SteynOnline

Celebrated men's room photographer Warren Kinsella is outsourcing his latest pictorial:

Before I forget: for anyone attending the Heritage Front/Maclean's hearing at the CHRC in Ottawa tomorrow, I will pay $100 for a clear photo of Lemire and Steyn together, ideally shaking hands. I'll pay more for actual footage.

Footage of what? And how much more? I had no idea there were such specialized tastes out there.

UPDATE: Oh, before I forget: this website hereby announces it will pay $0.23* for a clear photo of Warren Kinsella and any Liberal frontbencher together, taken in the last two years. For such a well-connected political insider, they seem to be hard to come by.

(*East Caribbean dollars)

Among the many fascinating nuggets in Joseph Brean's epic National Post front-pager is this passage apropos the all but sole beneficiary of the Section 13 "hate message" provision of Canada's Human Rights Code:

They point to Mr. Lemire's accuser, former human rights commission employee Richard Warman, who is also the complainant in more than a dozen other section 13.1 cases -- more by far than any other complainant ever -- and wonder how one man could be so widely aggrieved. They also note his 100% success rate.

Liberal MP Keith Martin, who has put forth a motion to scrap section 13.1, says it seems unfair that "someone could be using the power of the state for their own private initiative. I don't want to use the word pogrom, it would be too strong. One person's private crusade."

Mr. Martin describes the legal test of "likely to expose" as "a hole you could drive a Mack truck through," and said it is being applied by "rogue commissions where a small number of people [are] determining what Canadians can and can't say."

Far from backpedaling on his campaign, Keith Martin is getting tougher and tougher on Section 13. Like most fairminded people, the more he looks into the "human rights" racket the more affronted he is. Richard Warman, the CHRC's serial plaintiff, noted pie inciter and member of Stormfront, can't be happy that the charges leveled at him by bloggers are now being repeated by Members of Parliament in the national press. I wonder if he will sue - or threaten to sue - Dr Martin, as he has sued - or threatened to sue - everyone else who disrespects him.

Dr Martin is quite right, however. Consider, for example, this case:

Richard Warman is a lawyer in Ottawa. On February 2, 2002, Mr. Warman filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against Fred Kyburz. Mr. Warman's complaint alleged that Mr. Kyburz communicated messages through his Internet web site, messages which expose identifiable groups to hatred or contempt, in violation of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Mr. Warman's complaint was subsequently amended, with leave of the Tribunal, to include the allegation that Mr. Kyburz retaliated against Mr. Warman for having filed his human rights complaint, contrary to section 14.1 of the Act.

By "retaliated", the judge is referring to certain postings at Mr Kyburz's widely unread site following the complaint. Richard Warman was not a member of any of the "identifiable groups", but that's the great thing about the "human rights" racket. You can write something about Jews, Muslims, gays or transsexuals that prompts not a single complaint from a Jew, Muslim, gay or transsexual, but if Mr Warman decides to get upset on their behalf it's a goldmine. In the end, the Tribunal ordered Mr Kyburz to pay Mr Warman $35,000, including $20,000 for "pain and suffering".

"Pain and suffering"? Consider this passage:

Mr. Warman signed up to join the web forum, using a false name, and, as a result, was able to access the information posted there.

Richard Warman, a private citizen not a law enforcement officer empowered to conduct undercover operations, voluntarily becomes a member of a hate website, then gets his former colleagues in the government to investigate the site, and collects 35 grand - tax-free - for his "pain and suffering".

What does this racket have to do with "human rights"?

In free societies who value the integrity of the justice system, it would be Mr Warman and his chums at the CHRC who would be under investigation. You go, Keith!

Deborah Gyapong has two good posts today, as she does most days. The first examines certain aspects of Joe Brean's front-page story in The National Post; the second confesses to "some discomfort" about "the whole cast of characters from the Ernst Zundel case suddenly converging on Ottawa this Tuesday".

I agree with that. Unlike Richard Warman and Dean Steacy, I don't spend my time hanging out on white-supremacist websites, and I get a little queasy at some of the e-mail correspondence I wake up to in the morning. Nonetheless, bad laws usually start out being applied to unsympathetic characters on the fringes of society, and then work their way inwards. That's why it's best to stop them at the outset. As Deborah says:

Yet Marc Lemire deserves a fair hearing. He deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty. He deserves a legal system that does not engage in planting evidence or entrapment. He deserves a legal system where the rules are clear and not made up as we go along. 

She's right. The question for the defenders of this grotesque system is this: If Marc Lemire is such an obviously vile hateful man in breach of Canadian laws and "values", why is it necessary to set him up? And, if you let Warman and Steacy do it to Lemire, who else do you let 'em do it to? The Canadian Jewish Congress takes the position that the Levant and Steyn prosecutions are an overreach and not merited, but is otherwise cool with all the previous Section 13 convictions.

Terrific. I can imagine how that's playing on the wilder shores of the Internet: "Gee, what a surprise. The CJC is happy to have Section 13 applied to Aryan Nation of Moose Jaw and the Timmins Stormtroopers but thinks that Jewboy Levant and Jewboy Stein (Why don't you come clean about the spelling, eh?) should be the only ones given a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card."

And they wonder why folks think there's an International Jewish Conspiracy?

Sorry, not good enough. Section 13 is poorly drafted and corruptly administered. What is the real threat to Canada? A shmuck who calls himself a "supremacist" but lives in a basement flat and can't afford a lawyer? Or the supple expansive soft totalitarianism of unaccountable stage agencies above the law who believe they're entitled to do anything in pursuit of phantom enemies?

I don't find that a difficult question to answer. And nor should the CJC.

Oh, and if the Canadian, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario "human rights" apparatchiks don't like the unprecedented scrutiny they're getting, they should have figured that out before they accepted these cases. Ruth Selwyn, "former executive director, Canadian Human Rights Foundation", whines in the Montreal Gazette:

It is a pity that space is given to Mark Steyn's self-serving campaign to ridicule human rights. Steyn's representation of marginal cases as the be all and end all of the work of human-rights commissions shows a lack of understanding of the system or, worse, a deliberate attempt to distort it.

Oh that we could move on and focus on the real issues such as the discrimination that people do face every day in Canada.

Well, if you're so eager to "move on", why don't you take that up with Dean Steacy and the rest of your buddies? I'd love to move on, too. But I can't - because your pals started this. They came after me, not the other way round. For some reason, they thought Maclean's, Ezra and I would just roll over and take it the way all the losers in basements did. That assumption is itself very revealing about these bullies' belief in their own ominipotence.

Oh, and by the way, no case is "marginal" if it's you in the middle of it. If you're a restaurant owner looking at a six-figure legal bill because the Ontario Human Rights Commission decides to invent the human right to smoke pot on someone else's property, that's not "marginal": the fate of your business and your home and your family hinge on the outcome. Like so many human rights poseurs, Ruth Selwyn seems to have forgotten that the individual is the ultimate minority group.

Still, since she seems pretty plugged in to the "human rights" cocktail circuit, Ms Selwyn might as well pass this on to Steacy and the gang: "Moving on" is in their power, not mine. I want a repeal of Section 13, plus a Royal Commission, and I'm in this all the way to the Supreme Court. And, if that cuts into their ability to "focus on the real issues", they should have thought of that before they picked this fight.

I regret to say that, until I had the misfortune to catch the attention of the "human rights" racketeers myself, I was unfamiliar with the sterling work of Marc Lemire's lawyer, Barbara Kulaszka. But she's awful good. I like the way, apropos the CHRC crowd's zeal for posting on hate websites, she refers to them as "members of Stormfront". Which, of course, they are. Ms Kulaszka identifies Dean Steacy as a "member of Stormfront", and Richard Warman as a "member of Stormfront", and Sgt Stephen Camp as a "member of Stormfront". Perhaps somewhere there's a message thread wherein Richard Warman attempts to entrap Sgt Stephen Camp while he's simultaneously attempting to entrap Dean Steacy. It might be easier to buy these kinky "hate message" crusaders a group membership to some online dating service for the more specialized fetishes.

But, given the minimal traffic at Stormfront, one has to wonder how many of their neo-Nazi white-supremacist members are servants of the Crown's "human rights" apparatus idling away the office hours on a rainy afternoon. Still, unlike "Canadian human rights crusader Richard Warman", "Stormfront member Richard Warman" at least has the merits of being indisputable.

[PS Yes, yes, I know Ms Kulaszka has unsavoury associations - Ernst Zundel et al. But I'm not looking for a date, I'm admiring her pushback against an out-of-control state agency. Almost all previous federal Section 13 defendants were too poor to afford legal counsel. Think about that, by the way. In most civilized legal systems, an accused person unable to hire a lawyer is at least entitled to a public defender. In Canada's "human rights" system, the Crown pays for the prosecution and the defendant has to fend for himself. Which means that most federal Section 13 defendants, being a bunch of losers, were convicted without any proper legal representation. Shame on Canada.

Then Marc Lemire caught their fancy, and, unlike his predecessors, he got a lawyer and an effective one, and they pushed back. If not for their doggedness, we wouldn't know that the CHRC's all but sole plaintiff Richard Warman is a member of Stormfront, and CHRC lead investigator Dean Steacy is a member of Stormfront, and Sgt Stephen Camp is a member of Stormfront. Most of the revelations about the systemic corruption and abuse of process at the CHRC have arisen since the Lemire defence went to work: That's effective lawyering.

Oh, and by the way, justice is supposed to be, like Dean Steacy, blind. If you run a red light and you hit a pedestrian, it makes no difference in law whether the pedestrian's Marc Lemire or Nelson Mandela. Or at least it shouldn't. It's foolish to assume the abuses of the CHRC will always be confined to folks you dislike. "First, they came for the neo-Nazi losers in basements and I did nothing. Then they came for the fundamentalist Christians and homophobes and I did nothing. Then they came for the blowhards like Levant and Steyn and I did nothing..." You really think everything you say about everything you care about can be kept sufficiently bland and innocuous that you'll never attract their attention?]