It's hard to believe that Jennifer Lynch, the woman who presides over the corruption of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was appointed by the Conservative government. Her ethical hallmarks are very Liberal Party, circa Adscam.
The culture of the CHRC is pure Chretien 1990s: get away with whatever you can, just bluff it out. As I've mentioned before, they don't even have a code of ethics at the CHRC. Perfect! They can't violate their ethics code if they don't have one!
Lynch's commission has been hit with scandal after scandal this year, including an RCMP investigation after the CHRC hacked into a private citizen's Internet account. The Privacy Commissioner is investigating the CHRC, too. If she was a cabinet minister, she'd have been sacked by now, so it's curious how she has survived.
Lynch's appointment was made in haste. Conservatives are good at things like trade and commerce, and so top talent abounds in the party for such appointments. Illiberal human rights censors? Not so much. So it's not surprising that the appointment went to a second-rater -- Lynch was Joe Clark's former chief of staff.
I'm all for a big tent Conservative Party. In a country as large and diverse as Canada, a Conservative MP in Nunavut or Prince Edward Island is going to have a different world view than, say, a Conservative like Alberta's Myron Thompson. If the Conservatives want to form a government, there has to be room for both red and blue Tories. But Joe Clark's former chief of staff? That's not even a red Tory -- Clark himself still refuses to acknowledge the merger between the old Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance. What constituency was appeased by picking Lynch?
I have been doing research into Lynch's background -- research that, it's clear to me, wasn't done by the Conservatives before her appointment. Take this little gem that I found.
It's a story about Lynch back when she was a feminist activist within the old Progressive Conservative Party.
It seems that when Kim Campbell was briefly prime minister, she was introduced by Wayne Taylor of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce as Canada's "first lady". That, of course, is the term of art used for the wife of the U.S. president, though it might have been just a generic phrase that popped into Taylor's head, like "first citizen". It sounds more like a verbal stumble than a pre-meditated insult, the kind of thing that grown-up politicians quietly wince at, but quickly move on from.
Then lawyer Larry Carr apparently told a joke about Campbell's mother being a "free spirited feminist" who ran away with her boyfriend when Kim was 12. That's an embarrassing anecdote, of course, though it's true.
So what's the point of all that? That, at a chamber of commerce event, a couple of the old boys club made ham-fisted remarks? Fair enough. The "first lady" comment might be stretched to be sexist; the story about her mom was just inappropriate. A grown-up -- say, a prime minister -- would laugh it off.
But not Jennifer Lynch. This was her moment! She was a feminist, and she was going to pounce!
But Lynch didn't pounce on Taylor or Carr. She didn't criticize those two men, however petty their offences may have been, and however petty it would have made Lynch (and Campbell, by extension) look for doing so.
No, Lynch smeared the entire province of Alberta. Here are her quotes, from the Toronto Star.
"This movement away from sexism doesn't suddenly lift like a fog off of the country," she said. "What happens is, it lifts in certain areas faster than some others, and one area it hasn't lifted from is Alberta -- and I've heard that often."
"I just wonder why would somebody think that something like that was acceptable, and it has to be because things are not as quick to catch on in Alberta."
So Lynch condemns stereotyping by engaging in stereotyping.
So instead of criticizing two men -- for verbal misdemeanours -- she lashes out at an entire province.
Albertans in general are sexist, she says. Her proof? She's "heard that often." Maybe from Joe Clark.
We're not just sexist bigots in Alberta. We're stupid. "Things are not as quick to catch on" here.
Really?
Who's the bigot now?
Had Lynch actually studied Alberta feminism before smearing the entire province as a bunch of sexists, she would know that in fact Alberta produced Emily Murphy, the first female magistrate in the entire British Empire, and it was Murphy and the rest of the Alberta "Famous Five" who led the Persons Case, all the way up to the British House of Lords, which declared women to be persons in 1929.
Alberta isn't slow to catch on to equal rights for women. It was the first in the country -- first in the entire British Empire. It was Alberta suffragettes that cleared the way for women throughout the country -- for Campbell herself.
If Albertans were Lynch-like in their pettiness, they might have argued that Lynch herself was "spreading hatred and contempt" against Albertans. She'd be hit with a human rights complaint for hate speech. But Albertans are bigger than that. We don't need the approval of a second-rate political hack, the apex of whose career was working for Joe Clark. We know that Lynch's anger, her lashing out againt an entire province was probably just a manifestation of her own insecurities -- her own knowledge that she herself was likely a political token, and that Kim Campbell would soon be crushed at the polls. We'd let her go, but we'd remember her name.
But we didn't. Jennifer Lynch, ignoramus, smearer of an entire province, was actually appointed by a government rooted in Alberta to head the CHRC.
How perfect: a bigot in charge of rooting out bigotry.
An insecure token in charge of enforcing tokenism.
A second-rate political hack in charge of a second-rate bureaucracy.
Is it any wonder that the CHRC is in the mess it's in?
Fire. Them. All. Starting with Lynch.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission is prosecuting a former Member of Parliament because they feel his Parliamentary mail to constituents was offensive to Aboriginals.
Jim Pankiw, a two-term Saskatchewan MP who served from 1997 to 2004, is on trial this week for sending out flyers criticizing Indan crime in Saskatchewan, and opposing racial quotas for Indians. If convicted, Pankiw can face massive fines -- on top of even larger legal fees. He could also face almost any order, ranging from an order to apologize, to a lifetime ban on commenting about Aboriginals -- those are orders imposed on others convicted of "hate". And if Pankiw refuses to comply, he could serve time in jail. Here's the news report.
The subject of Pankiw's pamphlets was Aboriginal crime. Of course, Aboriginal crime is extremely high in Saskatchewan. Here's a Statistics Canada study that shows that while Aboriginals make up only 9% of Saskatchewan's population, they were 52% of the province's criminal accused. Here's the key chart, from page 39 of that Statcan report:
There are a lot of legitimate things one could say about this depressing chart -- a dozen different policy prescriptions for tackling the problem. Pankiw chose a particular way: he wanted to get tough on crime, he wanted to abandon Aboriginal "sentencing circles" and other alternative measures, and he wanted to end racial quotas. It sounds like his tone was particularly aggressive, but talking tough about crime isn't supposed to be a crime in itself. Whether or not his was the best approach was up to his constituents -- they relected him in 2000, but not in 2004 when he ran as an independent.
But for the CHRC to weigh and measure Pankiw's views is an outrageous incursion into the political affairs of Parliament. (The fact that it's four full years later is another disgrace -- and a delay that, in a real court, would have resulted in an automatic acquittal for a criminal accused.)
Pankiw's case was the subject of a cover story in one of the first issues of the Western Standard magazine, where journalist Terry O'Neill looked at the absurd test that the CHRC's "experts" used to classify Pankiw's conservative brochures as "hate":
Smith went on deconstructing the nuances of the Pankiwian colour palette: "One notes that the colours of the pamphlet (white of the paper, red and black inks) wittingly or unwittingly utilize colours very much associated with aboriginal people, for whom four colours have come to be associate with the four cardinal directions and have great spiritual significance," he writes. "These colours, yellow, red, black, and white, are to be found in much of the aboriginal ritual contexts and are frequently to be found in regalia and clothing." He concludes that "one can hardly claim that the symbolism in this pamphlet is not inflammatory." Smith declined the opportunity to explain his theories, on the grounds that, because his report is not meant to be public at present, it would be "unethical" for him to comment. Pankiw says that since Smith was contracted last year by the Kitselas Indian band of B.C. to help prepare its treaty and land-claim case and as a supporter of Indians' treaty rights, he's not likely to give a "fair shake" to someone who questions the legitimacy of treaties, as he does.
Oh, and by the way, who do you think was the hate crimes investigator who recommended that the CHRC prosecute Pankiw? None other than Richard Warman, the CHRC's serial complainant of fortune, library censor, online spewer of anti-Semitic and anti-gay bigotry, and libel nuisance litigator against me and other critics of the CHRC. As O'Neill reported:
On April 14, 2004, Richard Warman, an Ottawa-based lawyer who is an investigator with the Commission, filed a landmark report recommending the Commission appoint a Human Rights Tribunal to inquire into the complaints. The next day, the CHRC's director of investigations, Sherri Helgason, gave Pankiw until May 7 to respond. The Commission will then decide whether to turn to matter over to a tribunal for adjudication (the Commission itself does not confirm or deny the existence of any case until it proceeds to the tribunal stage, a Commission staffer said).
...Take Richard Warman. The man investigating Pankiw has a storied history of making human rights one of his personal causes. He is a political animal, having run for the ultra-left wing Green Party in Ontario both provincially and federally. He was personally awarded $30,000 by the tribunal in June 2003 for helping to shut down a racist website. Last summer he also personally sued the Northern Alliance, a white supremacist group, for libel after the group said on its web site that he was "a misguided witch hunter." In a speech in October 2003, discussing the fight against offensive speech on the Internet, Warman said he was looking forward to international agreements that would allow nations to arrest those it considers promoters of hate-speech if they try and enter the country.
What are the lessons here?
1. The CHRC has long ago abandoned the legal limits set out by the Supreme Court in its 1990 Taylor case, that prohibited "hate" prosecutions of political views. They are violating the constitution.
2. And why wouldn't they? Jennifer Lynch, the CHRC's chief kangaroo, hasn't fixed the problems at the CHRC. Fixed them? She doesn't even acknowledge them. The CHRC is beset by an RCMP criminal investigation of its own conduct, a Privacy Commission investigation of its conduct, and a Parliamentary review. Lynch is digging in her heels -- to the embarrassment of the Conservative government that appointed her.
3. MPs from all parties make comments that can be considered offensive, or promoting hatred or contempt of a particular group (that's the wording of the Canadian Human Rights Act). I think, for example, of Liberal Michael Ignatieff's statement that Israel commited war crimes during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Those comments were much more brutal than what Pankiw said about Aboriginal crime, at least to my ears. But the CHRC only goes after one side of the political aisle: conservatives. Just like the CHRC only prosecutes Christian clergy -- not radical Muslim clergy. Just like the CHRC only harasses conservative journalists (like me), never offensive leftist journalists, like the bigoted Heather Mallick. They have a hate-on for conservatives. Their fatwa against Pankiw -- as ordered up by Richard Warman, a three-time Green Party candidate -- should come as no surprise.
4. The public denormalization of HRCs is well underway. But that is only the first step in the solution. Now that public momentum for reform is building, it is up to legislators to act. It's no use that Lynch and the rest of the HRC mafia are disgraced in the court of public opinion, if they can continue their wrecking ball attack on natural justice through their kangaroo courts. It's time for the federal government to act -- and with the election now safely out of the way, now's the time. Legislative reform would be a bi-partisan effort, especially since Liberal free speech champion Keith Martin was re-elected.
5. The Conservatives thought that by appointing Lynch they could control the CHRC. They were wrong -- she has betrayed them by continuing their prosecutions of the hate speech laws, by continuing to bully Christians, conservatives and other political dissidents, and continuing the CHRC's sordid association with Richard Warman, who, to this day, receives CHRC payments for his costs as a witness in his own complaints. Lynch is laughing at the Conservatives -- when she's not busy jetting around the world. I mean, really, if you were Jennifer Lynch, what would you rather do? Clean up the swamp of corruption at the CHRC, and answer tough questions from the RCMP, or jet off to, oh, Africa on a $6,000 junket, Australia on a $7,500 junket, or even a quick jot down to Washington for a mere $1,500. Nothing beats a week in Geneva in June, though -- for a cool $8,300.
6. For the past year, the federal government was continuously on standby for an election, and it might have made sense to avoid starting this reform on the eve of such a vote. But now that the election is over, the Conservative mandate is stronger, and the Liberals are clearly in no position for another election for at least a year, the timing is right for reform. In fact, that delay was helpful: more and more public support has been marshalled. From the Toronto Star and Eye Weekly on the left, to the Montreal Gazette, Maclean's and the Globe and Mail in the centre, to the National Post and Calgary Herald on the right, from Rex Murphy and Neil Macdonald at the CBC to Mike Duffy and Bob Fife at CTV, from PEN Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists to EGALE, the gay rights lobby, there pretty much isn't anyone who hasn't endorsed shutting down these HRC censors. The public support is there. Now is the time for legislative action.
And you know what? I think we'll get that reform before next year is done.
I received this letter today from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, couriered to my lawyer.
It comes two months after the CHRC received my response to Rob Wells' human rights complaint against me (the third complaint against me this year).
The CHRC's Natalie Dagenais waited until the federal election was over before contacting me -- I bet that was a direct order from Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissioner of the CHRC, who's already a big enough embarrassment to the government, and didn't want to pop her head up during an election.
In her letter to me today, Dagenais says she's finally going to pass my defence along to the commissioners who will rule on whether I've commited a hate crime by republishing an Op-Ed by an Alberta pastor named Rev. Stephen Boissoin. You'll recall, Rev. Boissoin has been fined, given a lifetime ban on expressing his faith, and ordered to publicly renounce his faith, for daring to express a politically incorrect religious view.
If the commissioners find me guilty, they'll prosecute me before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In the thirty years they've been prosecuting section 13 "hate speech" cases, they've never lost. Political prosecutors in Iran and China would be impressed.
But here's where Dagenais becomes a symbol of everything that's wrong with the CHRC and its censorship fetish: she blacked out portions of my defence before passing it on to the commissioners. Seriously -- she censored what I wrote in my own defence, before she passed it along to the people who will sit in judgment of me. She's only allowing me to say things in my defence that she approves in advance. Look at the version of my letter she's passing on: several of my arguments are blacked out. You can read the full, uncensored version here (.pdf version here).
Here is a pdf of my reply that my lawyer sent in today, which I'll also paste here:
October 20, 2008
Natalie Dagenais
Canadian “Human Rights” Commission
344 Slater Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 1E1
Dear Natalie,
Re: Rob Wells v. Ezra Levant
It’s pretty embarrassing that you’ve taken two months to merely pass on my last letter to your superiors at the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. I suppose all Canadians should be grateful for the CHRC’s sloth. Who knows how many journalists could be harassed if CHRC employees stopped playing solitaire and took to their work with real gusto? I’ll be charitable: perhaps everyone over there has simply been busy with the RCMP’s criminal investigation into the CHRC’s abusive and corrupt conduct, so your “real work” – censoring journalists, Christian clergy and political activists – has fallen by the wayside.
I note that you have blacked out a number of my arguments before passing on my response to the commissioners. Silly kangaroo, don’t you know the rules? You’re not supposed to censor me until after the show trial. Remember: convict first, then censor! I know you’re excited about using your big, black censor’s pen but just wait – you’ll get your turn. You always do.
I’m going to take the liberty of sending my unredacted remarks directly to your commissioners. I’m frankly not interested in your opinions about what is or is not “relevant” to my defence. Every drop of corruption, abuse and illegal conduct at the CHRC is relevant, and I’ll not have some junior bureaucrat telling me otherwise. I’m entitled to have my submissions presented in full to the censors that will decide my fate. Even the medieval Star Chamber permitted that.
I’m sending this letter, along with my original response, directly to the kangaroos.
Signed,
Ezra Levant
cc: jennifer.lynch@chrc-ccdp.ca
yvonne.boyer@chrc-ccdp.ca attachment: unredacted August 28 letter
So far, this nuisance suit hasn't cost me too much money, but I did have one of my lawyers, Tom Ross, review the letter to tone down the more excitable parts of it. I spoke with Tom today, and we're also continuing to fight the Alberta human rights commission's refusal to release their internal e-mails about me, as they're required to do by provincial freedom of information laws. If they're willing to go to court to prevent me from reading what they wrote about me, you can bet it's politically scandalous. I'd like to learn more about their abominable decision to spend $500,000 of taxpayers money, deploying 15 government employees to investigate me for 900 days. Wouldn't you?
Tom says I still owe him a few thousand dollars; if you want to chip in I'd be grateful. Unfortunately, the lawsuits haven't stopped -- I'll tell you about a new one tomorrow.
If you think the CHRC is a corrupt, abusive agency that needs to be stopped and you want to help, please click the PayPal button below, or send a cheque by snail mail to Tom, payable to "McLennan Ross in Trust", and indicate that it's for my human rights complaints. Tom's address is:
1600 Stock Exchange Tower
300 - 5th Avenue SW
Calgary, AB T2P 3C4
"This organization is not a registered non-profit organization. Donations to this organization are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."
Richard Moon, the University of Windsor professor who was hand-picked by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to "review" their misbehaviour, will receive a $52,250 payday for four months of part-time work.
Gee. I wonder what he'll tell them?
If I'm ever, say, audited by Revenue Canada, can I hand-pick my taxman?
Can I pay him $52,250? Just to ensure he's being fair, you see.
That's the equivalent to $150,000 a year -- for a part-timer. According to the University of Windsor, Moon has a busy teaching schedule, so he'll be moonlighting for the fifty large.
Recession? What recession? It's party time on the taxpayers' dime down at the human rights commission!
P.S. I see that the CHRC also hired a lobbying firm, Hill and Knowlton, to help them with "communications" issues this spring, for a cool $10,000. I guess the CHRC's staff of nearly 200 couldn't handle all of the CHRC's communications issues this spring.
P.P.S. Note there are plenty of other contracts issued by the CHRC, to "consultants", without describing the nature of the work. How many hundreds of thousands of tax dollars is the CHRC spending on lobbyists, PR firms and other self-serving political projects? I suppose it's better that they waste their money on damage control, than spend it harassing more journalists and Christian pastors.
I've received friendly feedback from readers who are interested in attending the conference at University of King's College about the media's "right to offend". It's open to the public, so if you're in Halifax on Nov. 1, please come by -- details are here. It's free to attend, and they actually serve a free lunch, too. You can't beat that!
I've also been invited by the prestigious Canadian Media Lawyers Association to speak on a panel at their conference in Ottawa, on November 8. It's a pretty august conference, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada giving opening remarks -- according to this agenda, it looks like she'll be talking about libel law. As I mentioned here, this summer the SCC significantly enhanced the defence of fair comment in defamation law, strengthening Canadians' freedom of speech. It will be interesting to hear Justice McLachlin expand on that decision.
For anyone interested in media law -- from defamation to human rights censorship -- this conference has national-class experts ranging from Richard Dearden, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's lawyer in his defamation suit against the Liberal Party, to Michael Geist, Canada's Internet law guru, to name just two speakers.
I've been invited on a panel, too, entitled "Impact of Human Rights Commission on Freedom of Speech" -- a very real threat to Canadian media, and one against which the defences in defamation law (truth, fair comment, etc.) do not apply. I'm on the panel with some pretty heavy hitters: Julian Porter, Q.C., Maclean's lead lawyer in their B.C. Human Rights Tribunal show trial, and Mark Freiman, chief counsel to the Air India Public Inquiry.
It's an honour to be invited to serious discussions like this one and the one in Halifax. It is a sign that there is growing concern about the threat to our civil rights posed by the preposterously named "human rights commissions" and that concern is non-partisan, and that concern has spread from politics into law and civil society. It's a sign of how wide and deep opposition to HRCs has become and how far the national discussion has moved in the past year.
Think back a year -- not even a year! In 2007, the idea that the threat of HRCs would be discussed at such a mainstream and prestigious gathering was unthinkable. And the idea that my point of view -- repealing the hate speech provision of HRCs, and even abolishing HRCs altogether -- would be given a seat at the table in such high company is startling evidence of how far our campaign to denormalize these rogue and abusive commissions has come. Who knows? Perhaps in a future conference, Justice McLachlin won't be talking about how she expanded freedom of speech in defamation law -- maybe she'll be talking about how she struck down the HRCs' political censorship provisions, ending a thirty-year blemish on Canadian law.
I am delighted to be one of the participants in the upcoming public conference on the media's "right to offend", being held on November 1st at University of King's College in Halifax. (I'll try to visit the world headquarters of Free Mark Steyn while I'm in the neighbourhood!)
Even more delightful is that the symposium is sponsored by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. The very first politician I ever met was Sheldon Chumir; he had donated a "lunch with Sheldon Chumir" to a charity auction that my father bought. Chumir took my sister and me to lunch, and we peppered him with so many questions that he hardly had time to eat a bite. Even back in high school, I knew I was a conservative, but I also knew that Chumir was my kind of Liberal -- he was a contrarian who deliberately chose to be a Liberal in Tory-blue Alberta, precisely so that he could be in opposition. That's not the usual reason most people get into politics. He was a civil libertarian, too, of course, which is why the foundation named after him is focusing so much on the threat posed to civil liberties by Canada's imposter "human rights commissions".
I'm excited that the keynote speaker of the conference is Margaret Wente. She has been one of the most effective journalists in the country at exposing the insanity of Canada's HRCs. Her column about the Ontario Human Rights Commission trial of a plastic surgeon who violated the "human right" of a male-to-female transexual who wanted, uh, intimate female surgery remains the most hilarious and outrageous editorial I've read on the subject.
Of course, there will be censors on the panel, too -- including John Miller, the journalism professor who tried (unsuccessfully) to intervene in the BC HRT kangaroo trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine. I'm looking forward to meeting Miller. I've never met a pro-censorship journalist before, but I'm just a small town boy.
I'm glad the symposium will be held in Halifax. Not only is it a gorgeous city, but it's also home to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, currently under siege by that province's HRC for daring to publish the cartoon to the left. They've been accused of violating human rights, too. I wonder if any folks from the paper will be in attendance (maybe) or the radical imam who filed the complaint (I'm thinking, probably not).
The title of the conference says it all: the right to offend. Free speech is meaningless if it applies only to inoffensive speech. The meaning of free speech is that it must be free from other things, including other admirable things, like good manners, political correctness, or the ideological fashions of the day. That's not to say there is no antidote to offensive speech. There are plenty, ranging from ignoring the offender, to rebutting him, to condeming him to socially ostracizing him. But none of those remedies involve the government and its unlimited power.
If I prepare my remarks in advance, I'll post them here on my blog. If you're in Nova Scotia, please stop by.
My six-week leave of absence is over, and I'm happy to return to blogging. I missed it a lot -- especially when fascinating or frustrating news presented itself.
I was working as a volunteer at the Conservative Party's election headquarters in Ottawa. It was an exciting and challenging experience working with a national-calibre team in a hotly-contested race with five parties -- and a global financial meltdown right in the middle of things. I enjoyed it and I even got used to going into the office at 6 a.m. Here at ezralevant.com we keep more civilized hours!
As loyal readers of this site know, although I am a conservative and a long-time supporter of the Conserative Party, my animating cause -- the abolition of Canada's corrupt and abusive human rights commissions, especially their Maoist "hate speech" provisions by which they attack dissident political opinions -- is a non-partisan one, and it ought to be.
Two of Parliament's key freedom of speech activists have been re-elected. Conservative Rick Dykstra of St. Catharines was re-elected handily, and Liberal Keith Martin of Esquimalt Juan de Fuca squeaked back in, by a margin of less than 100 votes. Dykstra is the MP who proposed a resolution before Parliament's Justice Committee to have a full-bore review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its operations and its censorship provisions in particular. Martin is the MP who really got the ball rolling early in the year, with his private member's motion to repeal that provision altogether. Of course, many other MPs made very encouraging public statements about reforming the commissions, such as Jason Kenney who chaired the "war room" in which I worked this past month.
When I was working on the campaign, needless to say, I met a great number of MPs, cabinet ministers, senior staff and reporters. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of senior people in the Canadian political establishment who, on their own, brought up the subject of HRCs with me. It was very encouraging -- over the next few days I'll tell a few anecdotes about that, while respecting the privacy of those conversations where applicable.
Of course, the past month hasn't just been about the election campaign. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal chose a characteristically cowardly moment to issue their "ruling" in their trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's -- the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, preceding the election. I don't blame them -- as the Vancouver Sun's Ian Mulgrew opined during the trial this June, the BCHRT murdered its own reputation, not Steyn's. I'll give you my thoughts on their execrable ruling later.
Over the past six weeks, I haven't received any new human rights complaints -- at least, none that I know of. As I discovered in August, human rights commissions no longer even tell me when I've been hit with a complaint. Welcome to justice, kangaroo-style.
I have, however, been hit with another defamation lawsuit by a human rights industry apologist, that landed right in the middle of the election campaign. I'll tell you about that, too. I've lost track, but I think I'm up to 20 lawsuits, human rights complaints, law society complaints and other nuisances at the hands of the human rights bullies, all in an attempt to use "lawfare" to stop me from criticizing their corruption and abuse. Thanks to the support of my readers, I've been able to laugh off their SLAPP suits, and keep on marching. Their strategy might have worked before the age of the Internet. Now, the abusive litigation of the HRCs and their courtiers is not only no longer intimidating, it is ridiculous and embarrassing to themselves. It is the perfect illustration of their bullying instincts being foiled by technology and an army of grassroots activists. And it has confirmed my thesis: these are political warriors, dispatching their political enemies, not meting out anything remotely close to "justice".
The fascinating CHRC case of Warman v. Lemire also concluded its hearings. That's the case that really exposed the corruption within the HRCs, including their practice of sending government employees online, in the guise of anti-Semitic bigots, to spread hatred on the government dime. I still can't believe that preceding sentence is true in a country lik Canada, and I didn't believe it until I started reading transcripts of human rights hearings where the CHRC admitted happily to their bigoted tactics. It was the Lemire case -- and his decision to fight back -- that has led to no fewer than four investigations of the CHRC, including one by the RCMP.
Finally, I'll have some news about my book on HRCs. McClelland and Stewart, Canada's most prestigious publisher, has commissioned me to write about my fight -- and the rot in HRCs in general. I'll tell you more about that project, when the book will be ready, and how you can get a copy.
I've got some more work to do today, but I hope to get back into regular posting right away -- my goal will be a meaty post at least once a day.
I'll make my first one about my assessment of the renewed Conservative government, and what it means for Canadians who care about freedom of speech and the right to dissent from politically correct orthodoxy.
In the months ahead, I think I'll broaden the subject matter of my posts to other subjects beyond human rights commissions. But it will remain my key focus, until we've fixed the problem. And I believe we will -- we're half way there.
P.S. Tomorrow I'm giving a speech for the Fraser Institute in Calgary about HRCs. I'm not sure if there are any tickets left, but you can check with them here.
I have a few more HRC-related speeches coming up in Halifax and Ottawa that I'll let you know about, too.
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