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The Canadian state's assault on free expression has never made the front page of the Dominion's leading liberal newspaper, The Toronto Star, nor of The Globe And Mail, nor even of The Vancouver Sun, when last week's show trial was happening right under their noses.

But it is on the front page of today's New York Times.

I don't have a lot to add to what Andrew Coyne, Ezra Levant and others have written on the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal. Readers of this site have lived with the issues for six months and know most of the arguments - better, indeed, than the pseudo-judges in Vancouver. On Friday, the intervenor for the Canadian Association of Journalists referred en passant to constitutional challenges to Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Code, and Chief Commissar Heather McNaughton asked whether any such challenges were currently proceeding, and he replied: Yes. Warman vs Lemire. Most SteynOnline readers would be aware of Mr Lemire's constitutional challenge to the core "hate speech" weapon in the "human rights" armory, and know that it's intimately entwined with the Maclean's case. But Heather McNaughton, British Columbia's chief "human rights" inquisitor, apparently wasn't.

Other than that, here's just a couple of observations:

1) When I arrived at the courthouse, an officer of the BC Sheriff's Department, said because of "security threats" he'd be sticking by me everywhere I went in the building. I found this rather reassuring for about 90 seconds until it occurred to me he almost certainly meant not that the court had been apprised of security threats against me but that I myself was the security threat.

2) Tuesday was devoted in large part to discussion of my review of the CBC sitcom "Little Mosque On The Prairie" and to in-depth joke exegesis by Chief Sock Khurrum Awan. To the best of my knowledge, he was not sworn in as an expert witness, a Professor of Humorological Studies from the University of Saskatoon or whatever. But he clearly felt many of my jokes were not funny, and actionably so. In my "Loose Ends" days at the BBC, we occasionally used to do the show on the road from Edinburgh, Belfast and so forth, and I'd find myself checking in to hotels with my pals Carol Thatcher, Craig Charles and co. And Craig was occasionally wont to say to the fellow at reception things like, "I pre-booked a couple of hookers. Can you have them sent straight up?" And the clerk would give him a frosty stare, and Craig would turn around and say to us: "Uh-oh! Humour bypass operation." I never thought it was the greatest line, but it seemed oddly apt by the time Mr Awan and Faisal Joseph were done discussing my "Little Mosque" review.

3) I was very touched by the number of folks who came up to me in Starbucks, HMV and other Vancouver emporia and expressed support for me. On my first day at the hotel, I went into the elevator with two ladies, one of whom looked at me and said, "You're that dastardly troublemaker Mark Steyn!" They told me to stick it to the kangaroos and got off a couple of floors ahead of me. Whereupon the Eastern European bellman, intrigued by the conversation, said, "So what brings you to Vancouver, sir?"

I replied, "I'm on trial at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for crimes against humanity."

"Oh," he said, with a nervous laugh. "You must lead a very interesting life." (Not lately.)

4) Finally, skedaddling out of Vancouver on Saturday, I got to the airport to find my flight had been delayed two hours. So I did what I normally do in such circumstances - went to kill time by heading to the gift shop to buy some crummy souvenir knick-knacks for my kids. And, as soon as I got to the first amusing "Beautiful BC" T-shirt, I thought: Why the hell would I want any souvenirs of the lousy jurisdiction that's about to end my career in Canada? So I put the bills back in my pocket and made a mental note to buy a couple extra "Live Free Or Die" T-shirts back in New Hampshire.

James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland, has a piece in Friday's Australian on the "human rights" commissions business. It doesn't seem to be online, so here are a few choice excerpts:

HERE is a little known fact about Canada. It is today a country where you can say or write things that are true and yet still be brought before a tribunal.

That tribunal can fine you; it can order you to pay money to the people who complained about your words; it can force you to issue an apology; it can do all three.

That's not all, though. The people who complained will not need to hire a lawyer.

Their costs will be picked up by the state, by the taxpayers.

You, on the other hand, will have to hire a lawyer to defend yourself. And there will be no award of costs at the end, so that even if you win, you will still be out of pocket to your lawyers tens of thousands of dollars.

Of course, you will not win...

These things are happening right now -- in Britain's oldest self-governing Dominion, the place where so many of the lawyerly class here in Australia regularly look for inspiration when it comes to bills of rights and how best to protect human rights (which is incredibly ironic, I know)... I don't much like having to state the obvious, which is that Canada has become a joke as far as the issue of protecting free speech is concerned.

And not such a good joke when the laugh's on you:

In the Steyn case, what the Canadian Islamic Congress is objecting to are quotations Steyn used. They are quotes of what Muslim leaders have said. So the purported grievance is that a writer is quoting one of their fellow religionists, and that quote (though true) might in the minds of those ideologues staffing these tribunals expose someone to hatred, even though in fact there is not a scrap of evidence that this has actually happened.

And a few years back when these hate-speech provisions were challenged, what did the Supreme Court of Canada say? ``They're perfectly fine, thank you very much'', said the court. And the Canadian Attorney-General? His department has just published the most fatuous defence of the provision, and this from a Conservative Government.

It notes that history is full of examples of times when lies and distortions have been used by groups such as the Nazis to repress speech, missing the irony that they want to repress speech now so that others can't do so later.

wonders bigtime "journalism ethics" type Ron Friedman. Speaking of journalism ethics, Mr Friedman writes of my notorious Maclean's hate crime:

Many groups and people were offended by it.

Oh, really. Which "groups" were they? And how many is "many"?

The other thing that caught my eye was this:

“The feeling is that it doesn’t matter which way Steyn is going to go, it’s probably going to get appealed,” she said.

Oh, great. I've become an "it". I used to be a writer, now I'm a case. That's not a promotion.