SteynOnline

Three pieces worth noting:

First, Rebekkah Hebbert's guide to how to wage the campaign.

Second, Jennifer Lynch's guide to how to obfuscate and dissemble.

And finally, Deborah Gyapong on where all this is heading: the state as an increasingly coercive lone arbiter of legitimate discourse.

...just to reassure myself as I can reassure you that Canadians can have pride in all of the employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the way we carry out our complex mandate.

Ms Lynch, let me stop you there. That's not an answer to my question.

This exchange (click the YouTube clip) with Joe Comartin, the NDP MP, at yesterday's Committee hearing summed up Commissar Lynch's strategy. Asked specific questions by Mr Comartin, she retreated to ever more expansive generalities. When he queried whether she was embarking on civil action against Ezra Levant and me, she replied that "we are leaders and catalysts in advancing equality in Canada and in fact internationally." I gues that explains all the lunches in Geneva and Dublin but it seems an odd response to a very specific line of questioning. By this stage, Commissar Lynch seemed to be repeating a handful of stale bromides in entirely random order. I think Ezra is right, and that her preferred mode of condescension and transparent evasion (occasionally enlivened by entirely false assertions on such specifics as the RCMP) was not a wise move.

Jesse Ferreras has more on the day's events, as do The Interim and the Moose & Squirrel, with a big round-up at the Lynch Mob.

[UPPERDATE: Marc Lemire has asked to be invited to testify.] 

[UPDATE: "Canada's Schoolmarm." The "TM" after the "QC" is a nice touch: I was interested to discover via a FOI request that the Chief Commissar signs herself "Jennifer Lynch, QC". I know many QCs, including my brother-in-law, but they don't use the post-nominal in their signature.] 

I spent much of Monday on a plane to Phoenix, to see my friends at the Goldwater Institute, a great beacon of liberty and thus the antithesis of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission. So I'm only belatedly catching up to the all-star censorfest at the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Human Rights. It was live blogged by Miss Marprelate, Jay Currie, and the ol' hatemonger himself Ezra Levant - and Deborah Gyapong has pictures.

A couple of quick observations from the wee small hours in the western desert:

First, this letter to the Justice Committee from Ezra Levant is a little disturbing. I met the clerk of the committee on my trip to Ottawa and found her very charming, but she explained to me that nothing could be distributed to members unless it was in both English and French. Fair enough. Them's the rules and that's that. So I went back to New Hampshire to translate certain unilingual exhibits such as Julian Porter, QC's objection to the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal's decision to hold the Lemire trial in secret. Ezra, on the other hand, submitted his evidence to be translated by the government and it does seem somewhat unsatisfactory that they were unable to do it in time for Commissar Lynch's appearance.

Second, if Richard Warman was present at today's events, why was he not called as a witness? Mr Warman is Section 13's serial plaintiff and both Ezra and I charged him with a grotesque abuse of the process and cited him as a leading example of how "corrupted and diseased" Section 13 has become. If he has time to show up in the audience, why doesn't he have time to testify?

Third, M Menard and Mr Comartin, who were impressive questioners last time round, were sharper still on this occasion. Serge Menard is a Bloc MP and Joe Comartin an NDP member. Realistically, even assuming every Tory votes to do something about Section 13, nothing can happen without at least one other member of the committee, and it would seem the Bloquistes and the token Dipper are more engaged by the subject than the Liberals.

Fourth, Commissar Lynch was a bland obfuscatory dud who all but openly insulted the members' intelligence, retreating to the same generalized bromides. Her assertion that the dismissal of the case against Maclean's demonstrated that the process worked was laughable. Everyone knows Maclean's and I got off only because we went nuclear and made the price of conviction too high for the Commission to risk. But beyond that, even overlooking that curiously random grin of hers, there's something very creepy in hearing a government's chief censor emphasizing her commitment to a "harmonious society". It's not only a dubious legal concept in terms of Canada's 800-year inheritance since Magna Carta, but it has the explicit whiff of totalitarian fakery. I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmonee, but I wouldn't hire Commissar Lynch, Dean Steacy or Richard Warman as the vocal coaches.

Richard Moon has decided to join Pearl Eliadis and Bernie Farber as a last-ditch defender of Canada's "human rights" commissions. He's certainly entitled to his opinion. Oh, wait, no. This is Canada, so he's not. But, fortunately for Prof Moon, his opinions happen to coincide with the state regulators, so he's okay.

Ezra Levant responds to Professor Moon here. Let me make just one point. The professor sets out in this speech to demolish the claim that Section 13 has a 100 per cent conviction rate. As he says, I have made this statement frequently:

When Mark Steyn makes the claim he likes also to point out that not even Iran and North Korea have a 100% conviction rate. 

True. I said it to Parliament and I stand by it. How do we know the professor is a weasel? One giveaway line. This is how he rebuts my outrageous falsehood - by conceding the point:

It is true that all s. 13 complaints adjudicated by the Tribunal have been upheld.

In other words, it's not a falsehood. Ezra and I were right all along. Until last month's judgment in the Lemire case, nobody prosecuted under Section 13 had ever been acquitted - with the sole exception of the "Canadian Nazi Party", which was let off on the quaint grounds that it did not in fact exist. But, if you had the misfortune to enjoy corporeal existence and you were charged under Section 13, you would be convicted of the crime. As Professor Moon admits in plain English, Ezra and I are right on this.

So his "rebuttal" consists not of demonstrating, as he promises his unfortunate audience, that our claims are "false and malicious" but that, even though they're true, they're nothing to worry about. Relax, he says. Sure, everybody prosecuted under Section 13 gets convicted, but don't worry about it, because the "human rights" commission prosecutes very few people so the 100 per cent conviction rate simply demonstrates their shrewd eye for a good case, and their ability to winnow out all the ones where the defendant would be acquitted.

Really? So the 100 per cent conviction rate is just a tribute to the fine judgment of CHRC agents? In that case, why has one man been the plaintiff on every case since 2002? Moon goes into a lot of statistics about the proportion of Section 13 complaints that never come to trial, so perhaps he could give us the following figures: What proportion of Richard Warman complaints are rejected? And what proportion of non-Warman complaints are rejected? If we are being invited to trust in the finely balanced sifting processes of CHRC investigators, why is one lone individual among 30 million Canadians the sole plaintiff? Why did this institution abet the transformation of Section 13 into Warman's Law?  

At any rate, that's Moon's rebuttal: The wretched Steynd and Levant are right on the facts but it doesn't matter because of the benign wisdom of the state apparatchiks. Did his audience fall around hooting with laughter? A Deputy US Attorney made a similar argument to me during the Conrad Black trial: "We only go after the bad guys so we have a high conviction rate." A high conviction rate. Not a 100 per cent conviction rate.

A courtroom that offers the 100 per cent certainty of a guilty verdict is not justice. It is, indeed, an institutionalized miscarriage of justice, using "miscarriage" in the most literal sense.

Shame on Professor Moon for his defence of the racket. He's being far more "false" and "misleading" on the point than anything Ezra and I have said. And, for a statist blowhard who huffs and puffs about how "malicious" the critics of the CHRC are, you're getting a politer response than you deserve. Straighten up and fly right, daddy-o.

More from Scaramouche and the incendiary feline.