Imagine that you could be brought to trial by an anonymous accuser who claims he was offended by something you said or wrote. In Canada you can be. If one person complains to the Canadian Human Rights Commission that your speech was offensive you can be tried for "hate crime."
David Warren writes in The Ottawa Citizen about this Kafkaesque system he says has been foisted upon slumbering Canadians by left-wing ideologues. Here's part of his column:
Truth is no defence, the absence of harm is no defence, there are no rules of evidence -- due process is entirely subverted. The inquisitors of these kangaroo courts may ultimately reach any "judgement" they please, after months or years of playing cat-and-mouse with their selected victim.
A Protestant minister in Alberta was, for instance, recently ordered to publicly renounce his Christian beliefs, as well as pay a big lump sum to the anti-Christian activist who had prosecuted him, in a case I mentioned in a previous column, and which I am pleased to see is getting wide publicity in the United States even if not up here. "Re-education" programmes are frequently assigned, for which the victim must also pay.
All of the complainant's expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting "human rights" bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists.
The people are still sleeping, but some "blowback" has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own "independent" investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.)
Unwanted attention and publicity has been drawn to these Star chambers by the case of Mark Steyn who had been charged with hate speech by a Muslim who didn't like what Steyn wrote in his best-seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it.
It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author, Mark Steyn, and the mainstream newsweekly, Maclean's, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity -- biding their time until circumstances are propitious to "extend their mandate" again.
Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada's HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile "human rights" investigators have been doing, and in due course, their past victims should be exonerated.
Given what has already occurred, it is not enough to simply fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that "your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended" must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the foetid swamp of "politically correct thought."
Steyn's case was dismissed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission perhaps because they didn't want the ridicule they'd be inviting if they pursued it any further, but to give an idea of the sort of people who run this inquisition Warren cites an outrageous statement from its chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to the effect that Maclean's (The magazine which published excerpt's of Steyn's work) was guilty of publishing "hate," nonetheless. She regretted that her commission had no mandate to try the case, but looked forward to a time when this mandate would be extended.
Free speech is endangered in the United States but it seems an almost totally alien concept in Canada, and indeed in many European countries where liberal fascism has been able to impose its will.
RLC
