Category: HRCs

No, not the band; ME! That’s right, I’m better than Ezra!

Chew on this, Levant… 😛

Ezra Levant seems to think he’s all hot stuff just because he managed to video tape a little interview that he had with an HLC Inquisitorâ„¢ somewheres out in Wild Rose Country and managed to slap it up in bits and pieces on YouTube. Well, la-dee-da. Isn’t that special?

Sit back and relax, ladies & gents, as I prove once and for all that I am, in fact, Better Than Ezra. It’s my very first real scoop, dontcha know? Unlike Ezra — who just managed to tape a little preliminary thingamawhatever — I have gotten my hands on… wait for it…

Actual footage of a complete Human Lefts Commission hearing!!

Yes, you read that right; the entire proceedings from beginning to end! If this doesn’t convince people that we need to get rid of these things, nothing will. And yes, the footage is authentic. I have personally conducted exhaustive research and fact-checking on this (20 minutes of surfing and 11 hours, 40 minutes to get through 3/4 of a case of Moosehead) and I can assure you that that is, in fact, Richard Warman. Don’t take my word for it, though; see it for yourself and gasp in awe of my journalistic sleuthing skills:

What the fiddlesticks is an “HLC,” you ask? Why, I’m talking about Canada’s infamous Human Lefts Commissions®, of course. Sure, that’s not what they call themselves; they like to call themselves “Human Rights Commissions.” I don’t call them that, though (or, to be more honest, I can’t call them that; not with a straight face, anyway).

I’ve grumbled about these things before. The simple fact of the matter is that they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with human rights! What they are about is, trampling people’s long-established –not to mention hard-fought– rights and liberties and ramming a dystopian, leftist agenda down the throats of the Canadian public, whether they want it or not.

By now, just about everybody’s heard about the funhouse rides that Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and MacLean’s Magazine have been dragged into by these kangaroo kourts. What you probably haven’t heard about (unless you’re a bit of a wonk for stuff like this, the way I am) are all the ordinary folks that have been beaten over the head over the years with this state-sanctioned blunt instrument. By “ordinary folks,” I mean the kinds of people that don’t have the buttloads of money and resources required to stand up to these Ministry Of Love bullies when they get dragged into Room 101. Traditionally, those have been the favourite targets of the HLC thugs. The reasoning is simple, really: like all bullies, they prefer prey that isn’t likely to be able to fight back.

You see, plaintiffs in HLC cases have all their bills picked up for them by the state (i.e., by your tax dollars and mine, whether you approve of what’s being done or not). The condemned, however, is entirely on the hook for every penny of his defense, whether he wins or not. We’re not talking chump change here, either: fighting off an HLC inquisition runs up a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s just if you win (not that anyone ever has; Miniluv has a 100% conviction rate). The process itself is a punishment before you’re even “convicted” of whatever the hell it is that you’re guilty of supposed to have done.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they only do anything about complaints that fit in line with their personal ideologies. That’s right: they pick and choose who they do and don’t listen to based on nothing more than their own personal prejudices! No guidelines enforced, no oversight, no accountability. Nothing. No rule of law, here; just a few little pisspot tyrants running their little fiefdom any way they damned well please. Ezra Levant points this out himself today in a pretty damn good post, titled “How the Canadian Human Rights Commission violates the rule of law (with my own emphasis added, of course):”

Andrew Guille filed a “hate messages” complaint with the CHRC. He complained that a website called Recomnetwork.org, run by an “anti-hate” group, contained hateful messages that contravened section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, by discriminating against people based on race, colour, national origin, religion and sexual orientation.

So what happened? Did the “anti-hate” group in question, with all of the bigoted remarks on their website, become the first defendant ever to be acquitted in a section 13 trial? Or did Guille pull a Richard Warman — slam-dunk a bigoted website and collect a few thousand dollars for bringing the complaint to the CHRC’s attention?

Neither, actually. The CHRC refused to take the matter to a tribunal hearing, ruling it a frivolous complaint. But look at the grounds upon which this complaint was dismissed: Andrew Guille, said CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, is the “sibling of both Melissa and Chris Guille”, who Steacy implies are racist. Steacy — whose job it is to investigate complaints of bigotry — indeed conducted an investigation. But not into the website and its hate messages. He investigated Guille himself. Steacy met with Sgt. Don McKinnon of the London Police Force to get the low-down on Guille; he spoke with “anti-hate” activists with their own axes to grind and books to sell. None of this was done under oath; none of this was done with Guille there to cross examine his defamers (or to challenge McKinnon’s right as a government employee to disclose Guille’s personal information without permission). But even those offensive procedures aren’t the point: the point is the CHRC simply wouldn’t accept a complaint from someone they didn’t like, for the most tenuous and circumstantial reasons.

Even if their hunches and their gossip was right — even if Guille was, himself, a racist — so what? If a website is bigoted, isn’t it the CHRC’s job (an immoral job, an improper job, but their job nonetheless) to investigate it? Does the offensiveness of the site in question depend on the character of the complainant? Is the question of whether the Canadian Human Rights Act, a law of Parliament, is violated depend on who brings an alleged offence to the attention of the commission?

Compare that sloppy, vindictive, capricious standard to the aforementioned lengths real police and real prosecutors go to, to ensure that the law is applied evenly to all citizens. What Steacy has done here is exactly the kind of arbitrariness the rape shield law was designed to prevent. If a prostitute complains that she was raped, it is improper for the police to say “she has no standing to complain about rape” or “we know that, in the past, she has consented to sex with strangers — no use investigating.” An even more exact analogy would be if a convicted rapist complained of having in turn been raped himself. That would not excuse the police from ignoring the rapist’s own complaint.

The CHRC isn’t governed by the rule of law. It is governed by the whimsy of men — in this case, Dean Steacy, who himself admits to making anonymous posts on bigoted websites.

Say whatever you like about Ezra Levant, but you have to give him credit for being a man that sticks to his principles even if it turns his stomach. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Ezra, as a Jew, found the thought of speaking up for a “white nationalist’s” rights to be a little… shall we say, distasteful? [Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a few chuckles to be had over what Guille might think about being defended by an Agent Of ZOGâ„¢, but those’re some giggles we can save for later.]

I don’t think Ezra’s too worried about that, though. He’s likely thinking about another fellow; one named Pastor Martin Niemöller. You might have heard of him. After 1937, Niemöller was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He wrote something very profound, that goes something like this:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

In case you think Ezra’s making stuff up, here’s a .pdf of an internal CHLC document for you (taken from his site). There’s also Connie Fournier’s two cents over at Free Dominion.

Then, there’s one other little thing that Ezra mentioned today: besides being wannabe Orwellian totalitarians, they’re also a bunch of God damned racists! No, Ezra didn’t put it quite in those words, but I just did and if some HLC out there doesn’t like it, well…

What Ezra did do was to put up a link to a chart compiled by Marc Lemire (you can get it here, too) and make a very simple observation. The chart lists every section 13 decision up until November of 2007. What Ezra observed was the ethnicity of the respondents. There it was, over and over again: white, white, white, white, white… over and over again. The name “Richard Warman” pops up a hell of a lot, too (but that’s another post).

Come to think of it, I’m going to start a running tally of reasons to get rid of the HLCs altogether. If nothing else, it’ll give me something to do in my spare time (which I have too much of right now, anyway). So, what do we have so far?

1. They only support Leftist causes (sound familiar?).
2. The complainer gets all costs paid while the accused is forced to pay out of pocket (again: familiar?).
3. The very process itself IS a punishment.
4. The conviction rate is 100%!! (No, I’m not making that up) I don’t think even the Gestapo managed to pull that one off.
5. They plant fabricated evidence and willfully use it against the accused.
6. They only prosecute people of one race.
7. The rules change from case to case, as needed to ensure that the accused’s rights are properly violated.
8. Truth is not a defense.

How is it that I just know that that list’s just going to get longer?

Well, this dude’s managed to bash the nail right on the head, hasn’t he? (a big ol’ tip o’ the toque to Hunter for bringing this to my attention in the first place) Now, if someone could just explain to me why it is that this Brit seems so much more concerned with our freedom of speech than most of the Canucks that I bump into lately…

I’ve been bitching and bellyaching for a long time about the abuses delivered by Canada’s infamous Human Lefts Commissions. Yes, you read that right: “Lefts” commissions. Calling them “rights” commissions is sheer stupidity requiring mental acrobatics of doublethink that would give George Orwell a nasty hangover. These commissions have nothing to do with human rights. What they’re about is trampling people’s rights in order to promote Leftist ideology.

This guy seems to have that figured out; why don’t the rest of us?

First things first: a flip o’ my chapeau to the Relapsed Catholic for beating me to the punch on this one.

Some people will look at the issue and think that I’m referring to Xeno in the usual “xenophobia” context. Not so.

I’m referring to Xeno of Elea, the Greek pholosopher famous for, amongst other things, his paradoxes. You know; those bothersome little questions that, by their very nature, seem to have no possible answer at all. Perhaps the most famous of all of them was the question which has so often been paraphrased like this:

What, exactly, would occur if an immovable object were to be struck by an irresistable force?

What, indeed? It is beginning to seem as if this very question is, as you read this, being played out in Regina.

Bill Whatcott, a “long-time pro-life and family campaigner” from the Big Flat, has recently been slapped to the tune of $17,500 by Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Tribunal for… wait for it… hurt feelings.

Yup, that’s right. We’ve gone from “sticks and stones may break my bones” to “BOO HOO, he hurt my feelings, your honour; WHERE’S MY CHEQUE?!?!”

Okay, let’s examine this, shall we? First, in my opinion: yeah, he went a little overboard and crossed the line of decent debate (kinda hard to look reasonable strolling down the street holding a sign saying “Bare Bottomed Pitifuls are Celebrating Buggery in Regina. God Help Us!”), but it is still damned hard to slap down the very logical points that he does make:

If you can find factual inaccuracies in my flyers or if you can find that I said something in bad faith, at that point there should be civil penalties […] I’d be the first one to agree with that. […] If I’m lying by saying that homosexuals are predisposed to sexually transmitted diseases at a rate greater than the general population, by all means find me liable for slander. If I’m wrong in saying….that there is a predisposition in homosexuality towards the sexual abuse of children, if that can be factually proven to be wrong, find me guilty of libel. But don’t tell me that I can’t say something that is true.

In other words: “prove me wrong and I’ll take my medicine.” Sounds reasonable to me. Also sounds like the best way to deal with any disagreement, debate or what have you.

But the problem here (and a chilling one it is) is that the SHRC doesn’t seem to give a damn about bothersome little things like facts or truth. According to Janice Gingell (a lawyer for the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission):

Sexual orientation is a protected category under the code and you are not allowed to say things that will cause other people to feel hatred or ridicule or belittlement towards members of those protected categories.

Yup, you got it. Thou Shalt Not Speak Against The Priviledged Group. Period. Truth? Lies? Doesn’t matter. Just sit the hell down and shut the hell up. Forget freedom of reli… aw, screw it. Forget any freedoms you think you have. None of them matter. You aren’t one of the Protected Ones. So you’re screwed.

Orwell himself couldn’t have done better.

Getting back to Xeno….

…he will not pay a $17,500 fine ordered by Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Tribunal […] Whatcott has vowed to continue distributing his flyers with about 3,500 more to go out on Thursday.