative comments. Appalling.

The state has no right to determine who has the right to receive communion in the Catholic Church. So this is not a church and state issue. If someone is not leading a life consistent with Catholic teaching---in other words---a morally coherent life--receiving communion is spiritually dangerous. It is a loving act on the part of a responsible Shepherd to let people know the danger they are in.

Osama Obama Osama Obama?

At the gym yesterday, I caught a bit of Don Newman's Politics on one of the TVs hanging above the weight machines. During the pundit panel, Canwest national affairs columnist Don Martin misspoke himself and said Osama Bin Ladin when he meant Barak Obama.

"Just shoot me!" he said, according to the closed captioning.

I laughed out loud.

But then, I thought....what if a Tory MP had made the same mistake?

We would have Osamagate to add to the current scandals such as NAFTAgate and Cadscam.

Richard Warman gives a primer on human rights law

Richard Warman gives a detailed talk explaining how people can use the human rights commissions and Section 13 and similar provincial legislation to combat hate and racism. There are other segments of the talk on You Tube.

The talk gives a good primer on HRCs and the present state of the law and also reveals a great deal about how Warman sees himself and what he is doing.

Obviously, he sees himself as a crusader for justice and as an opponent of discrimination. It is clear to me as well, that many who know Warman personally also see him that way. He has lots of people on his side. The kind of thinking that he exhibits represents a widely-held mindset here in Ottawa, one that I suspect permeates the public service, union leadership, and the legal establishment.

While Ezra Levant has written about the need for the denormalization of HRCs, watching this video will give you some idea of what "normal" is inside the Queensway.

Then you might understand the kind of work cut out for any political party or group or movement that seeks to change it. For those with that mindset, change will be experienced as an attack on justice and support of discrimination, i.e. racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on.

If Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn had not been caught in the ever-growing net of what constitutes discrimination, little would have happened to challenge it.

But look at the campaign to discredit Steyn and Levant, even by people who agree the human rights complaints against them are specious, and utterly without merit.

As the Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times.

The problems of human rights commissions

Ezra Levant has some nice things to say about me this morning. Thanks! Some of you might be wondering why he refers to me as his former colleague. In or around late 2000, or early 2001, Ezra was my boss for about three months while he was Stockwell Day's director of communications. That was during the height of the Canadian Alliance implosion, when several MPs left to form the DRC.

All in all, I spent 18 months working in politics. I started working for Day right after he won the leadership and worked in the Alliance war room during the 2000 election.

I thought the transition from journalism to politics would be a piece of cake. It wasn't. For me journalism is about facts and fairness. I discovered politics is about marketing, branding, and messaging. Though I did find there was far more respect for the facts within the Alliance than from our chief rivals, politics was not a good fit for me. I hated the bloodsport aspect.

I had friends on both sides of the rebellion that rocked the Alliance. It was a very painful, stressful time. I started to work with the Caucus on Question Period strategy and carved out a niche for myself that did not require spin---which I found myself incapable of doing. Journalists quickly learned I would not divulge confidential information. I was terrified that something I might say would end up on the front pages and hurt someone.

During that time, I gained painful insights into the journalistic pack on Parliament Hill. What I knew to be happening from the inside seldom resembled what I saw in the newspapers or on television. I know many of the journalists after years of working in Ottawa. As individuals they are nice people. As a pack, well, there are reasons for terms like "blood in the water" and "feeding frenzy." And as a pack, they are much, much more susceptible to the spin of people like Warren Kinsella, because they share the same default assumptions. This is a big problem for the Tories. It is also a possible explanation for their caution on some issues like freedom of speech. Because the expected spin would be that doing anything to touch the Canadian Human Rights Act or Canadian Human Rights Commission is anti-human rights and....you guessed it....jumping in bed with neo-Nazis. The Liberals favorite gambit is to paint the Tories as anti-Charter, anti-human rights. And they are not beneath bashing Christians as an identifiable group to scaremonger. I heard on Mike Duffy's show the other day that the Liberals are planning to use the "scary hidden agenda" strategy once again in the next election. Sigh.

When Harper won the leadership in 2002, he or someone on his staff fired me and several others within two days, perhaps because we were prominent Day people, or Christians or social conservatives, I dunno. On a pragmatic level, Harper probably wanted to avoid have happen to him what had happened to Day when those loyal to Preston Manning made his life difficult. (Not that I would ever have participated in something like that). As well, Harper probably wanted to make sure he was distanced from the "taint" of being beholden in any way to those "scary" social conservatives. Whatever.

I have no personal loyalty or affection for Harper. I have nothing personal against him, either.

He's showed great skill as a leader and as a strategist. I think his control over the caucus is a good thing. From a political point of view, any party that wants to win has to have a military-style discipline. Politics resembles war. It is about power. You just have to hope the men and women with the right ideas and the best characters are the ones who gain it.

When I worked for the Alliance, the caucus resembled a herd of cats. Leaks to journalists were constant. Members spoke publicly about issues anytime they felt like it. There were too many operating like Garth Turner did before he was kicked out of the party. That there is silence now after weekly caucus meetings is a good thing. Now the Liberals are in disarray and consumed by infighting. People like to say Harper's "muzzling" of his caucus goes against freedom of speech. Well....if you have "freedom of speech" for every MP anytime he or she feels like venting, then you will not win and you will not govern. Simple as that.

As for the human rights commissions/freedom of speech issue? I have talked with many, many Tories about this. Many cabinet ministers. Many staffers. While awareness of the extent of the problem has varied, what I've heard corroborates what Liberal MP Keith Martin has said about the overwhelming support he's received for his private member's motion M-446 from the Conservative side of the aisle.

On one hand I respect the fact that responsible Tory MPs will not speak on the record about this issue without getting permission from the PMO. It sounds draconian, but it isn't. It's like making sure you have a choir that is following the conductor and singing from the same song sheet.

It's part of being a disciplined organization that is serious about winning and governing. Yeah, it makes my job a little harder. It is frustrating for those of us who want to see action on this file now.

My person opinion on this matter is that the whole question of civil liberties and human rights is far too important for any party to allow it to become a political football with cheerleaders on either side reducing important questions to seven second sound bites and drive-by smears.

This is an issue that deserves a Royal Commission, headed up by non-partisan, respected legal minds who also have a grounding in philosophy and constitutional law. It needs to have a mandate to look not only at the Canadian Human Rights Act, but our defamation laws, and Criminal Code provisions on hate speech. It has to have the mandate to look at the CRTC, the Internet, terrorism, child pornography and group defamation.

The Mark Lemire problem--well--its like the Omar Khadr problem

Those on the Left have a really hard time understanding how people like Ezra Levant could be supporting the Section 13 human rights case against white power advocate Mark Lemire. They conflate support for due process, for civil rights like freedom of speech, with agreement with his awful ideas.

Yet those of us on the right sometimes have a hard time understanding the MSM and Left-wing support of the rights of unlawful combatants like Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen languishing in Gitmo, or the attention given to the rights of people who Canada detains under security certificates as potential terrorists.

The lawyers who support these people sometimes unfairly get targeted as enemy sympathizers and the journalists who write about their cause as useful idiots for Al Qaeda.

I think both sides have to take off their ideological blindfolds and look at the civil rights at stake in a dispassionate way and not assume that lawyers or journalists who point out the dangers are necessarily in bed with the people they represent. Criminal lawyers who represent murderers are not in favor of murder. Those who warn of the dangers of excessive wire-tapping, or the inhumane treatment of a Canadian citizen who would under other circumstances be treated as a child soldier are in the same boat as those who say Mark Lemire should have the right to freedom of speech, even if his ideas are odious.

Ezra makes his case here:

UPDATE 1: Some commenters and bloggers are surprised that I would support Marc Lemire, because he runs websites that could fairly be called white supremacist. The answer is pretty simple: I don't. I just believe that a government that censors an offensive website is more offensive -- and dangerous -- than any website itself. And, as the March 25th hearings will likely show, in its zeal to "get" the Marc Lemires of this world, the government has become what they claim they abhor: sneaky, anonymous Internet lurkers, posting bigoted comments. Far more troubling than those government agents' own petty epithets, though, is the human rights commissions' perversion of our legal system, and their erosion of our freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

snip

My "support" for Lemire is my support for his fight against the human rights commissions, which are procedurally and substantively unCanadian. I suppose that's one of the differences between Warren Kinsella and me: I don't rejoice when my political opponents are dealt with tyrannically by my government. I think it's unfair and, at best, amoral. But I also realize that the precedents set when the state prosecutes the Lemires of the world are then used when the state prosecutes the Levants and the Steyns of the world.

And if they ever go after the Kinsellas of the world. So far, Canada's left has been exempted from these human rights complaints. That's partly because the commissions themselves are stacked with lefty, politically correct appointees who would find a creative way to dismiss a complaint filed by a conservative or a Christian. (I have probably read 50 tribunal rulings, and the only one in which a complainant was a Christian was dismissed. A dairy farmer in Alberta didn't want his milk to be picked up on Sunday, but the commission told him he should have thought of that before becoming a farmer.) But I think the exemption for the left is mainly because conservatives and Christians don't tend to run to the nanny state to censor their opponents. Conservatives are so used to being in the minority that we've learned to debate, and to take rough and tumble insults without complaining quite as much, at least to the government.

But should that ever change -- should conservatives start filing the same sort of nuisance complaints at human rights commissions as do liberals and Islamic fascists -- I bet it wouldn't be too long before the left started to worry about due process and constitutional freedoms.

Catholic Insight editorial issues rallying cry

Catholic Insight Magazine has a great editorial in its February issue now online. This little magazine also faces human rights complaints. Here's the rallying cry in its editorial.

What Canadians need now are citizens who will demand from our governments – provincial and national – that HRC’s, as presently constituted, be reformed. They must stop their role as censors of what may or may not be printed or said in Canada, as they are doing today without regard to the normal role of the press in society, or to the rights to freedom of speech and religion, and without the legal safeguards of the courts. HRC’s are extra-judiciary instruments whose officials rule and levy fines on the skimpiest of evidence, or sometimes in its complete absence, as in the recent case of Baptist Pastor Stephen Boissoin in Calgary.

Their personnel seem driven by an agnostic mentality opposed to traditional standards of behaviour. One example is the badgering and bullying of at least a dozen mayors of Canadian cities over the last 15 years or so, to allow Gay Pride days. They fined those who refused, until they complied. Toronto’s Gay Pride displays vulgarity and public nudity. The mayor gives his blessing, the police look the other way or actively take part, and the newspapers treat it as a great cultural event which brings in “tourists” and supposedly millions of dollars, while taxpayers must subsidize the lewd carnival to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars via a city which is deeply in debt.

Alas, many Canadians, including Catholics, have been indifferent to the progress of the “gay” agenda. They use standard replies: “You don’t have to attend Gay Pride days if you don’t want to.” “Their agenda does not concern us.” “Legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ does not affect me.” “You’ll get used to it.” These, and other expressions like it, are based on the false notion that agnostic secularism is neutral. Well, it is not.

Today its adherents demand that all school children must be taught the equality of same-sex "marriage" to marriage between a man and a woman; that all public opposition must stop and be designated as “hatred” and prosecuted under the “Hate Crimes” section of the Criminal Code; that all adverse comments about the homosexual lifestyle and its social, family and medical consequences be stricken off the record and publicly denied as untrue.

Quite a few individuals, including us, will not do this. So we must face the HRC’s.

Catholic Insight's must read February edition

Catholic Insight Magazine has a must-read edition on line. This little magazine also faces human rights complaints. Please consider taking out a subscription or sending them a donation to help them fight the battle ahead. They have none of the resources behind a big magazine like Maclean's.

In their February issue , REAL Women of Canada's Gwen Landolt has an excellent primer on the damage human rights commissions and activist courts have done to our civil rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. She examines how the equality provision of the Charter has come to trump other rights.

She writes:

This broad, all-encompassing definition of equality, written in such high-sounding language, in reality meant that human dignity was undermined if an individual or group felt that its self-respect and self-worth were not being respected. That is, according to the Supreme Court of Canada in the Law case, an individual or group’s human dignity is undermined if they feel marginalized, ignored or devalued. In short, equality rights under S.15 of the Charter now rest on the claims of a person’s feelings. This is an extraordinary criterion for courts to use in order to determine “equality”. It should not escape notice that this broad interpretation of “equality” provides a sweeping opportunity for the courts to protect any of their favourite groups, regardless of the intent of Parliament, the plain wording of the legislation, or the views of the public, since all that is required is that the individual or group maintains that they feel demeaned or marginalized.

Landolt is probably one of the most knowledgeable people in Canada about this issue. Take the time to read this piece and save it for future reference.

Where are the journalists when there is real censorship?

It annoys me to see all the mainstream media coverage of the so-called censorship in the Income Tax Act involving tax credits for Canadian films. Where have all these reporters been during the ongoing saga of real censorship involving human rights commission complaints and defamation lawsuits, most recently concerning Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Catholic Insight Magazine and Free Dominion? Yeah, we've had a number of columnists weigh in and some good editorials, but journalists? Do the Joan Bryden and the CBC Radio reporter whatshername's guilt-by-association smear of Liberal MP Keith Martin count?

Government funding or tax credits and their withdrawal may encourage or discourage certain types of art---hey---those on the right side of the political spectrum, especially Christians, have learned long ago they need not apply for a whole array of government supports that prop up the Canadian literati and film industry--but those with mettle can still get their book written and or their film made even if it is much harder.

Censorship has to do with the government coming in and shutting down a film, a book or a website and using the power of the state to shut people up through fines and jail terms for those who persist once they are given orders to never write or publish on the forbidden subjects again.

John Ivison has a good column today on the subject in today's National Post where he explains why the Income Tax Bill's controversial amendment is not censorship.

He writes that he is outraged as a taxpayer at what has been funded:

Telefilm Canada handed out $158-million last year, including to such productions as Sperm and The Masturbators. But while they or the other yet-to-be-released movies and shows may well prove to be the next Away from Her, Barbarian Invasions or Trudeau, all of which were award-winners and received substantial Telefilm funding, they are just as likely to be the next Web-dreams, Kink or G-Spot, titillating late-night fare designed almost exclusively to provoke hand-to-gland combat.

These three shows received substantial public funding over the years through Telefilm and the Canadian Television Fund. But why? Telefilm's mission is to foster productions that reflect Canadian society, with its linguistic duality and cultural diversity. Where's the Canadian distinctness in the G-Spot episode Sexorcist, where Gigi (Brigitte Bako), experiences a visit by a ghost that leaves her extremely "satisfied"? It's not that it's a bad show -- if it's on, I'll watch it because I'm Scottish and I know I'm paying for it. But the only connection to the Great White North is that Gigi is a struggling Canadian actress in Hollywood.

I don't want my tax dollars funding that crap! But cutting a subsidy is not the same thing as getting summoned to a Star Chamber or a kangaroo court and having the whole apparatus of the state trample on your civil rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Ivison also has a funny line about Charles McVety, the ubiquitous evangelical spokesperson who claims to have persuaded the government to include this provision.

He writes:

This message has been bolstered by Charles McVety, the evangelical minister and head of the Canadian Family Action Coalition, who claimed credit for the amendment, saying he's been lobbying the government to cut funding for productions with graphic sex and violence.

This is unfortunate. To corrupt an old joke, the definition of hell is a place where the English are the cooks, the Germans are the police, the Swiss are the lovers and Charles McVety is in charge of television scheduling.

I have met Charles McVety several times. He's a nice man. But I wish he were NOT the go-to person for the news media as the stock Christian from Hollywood's Central Casting, as their idea of a cross between Ned Flanders and Elmer Gantry. He comes across as a stereotype of the American Christian right and that's why the news media loves him so much. His timing is impeccable--as a saboteur of the very goals he believes in. He is the typical straw man that the MSM loves to set up to discredit the arguments of Christians. If he were really serious about his goals, he would start taking a back stage role and find someone else to front the arguments.

Try as he might and as sincere as he is, he is selected partly because journalists see him as a laughingstock, partly because of the vast ignorance among journalists about the variety and depth of thought within the Canadian Christian community, and partly because those who might be more effective have not done enough of a good job of putting themselves forward. One thing McVety knows how to do is punch out those press releases and get himself out there in the news cycle. He confirms the MSM prejudices against Christians, however unfair that might be to him.

Thankfully on the Catholic side we're seeing a new group of go-to contacts. Fr. Tom Rosica and Fr. Raymond De Souza are both highly articulate, bright, media savvy communicators who know how to make their faithful positions attractive.

Evangelical Fellowship of Canada president Bruce Clemenger is a thoughtful spokesman, but too cerebral for television. As a former television producer, I would say he has not mastered the art of the seven second clip. Janet Epp Buckingham, the former EFC director of law and public policy, was much better in that medium. Despite her unfortunate recent column, which I chalk off to a form of misspeaking, Janet is a great communicator and has done yeoman service for the cause.

I miss former EFC president Brian Stiller as a media spokesman for Christians. He had the right combination of erudition and the common touch.

There is another factor at work. There might be within the MSM some who just don't want someone with real talent to make a good case for views they adamantly oppose.

Another Liberal steps forward to support M-446

Liberal MP Dan McTeague is one of the courageous and principled members of the Liberal caucus who has stood firm in support of life and family, including the traditional definition of marriage, when his party was ramming same-sex marriage through the House of Commons in 2005 and characterizing those who opposed the move as anti-Charter and anti-human rights.

I spoke to Dan last week about freedom of speech and he is deeply concerned about the chill human rights complaints are placing on such a fundamental freedom.

He supports his fellow Liberal MP Keith Martin's private member's motion M-446.

More racism and homophobia on the left

For days I have been bothered by this post. I can think of many, many vile racist and homophobic stereotypes this post conveys. It also trivializes in a sick way the problem of prison rape, something that Dan Gardner writes about in a powerful op ed condemning a disgusting cartoon on prison rape and Conrad Black in yesterday's Toronto Star.

Dan writes:

But the cartoonist who thought it hilarious to mark Conrad Black's incarceration with a gag about prison rape is not some vicious American reactionary. He is Theo Moudakis. And his unspeakably crude joke was published Monday in the impeccably liberal and very Canadian Toronto Star.

For years, an American organization called Stop Prisoner Rape has pleaded for an end to these wisecracks. They "trivialize and dehumanize," the group says on its website. "Such flippant attitudes about sexual violence in detention (are) one of the major obstacles to ending this type of violence." Doesn't that sound like something the Star would say in one of its earnest and upright editorials? And yet, it seems, no one at the Star saw anything amiss in Monday's cartoon.

The racism--and Islamophobia--on the Left

When I was in high school back in the 1960s, one of our teachers assigned the watching of Firing Line. Back then William F. Buckley was frequently debating African American author James Baldwin. Then that same teacher told us to reprise the Firing Line debates in his classroom.

In my virtually all white high school in the Boston suburbs, I decided to play James Baldwin for that class. I read everything I could get my hands on. His novel Another Country and his essays The Fire Next Time changed the trajectory of my life. It bothered me that Baldwin said that every black person, deep down, hated every white person. I wanted to prove that I did not deserve to be hated. I sought redemption. Around that time, I and thousands of others marched to Boston Common with Martin Luther King. If Obama had been running for president then, I would have campaigned for him. As an American I understand the yearning to heal the divisions of our country's racist past.

I remember the huge controversy over busing in Boston during the 60s. To this day, we still do Louise Day Hicks imitations in our family. Some of you are too young to remember her, but she was the epitome of Boston opposition to court-ordered busing and school integration.

I was a child of my anti-Vietnam, flower-power generation. In addition, I plunged myself into a world where I had to examine to the core my unconscious racism and fear of black people. If I were the proverbial cookie, I would have been a Fig Newton, white on the outside, black on the inside. That's how deep my identification became, coupled with a hatred of "The Man," i.e. white men, patriarchy, the whole edifice of Western Civilization. When I spent my senior year at an Ivy League college, one of 70 experimental "co-eds," I was about the only white person who sat at the all black table in the cafeteria. Though some of the more Marxist, Black Power types did not like that, my friends insisted I sit with them.

I got kicked out of a rooming house because of my black friends. I experienced hatred from whites and blacks. Through the crucible of my experiences during nearly a decade of my life, one that continued after I left college and lived in the Boston area, I examined myself and worked at getting past the assumptions that go with race. The upshot: I can judge someone by the content of their character. It took a lot of self-examination and experience.

I know that racism exists in Canada. I know people do get stopped for "driving while black," for simply having a decent car. I know people who are genuinely qualified for jobs get passed over because of the color of their skin. Today. In Canada. Despite or maybe even because of affirmative action. That's why I cringe when people bandy about statistics talking about "black crime" or "black intelligence" because I know how dangerous this can be to people who are just trying to get by. Yet by the same token, I don't think it should be illegal to write about statistics or studies, but one must be careful to provide context, to look at cultural elements for example that have nothing to do with skin color, but more to do with family breakdown, class, country of origin and so on. Ideas have consequences and real people can and do get hurt.

I have long ago shed the ideas that racism is a "structural" problem that requires a Marxist solution, or that white people---i.e. white men---are uniquely evil. The problem of racism is a problem that lies in every human heart, just as evil lies in every human heart. Changing the "system" so the human tabula rasa can be freed up to its original innocence is a load of crap. Human beings are not innocent. We're all capable of great evil, given the right set of circumstances. "There but for the grace of God, go I" is good for all of us to remember.

The solution is found in acknowledging our innate tendency towards sinfulness, in accepting that no system will be perfect, in the protection of the institutions that best inculcate virtue and character---the family, the churches, religions, charitable associations and other civil society groups. The solution, too, is in integration, in mingling, in living and working side by side so that stereotypes and barriers get broken down as people see each other as people and not as "identifiable victim groups."

Having the government shut people's freedom of speech down, affirmative action programs that then call into doubt the real achievements of those who only want a level playing field are "solutions" that make the problem worse. The best solution is equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the protection of our precious civil rights---for all.

This is all a long preamble to say that I have come around to seeing that the solutions to the problems of racism are conservative, or perhaps classically liberal--not the kind of illiberal cant that passes for liberal today. Illiberal Utopian ideas get millions of people killed---for their bourgeois beliefs, their race or their religion.

It is interesting to me that people on the Left, so quick to pounce on conservatives and accuse them of racism, seem to be so unaware of their own trafficking in racist stereotypes. I think Dr. Sanity might have something to say about projection, about taking the dark parts of one's own unconscious soul, the unacknowledged sinfulness, and projecting it onto others. You will often find that those who are the most critical of others usually share the same sin, no?

There is also the kind of racism like that of Don Imus', who thought he was so hip that he could get away with talking like a black rapper. BZZZZZZZZ! DING DING DING! WRONG! He deserved to get skewered, most of all for his misogyny.

There is also a kind of deep-seated racism and Islamophobia on the Left that seems to treat those who burn down embassies, or strap bombs on their children as not morally responsible for their actions, but as mere puppets reacting to American or Israeli provocation. Its as if to say they are blindly reacting like a force of nature and it's all our fault, as if they are missing some part of the apparatus that makes a full-blown human being. It's like saying we should treat them the way we might treat with compassion someone who is criminally insane or otherwise mentally incapacitated. It's the same viewpoint that sees Iraqis as such inferior beings that can't possibly ever want democracy and freedom and urges that America abandon the field to Al Qaeda and Iran-sponsored death squads.

It's out of a fear of this "other," this "force of nature," that the freedoms in the west to criticize ideas or republish cartoons, or create films critical of Islam, are getting shut down. The non-Islamophobic approach would be to say--our Muslim friends and enemies--we believe you are adults with free will and are capable to taking criticism and behaving responsibly. When those among you do not behave well, or express dangerous ideas, we believe you are strong enough to endure the debate that ensues and contribute your own response in a civilized fashion. We believe you agree with us that threats and thuggery are not acceptable. We acknowledge that Muslims are most in danger from the thugs among you and we stand in solidarity with those among you who desire a robust civil society that respects freedom.

Commitment to affirmative action--the kind that results in racial quotas---is also a racist doctrine on the part of the left. It is as if to say that black people, or Aboriginal people, or any other defined victim group are so handicapped that they cannot compete with whites. That is disgusting. Yes....there is lots of racism to overcome in our society, but trying to solve it with more racism exacerbates the problem. But I also reject the view on the right side of the spectrum that racism is a thing of the past. No it is not. We all have work at rooting it out-- of ourselves first of all, and to resist using "the other" as an excuse for hiding from our own failings.
It is classic racism that makes loser whites blame blacks or Jews for their problems. Yes, it still exists and must be exposed and resisted by civil society.

In fact, isn't that what racism is all about? About demonizing "the other" as a way of creating a scapegoat for the expiation of one's own sin? or someone to blame instead of looking squarely at how our own behavior contributes to our problems?

It's something we have to constantly be on guard against in ourselves, whether we are on the right or the left. That's why we must work on loving--i.e. not hating--our enemies. Because only then will be see past the fog of our own projections and scapegoating.

The pack turns on Obama

The media honeymoon seems to have suddenly ended for Barak Obama.
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes:

SAN ANTONIO It took many months and the mockery of "Saturday Night Live" to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.

Great image, eh?

Support Free Dominion--support freedom of speech

I met Connie and Mark Fournier last summer when they faced a human rights complaint for their freewheeling forum Free Dominion.

Those complaints were subsequently dropped, but I've been keeping an eye on the site and the latest developments with some defamation suits they now face.

Connie has posted a new column on No Apologies that is a must read for all freespeechers in the blogosphere.

She writes:

We believe that there will be more lawsuits coming, and it is absolutely critical that we go the distance. We will lose our chance to reclaim our right to free speech in every other medium if we lose the stronghold we have built on the internet. We cannot allow even one more website to go dark, or for another blogger to shut down their comments out of fear of the radical left.

Make no mistake, war has been declared on our faith and our freedom and the result of this fight will profoundly affect all of us… even those who have never been online. It is up to us to bring news of this battle to our friends and family who love freedom. So, send some emails, make some phone calls, and activate your prayer chains. We cannot and must not lose this fight. Our future depends on it.

We're all cheese-eating surrender monkeys now

Saith Binks:

For a brief moment of unity after 9/11, it was said “We’re All New Yorkers, Now.” In 2008, the year of Jihad 1300-and-some-odd, it can be said more and more “We’re all Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkeys, Now.”

Read his essay on why it is so important for the West not trade freedom of speech for illusory peace through appeasement as the Netherlands considers banning Geert Wilder's film critical of Islam.

Complaints against Steyn and Levant "utterly without merit"--Kinsella

I don't think Warren Kinsella is a Nazi because he posts a swastika on his website and links to the Stormfront, when he deliberately does not link to mainstream conservative blogs.

That's because I know the context for the postings and links and I understand his Liberal partisanship. I know he opposes Nazis and racists.

By the same token, I do not think Mark Steyn is a bigot because he sometimes uses colorful language that from time to time includes ethnic and racial stereotypes. Not when you examine and understand the context. Instead, Steyn lampoons the way ethnic and racist stereotypes have made people think and do stupid things.

Thus, the letter to the editor that Warren Kinsella posted today that he wants Maclean's magazine to publish allegedly proving Steyn is a bigot would be similar to a Kinsella critic's taking the Swastika and the Stormfront links out of context and using it as "evidence" of Nazi sympathies. That would be appalling and I would defend Kinsella against that kind of smear. I also find it disgusting that some at Stormfront are smearing Kinsella with pedophilia for taking the bathroom stall photograph of the swastika that he posted as evidence neo-Nazis still pose a threat. Steyn has made fun of that photograph, but he has never suggested Kinsella is a pedophile for taking it.

Interestingly, Kinsella includes footnotes of Steyn's alleged bigotry with his proposed Maclean's letter, but no links, so no one can go and check the originals for themselves. I hope that if Maclean's publishes the letter, they will also provide the full context so that everyone can see the truth.

The Canadian Islamic Congress' complaint against Steyn and the dossier compiled by some of the Osgoode Hall supporters takes Steyn quotes out of context, removes quotations marks to make it seem that Steyn said Muslims are breeding like mosquitoes for example, when in fact, it was an imam based in Europe who said that.

Since I have actually read the articles in question and America Alone and Robert Ferrigno's dystopic novel that Steyn reviewed, that review forming some of the CIC dossier, I know the CIC "evidence" is misconstrued, misrepresented, and, were they not able to get a couple of human rights commissions to take them seriously enough to investigate, in places downright risible.


It is odd that Kinsella attacks Steyn as a bigot given the fact that he has said:

Most of us agree the recent human rights complaints against two prominent Canadian conservative writers are utterly specious, and therefore the best thing to happen to the far right in ages (cf. neo-Nazi web sites, supra).

He has also said:

As such, I'll keep saying it until someone finally hears me: I don't support the complaints against Steyn or Levant. I think they are utterly without merit. In fact, I believe they have the potential to denude future, more-serious fact situations of all credibility.

Besides: given my own political past (cf. the fuzzy purple dinosaur, inter alia ), I can hardly take the position that it should be somehow illegal to speak caustically - even cruelly - about deeply-held beliefs.

Utterly without merit? Utterly specious? I'm confused here. Why, then, is he attacking Steyn now as a bigot? Why is he participating in a campaign with "the potential to "denude further, more serious fact situations of all credibility"?

All religions are equal?

Ezra Levant has expressed a great deal of faith in the courts. He is eager to have a "real court" take a look at the human rights complaints against him for republishing the Danish Motoons.

Alas, I fear some of multicultural, relativistic nonsense that makes human rights commissions and tribunals so dangerous to civil liberties, has also infected our courts though, granted, to a lesser extent. Take for example the quote I pulled yesterday from a most interesting National Post story, concerning a Supreme Court of Canada decision on freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion is seen as an essential element of a free society and is enshrined as a "fundamental freedom" in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"A truly free society is one which can accommodate a wide variety of beliefs," the Supreme Court of Canada stated in its landmark 1985 decision on religious freedoms. Further, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in 1987 that even beliefs that seem "absurd, fraudulent, evil or novel" require the same protection as main-stream faiths.

"In the eyes of the law, religions are equal," that court has ruled.

Say what? Papal encyclicals equal to the rantings of Jim Jones?


Is this is the kind of nonsense in the post-Christian, multicultural, relativistic mindset that has chucked truth out the window in favor of tolerance. Or does it reflect another equally disturbing mindset that sees only scientific materialism as rational and any belief in the spiritual realm as by definition irrational.

In other words, is this decision saying: all religions are irrational, therefore they are all equal?

I recently interviewed science journalist Denyse O'Leary on her concerns that the materialist viewpoint is endangering our notion of civil rights. Materialists believe mankind evolved by chance from the primordial slime, that not only is there no soul, but there is no mind separate from the biological functions of the brain. If mankind has no soul, and no free will, O'Leary said, then the state starts to look at its subjects the way a dog owner might if his dog gets depressed.

The more elastic term of "human rights" is replacing civil rights that had a specific meaning after having been litigated for centuries, she said. That's true. We hear of human rights to water, to health care, to freedom of poverty. And now the new human right to be free from being offended. We're like the dogs the owners want to keep happy. Just as a dog owner might take steps to modify the dog's environment and routine to rid the dog of depression, so will the state improve the system so we can live in our predetermined, state-sponsored harmony. If that means removing the rights of Ezra Levant to publish cartoons or keeping Mark Steyn from talking about demographics so some people won't be upset, well so be it.

Denyse, who recently co-authored an excellent book called The Spiritual Brain with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, also spoke about the prevailing viewpoint in science and academia that humans have no soul, they also have no free will. There is a branch of neuroscience called "neurolaw" that tries to see some genetic component in crime. Her book is also full of examples of how religious experience is explained away as some kind evolutionary adaptation that is little more than some chemical and electrical blip in the brain.

Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal has been trying for years to get religious believers to stop using terms like "believers and non-believers" or "the faith community." He stresses that we are all believers in something, we all have faith, though not necessarily religious faith. We all have a priori assumptions that cannot be definitively proven, whether we are atheists or secular humanists or believe that God created heaven and earth and sent His Son to die for us.

What he has fought against is the idea that the atheists and the secular humanists are the only rational ones and everyone else is a "believer" of some kind.

Yes, it is important that the state does not meddle in religions. Nor should religious institutions seek to usurp state power. The West learned the hard way what happens when political and religious power combine and heretics face the full power of the state to crush them. Kinda like the way human rights commissions are evolving, no?

But why? What is the purpose of religious freedom? It is not so everyone can be as nutty as they wish, or pursue ideas that are false and bizarre and irrational. No. It's to protect the truth and the freedom of the human conscience to accept or reject it. This is a distinctly Christian contribution. We have a God who loves us enough to allow us to reject Him. The truth of the Christian faith must be freely chosen. It must, as Pope Benedict says in his most recent encyclical, be chosen anew by each generation. It cannot come at the point of a sword, or by the coercion of the state.

It also recognizes that we humans "see through a glass darkly," that we don't have a complete picture, so one sect should not have the power to imprison or sanction those with a different perspective.

An email from Denyse popped into my inbox while I was writing this.

About the court decision in question she writes:

Such a decision amounts to saying that all religions are a tolerated form of
public lunacy.

Judaism or Christianity are just as believable as the Green Alien Worm
cult. No more and no less.

And she adds:

First, the fact that the courts can't, in general, be judges of religion
does not mean that no religions make rational claims.

Courts can be judges of laws because the government has made laws.
Courts can't be judges of religion because the government has not
established a religion.

Here is an example of a rational, evidence-based argument in favour of
religion: As I mentioned in an earlier post, I can show you beyond any
reasonable doubt that the universe shows evidence of fine tuning. If you
have had to listen, as I have, to physicists claiming that that's
because there are a zillion flopped universes out there, you will
realize that some people in science say extraordinarily silly things.*
The GAW cult does not have a monopoly on that kind of thing, not at all.

Now, quite obviously, the fine tuning of the universe can be
appropriated by any religion that expects to find a Mind behind the
universe. It is bad news only for materialist atheists. Nonetheless, it
IS bad news for them, AND it is evidence-based.

So, if I am setting forth a case based on the physics of our universe,
I don't NEED the protection of a body aimed at protecting "absurd,
fraudulent, evil or novel" faith positions. I just need a few minutes of
the time of fair-minded persons. Even if these persons end up
disagreeing with me, they must admit that I have reasonable arguments
based on *accepted* evidence on my side.

Similarly, when we look at the Jewish and Christian traditions, what do
we see? We see that great thinkers like Maimonides and Aquinas and
Calvin proceeded via rational discussion to rational conclusion.
Confutable? Yes, within reason. But "absurd, fraudulent, evil or novel"?
No!

Even if we move on to distinctive faith positions, like the Christian
doctrine of the resurrection, books like Leon Morris's "Who Moved the
Stone?" and Bishop Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" advance
reasoned arguments based on the available evidence. Again: Confutable?
Yes, within reason. But "absurd, fraudulent, evil or novel"? No!

To sum up, I don't think that the government needs a special office to
protect unreasonable beliefs or mop up after hurt feelings or contruct a
religion-based case for refusing to provide expected services. And I
certainly know that historic Judaism and Christianity have managed fine without that for millennia.

Interesting story that raises some huge questions

The National Post delves into a sting involving an undercover
police officer pretending to be a Voodoo practitioner.

It raises some interesting religious freedom questions that I hope to delve into more later.

This jumped out at me:

Freedom of religion is seen as an essential element of a free society and is enshrined as a "fundamental freedom" in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"A truly free society is one which can accommodate a wide variety of beliefs," the Supreme Court of Canada stated in its landmark 1985 decision on religious freedoms. Further, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in 1987 that even beliefs that seem "absurd, fraudulent, evil or novel" require the same protection as main-stream faiths.

"In the eyes of the law, religions are equal," that court has ruled.

The preposterousness of the Cadman "bribe"

In the spring of 2005, the social conservatives desperately wanted an election over marriage. Back then, marriage was the "understory" while corruption was the overstory. Just as freedom of speech is the "understory" today but corruption is the overstory.

But some pragmatists within the Conservative Party did not think the party was as ready as it could be to go to the polls then. I recall them quietly sighing with relief that Cadman's vote spared them an election at the time. They knew they would be even more prepared come the fall.

Tom Flanagan is not a social conservative. In fact, I see him as someone who has strategically tried to distance Harper and the Conservative Party from those "scary," pesky so-cons. I guess the assumption is that so-cons have nowhere else to go. (News flash, they could stay home, or go back to voting for pro-life Liberal candidates, or plain old Liberals because socons are not necessarily fiscal conservatives.)

From what I know about Flanagan and Finley, the idea that they would bribe Chuck Cadman with a million dollar insurance policy is utterly preposterous. As Ezra Levant points out even members of the insurance industry say such policies don't even exist. Ezra has several posts on this and will be keeping up with new developments.

First of all, Flanagan is a strategist who, like Harper, thinks many chess moves ahead. He is also someone who studies human nature, like Harper. Both these men knew, for instance, that any person who followed Preston Manning as leader of the Canadian Alliance would experience an internal rebellion as Stockwell Day did.

They would have known that Chuck Cadman could not have been bribed, and they are too cautious, and probably too principled, to do anything remotely illegal. And, because they are not social conservatives, marriage would not have been the hill they wanted to die on. It would not have been blinding passion for them. These men know how to bide their time.

These are the guys who have helped Harper navigate to the center of the political spectrum, the stylists of his cautious, incremental, pragmatic leadership approach.

Nah, the idea they might have risked everything they had worked for with something stupid and illegal is nuts.

The Liberals, even freedom of speech favorite Keith Martin, are all excited about this Chuck Cadman controversy. While last week, one Liberal MP told me he was losing sleep over the uncertainty of a possible election, feeling demoralized and exhausted, now the Liberal caucus seems energized and ready to bring down the government after caving on the budget, the Afghanistan motion and the Crime Bill that passed the Senate in record time last week.

I sure wish the Tories, who do not have the internal divisions on the freedom of speech issue that the Liberal Party has (i.e. they do not have people like Hedy "crosses are burning as we speak" Fry in their caucus ), would shed their risk averse course in this instance and hold the banner high to restore our rapidly eroding civil liberties.

Instead, the Justice Minister--Mr. Caution personified, is busy appointing new commissioners to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Which is not to say Rob Nicholson opposes civil liberties. I doubt that very much, despite his caution. I don't know him, he's from the Progressive Conservative wing, and in my experience, even off the record he stays with the talking points. I would imagine his picks would not be saying under oath that they think freedom of speech is an American concept. At least I hope not.

To sum up, the same risk averseness among Tory leaders that made the pragmatists unwilling to make marriage their hill to die on, that made it totally unlikely that anyone bribed Cadman, may now disappoint those of us who want to see the Tories publicly fight to make human rights commission abuses go the way of the Berlin Wall.

But Harper does sometimes surprise people with the force of his conviction and his deft leadership. I have been told the freedom of speech issue has come up in caucus, so he's aware of it. Maybe he'll surprise us with something brilliant, like he surprised people with the establishment of the Manley Commission to look at the Afghanistan mission. By setting up a bi-partisan commission to examine the issue, he avoided the political landmines of the war and brought the Liberals on board.

Imagine if he set up a new commission to study human rights legislation? Imagine some of the great, impartial legal minds he could bring to study this from top to bottom--people from the left and the right--and come up with some bullet-proof recommendations that could earn the respect of all parties. That would be real statesmanship.

Time to get a Maclean's Magazine subscription

If you haven't already. My renewal notice came in the mail yesterday. Go here and get your subscription online.

Here's Mark Steyn's latest summary of the so-called human rights travesty.

The system is risk-free for the plaintiff: the Crown picks up the tab for the "complainant," while the "respondent" — i.e. defendant — has to pay his own legal bills no matter what the eventual verdict is. Ted Kindos of Burlington, Ont., has already spent $20,000 of his own dough defending himself against a "human rights" complaint and estimates he'll add another six figures to that before it's all done. Mr. Kindos owns a modest restaurant, Gator Ted's Tap and Grill. So what outrageous "human right" did he breach? Well, he asked a guy smoking "medical marijuana" in the doorway of his restaurant if he wouldn't mind not doing it. Mr. Kindos felt that his customers — including young children — shouldn't have to pass through a haze of pot smoke to enter his establishment. But apparently in Canada there's a human right to light up a spliff in some other fellow's doorway. The other man's grass is always greener, and in this case the plaintiff's grass will cost Mr. Kindos an awful lot of green. He faces financial ruin, while there's no cost to the complainant.

In the good news department, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has decided not to hear the complaint against Maclean's Magazine. It is my understanding Ontario does not have an anti-free speech, "thought crimes" section in their human rights law like Subsection 13(1) in the Canadian Human Rights Act or the similar section in the Alberta Human Rights Act that is being used against Ezra Levant.

Gee, I wonder if Dalton McGuinty will think it is time to bring one in.

Why on earth did it take the Ontario Human Rights Commission nearly three months to decide it had no jurisdiction to hear the Maclean's case?

The process is the punishment.

Pray for the kidnapped Chaldean bishop

From Whispers in the Loggia:

Last October, some might remember the kidnapping of two Syrian-rite clerics in the Iraqi city of Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Earlier today, after presiding at the Stations of the Cross in his cathedral, the city's Chaldean prelate Bishop Faraj Raho (above) was similarly abducted, and three companions -- including his driver -- were killed.