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From today's Montreal Gazette:

Rights Commission Threatens Our Liberty

Whatever else may be said, the last year-and-a-half has certainly changed the terms of the debate. Now we need to return Jennifer Lynch, QC and her gang of control-freak social engineers to more useful employment on the night shift at Tim Horton's.

Meanwhile, Blazing Cat Fur has the winners of the Jennifer Lynch T-shirt competition. It's not a wet T-shirt competition, although the arguments mustered by Liberal MPs in defense of thought-policing are certainly sopping. No self-respecting adult would agree to be policed by such an ahistorical nitwit.

Jennifer Lynch, QC (Quintessential Coward) and Canada's chief censor, will "debate" Ezra Levant today at 2pm Eastern, after tortuous negotiation of terms in order to ensure that Queen Jen doesn't have to share the same airspace as this impertinent peasant and risk infection by his hatemongering. Jay Currie offers some advice to other TV and radio bookers.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Marc Lebuis, who runs the excellent Point de Bascule website. (It was an entirely accidental encounter in Montreal, in a mercifully non-droits des personnes context.) M Lebuis makes some damning points about the cowardly selectivity of Commissar Lynch's racket.

The pushback continues. Notwithstanding Ezra Levant's line-by-line dissection of her "reverse chill" routine, Jennifer Lynch, Queen of Censors, returned to the fray this morning, in an appearance on The John Oakley Show on Toronto's AM 640. Scaramouche found it a riveting listen:

And finally--my favourite part of the interview. The part where Jen, nose growing to Pinnochioesque lengths, insists that the system “works”. As evidence (there I go again) she says that three--count ‘em, three--“human rights” bodies considered but ultimately dismissed the hate speech complaint brought against Rogers/Macleans/Steyn.

Hey, that's great! Presumably, if Elmo & the Socks had complained to all 14 of Canada's "human rights" commissions and all 14 had "considered but ultimately dismissed" the complaint the system would have worked even better - indeed, nearly five times better.

As it happens, in British Columbia we were improperly acquitted. Under BC law, we're guilty. Likewise, under what the CHRC regards as its "emerging jurisprudence" (ie, the accumulated bollocks of Richard Warman), we're guilty. We got off only because it had become politically problematic to convict us - in other words, because, unlike all the no-name targets of the "human rights" racket with the singular exception of the dogged Marc Lemire, we pushed back. And, unlike Mr Lemire, Maclean's and I had a high media profile. Had Joe Schmoe of Loserville Creek written what I'd written and posted it on his blog, you'd never have heard about it and he'd have been convicted. That's another reason to get rid of Section 13 and its provincial equivalents: There's no equality before the law.

I think about this a lot, because I remember the advice I was given by a high-profile friend when all this began: Play it cool, sit back, let the legal process run its course. Had that happened, I would have been deemed what Pearl Eliadis calls a "hatemongerer" in multiple jurisdictions and under the statutory penalties it would have been illegal for Maclean's to continue carrying my column. That's why everyone should push back and go medieval - okay, enlightenment - on Jennifer Lynch's totalitarian ass. That's what Ezra did in Alberta, and that's the only reason he survived, too. You play by Jenny's rules, you'll go down.

Incidentally, I see Queen Jen is still reprising my "drunken pedophile" line. If she's that affronted by it, why not bring a "human rights" complaint against me? If nothing else, surely it must be grossly offensive to pedophiles to compare them to Canadian "human rights" officials. I jest. Or do I? Well, you'll never know until you haul me into court. Ah, but I don't think Commissar Lynch is terribly eager to do that. Ezra and I can more or less say anything we want anywhere anytime, and no HRC is going to be in any hurry to accept any complaint with us as defendants. There goes that old equality-before-the-law shtick again.

By the way, the Closet Conservative makes a good point about the new, improved lingo coordination of the PC enforcers:

I think I have figured out one of the things that the CHRC got for their money when they hired an external PR agency. They definitely got briefing notes about changing the language of their debate.

Please note that in the audio clip Ms. Lynch and Mrs. Eliadis (in her letter to the editor) are taking great pains to explain that the CHRC does not use the language of criminal law. They don't 'convict'! They don't 'prosecute'-silly proletariat haters!

This is a recurring theme. They are trying to strip away the suggestion that they are criminal thugs, or that their actions are in any way related to real criminal convictions and jurisprudence...

So no need to worry, because it's not a "prosecution" followed by a "conviction", it's just a "hearing" followed by a, er... Well, as Professor Martin told the House of Commons committee yesterday, John Taylor was jailed for his opinions. I guess it looked pretty much like a "conviction" from the Cell Block #9 communal shower. But, of course, to convict someone in a real court, you'd need due process and legal representation and stuff like that, so perhaps Jen and Pearl are right. Maybe instead of "conviction" we could just call it "re-education camp".

[See updates below] 

Speaking to the House of Commons committee hearings on Canada's "human rights" commissions, Professor Martin of the University of Western Ontario gave a remarkable presentation on what he calls their "horrifying record". You can listen to the audio here - it's apparently too strong meat to let the citizenry see the video. You won't want to miss it.

Among its other notable features, it marks the latest stage in the denormalization of Richard Warman, former Canadian "Human Rights" Commission employee, victorious plaintiff on every Section 13 prosecution since 2002 and the country's most prominent Internet Nazi. Professor Martin calls him "the utterly odious Richard Warman" - and even brings up the Anne Cools post, as Senator Cools happens to be a friend of the professor.

Section 13, the CHRC and its Chief Commissar shame Canada, and they will not endure. In his previous incarnation as BBC late-night host twittering with leftie novelists into the small hours about freedom of expression, Michael Ignatieff would have been the first to say so. I'm confident his old pals Rushdie, Hitchens and Amis will eventually remind him of what he knows to be true.

[UPDATE: I like this line in response to a Liberal questioner: "Life in a democracy requires robust citizens." The Grit questions are as one might expect: tendentious, emotive, and boasting of their PC bona fides.]

[UPDATE 2: Gotta love this question from Mr Hiebert: "In the example of Senator Cools, I have to ask: Do you believe that she should have access to some form of legislation or prosecutorial avenue to prevent people like Mr Warman from making the comments that he did about her on the Internet?"

And there it is, folks: In Hansard, in the official Parliamentary record, for all eternity.

Professor Martin's response: "She does not want to soil herself by getting into a tussle with vermin like this [Mr Warman]." On the other hand, he is in favour of "a public hanging of Richard Warman".]

[UPDATE 3: The committee chairman: "I assume it's a reference to her race that begins with the letter 'n'." Mr Warman came this close to getting it read into the record.]

[IN SUMMARY: I yield to no one in my contempt for Richard Warman, and I'm all for getting his activities into Hansard, but I think the Professor's friendship with Senator Cools led him slightly off-track at times. It was a good presentation on overall philosophy and the law and in response to Liberal questions, but he got muddled up on some of the specifics of the HRC cases. Very good on the "odious" Taylor - the first Canadian to be imprisoned for his opinions since the 1930s.]

[UPDATE TO THE "IN SUMMARY" UPDATE: Mark Bourrie, whom I met at the Prime Minister's garden party last year, writes:

You might want to change that last line in your Thursday piece, the one that says Taylor was the last person imprisoned in Canada for their beliefs since the 1930s. I'd move the date to the summer of 1940, when the odiuos mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, was carted off to Petawawa under the War Measures Act for telling a press conference that he would not allow the feds to use Montreal City Hall or any other city property for manpower/draft registration. Cops came for Houde the next day and he spent four years locked up.

There were a few other small Commie and Nazi-wannabe fish picked up during the war, but you're most likely to hear about Houde. While corpulent, corrupt, disloyal and stupid, Houde was almost certainly not an agent of an enemy power. (The War Measures Act contained provisions for punishing people who discouraged recruitment, which was Houde's offence.)

BTW, Montreal voters put him back in office as quickly as they could. He was re-elected in 1944.

Actually, the line about "the first Canadian to be imprisoned for his opinions since the 1930s" came from Professor Martin's testimony, but Mr Bourrie has done extensive research into this subject, so I'm inclined to let him have the last word. I would add, however, that there is clearly a difference between the senior executive of a major city refusing the national government in wartime and an obscure private citizen running a recorded telephone message service out of his basement to a miniscule number of nobodies. In fact, if you look at who the CHRC chooses to torment and those from whom it backs away, it becomes clearer that it's a exercise in pure state power rather than anything to do with human rights - which should, of course, be a protection against arbitrary and whimsical state power.]