SteynOnline

Ezra Levant and I had a grand time in Ottawa last week. It was a joint appearance to promote his book Shakedown, and Maclean's has posted some photographs of the event, including a rather odd one of me in mid-speech. It looks like I'm demonstrating the Birdie Song*, which unless I was drunker than I remember I don't think I did.

As you can see, half the Canadian cabinet showed up, including my favorite federal hottie Rona Ambrose. The massed ranks of ministers of the Crown have prompted some snippy type in the comments section to sneer, "Gee, wall-to-wall conservatives. How surprising." In fact, the event was co-sponsored by Rick Dykstra (Con) and Keith Martin (Liberal), and the first speaker was Senator Jerry Grafstein (Liberal), who happens to be in the very first picture, just to make it easy for Mister Snippy. Also in attendance were at least two Bloc Québecois MPs. All very tripartisan.

Afterwards, it was late-night pizza with Laureen Harper at 24 Sussex Drive.

More from Deborah Gyapong.

[UPDATE: M J Murphy has an alternative explanation, as befits Canada's second most comprehensively shagged sheep]

So soi-disant right-wing racist hatemonger Kathy Shaidle turns out to be an open-borders gay leftist. I should have known. Just like self-proclaimed "human rights" activist Richard Warman is Canada's most energetic Internet Nazi when the shades are drawn, so Shaidle, after a hard day posting at far-right hate sites like Five Feet Of Fury, and linking to far-right hate sites like, er, this one, apparently spends her evenings with her fellow Marxist lesbians from the Tamil Tigers laughing at how gullible we right-wing saps are.

It wouldn't surprise me if "Kathy Shaidle" turned out to be just another "pogue mahone"-esque pseudonym for Richard Warman. Or vice-versa. Has anyone ever seen the two of them together?

PS Kate McMillan is Warren Kinsella. And Ezra Levant is Antonia Zerbisias.   

Is this the all-time lamest defense ever of Canada's "human rights" regime? The Tri-City News of British Columbia, home of the Steyn/Maclean's show trial, has one of those Count/Pointercount features where they pit opposing columnists on the same subject. On the publication of Ezra's Shakedown, they've put Terry O'Neill, who actually attended the Maclean's trial, up against Mary-Woo Sims, the province's former chief commissar of "human rights". Mr O'Neill stands on a basic principle:

Let people with real conflicts use real courts to settle them.

Ms Sims, on the other hand, says:

Of course I don’t agree. My opinion? Levant is mad as hell that he has been the target of complaints about what he has written and has had to defend himself before the very commissions about which he has written. But he shouldn’t complain — the system worked as the complaints against him have been dismissed.

What makes me doubt his motives more is that he’s only concerned about “hate speech” and not at all about all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate and the concerns they address: sexual harassment, use of racial epithets, unfair workplace practices, etc.

Clearly, Ms Sims hasn't read Ezra's book - which is odd in itself: Here's a bestselling book on the "human rights" racket, and a lifelong "human rights" apparatchik isn't curious enough to want to know what it says.

But you don't need to have read it. If you'd glanced over any 500-word review of it or heard a five-minute radio interview, you'd know that Ezra isn't "only" concerned about "hate speech" but writes extensively about "all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate": He devotes considerable space to the "human right" of disaffected McDonald's employees not to wash their hands after using the toilet, and the "human right" of transsexuals to counsel female rape victims. Like me, Ezra started off principally worked up about the corner of the "human rights" machinery we happened to be ensnared in - its prohibitions on free speech.  But he came to see that, in fact, the whole racket is one big stinking heap of ordure - and that the systemic abuses of traditional Common Law protections and its betrayal of the principles of Canada's legal inheritance make it, as his book title suggests, a "shakedown" for creeps, misfits and professional nuisance plaintiffs like Richard Warman.

As for Ms Sims' assertion that "the system worked", yes, it did: By ensnaring Ezra in years of litigation and running up a six-figure legal tab, it ensured that "the process is the punishment", regardless of whether you're eventually vindicated. In the entire Danish cartoons controversy, Alberta remains the only jurisdiction in the western world in which the state has investigated a citizen for the crime of publishing them. That fact shames Canada, and makes a mockery of its worthless Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Tyranny is always whimsical. I see Ms Sims' bio says that she now "primarily looks after her father, who has Parkinson's disease and dementia". Suppose, in some unsought, entirely arbitrary fashion, she were to wind up suffering the attentions of the "human rights" shakedown. Not in a right-wing blowhard freespeechy way, but in the way that the hapless bar owner in the medical marijuana case was, or the health club owner in the pre-op-transsexual-in-the-ladies'-shower-case - ie, you're just getting on with your life when one day the "human rights" commissars knock on the door and destroy it. A half-decade investigation would certainly cut into the time Ms Sims has to care for her father, and eat into the cash reserves. Would she say then that "the system worked"?

As Ezra points out, the "human rights" regime has no defenders other than those currently or formerly living high on the "human rights" hog But, even so, Ms Sims' apologia is worthless. Where's that vicious old bruiser Pearl Eliadis when you need her?

More on this, of course, in Shakedown and Lights Out.   

A capacity crowd of 600 paying customers turned up for the Shaidle-Mansur-Levant freespeechapalooza in London, Ontario last week, but, as Kathy Shaidle's headline puts it:

Canadian Newspaper Editor Just Doesn't Have The 'Energy' To Deal With Whole 'Free Speech' Thing.

And that's pretty much what Paul Berton says.

Look, it's not difficult. As the très fatigué Mr Berton points out, his laughably misnamed newspaper The London Free Press ran a story about the event before it happened - by the paper's Bicycling Correspondent Randy Richmond. Whether or not the story was a "smear", it certainly had an impact: The original sponsors canceled the event, and it was obliged to find new sponsors, and a new venue.

In normal circumstances, if you decide an event is so controversial that it has news value before it happens, you have an obligation to report on it when it happens, if only to determine whether the ballyhoo was merited. Having been given the pre-game show, readers were certainly entitled to expect the game. That obligation is intensified when the original story has had such an impact that it put the event in jeopardy. The LFP chose to make itself part of the story, and then denied readers what Paul Harvey used to call "the rest of the story" - that the event had been moved to a bigger venue, and sold it out.

Aside from Paul Berton's lack of "energy", which is certainly reflected in his prose style, there's basic journalistic malpractice going on here: Bicycle Boy decided he'd determined the narrative - "Hatemonger en route to London!" - and when the plot wiggled free of him the paper simply dropped the story as if it had never happened.

More from Just Right Radio on "how the media creates uninformed citizens".

By the way, until Kathy mentioned it, I had no idea Paul Berton was the son of Pierre Berton. That line about a Canadian being someone who knows how to make love in a canoe would be funnier if it were true. On the other hand, Paul Berton is certainly very good at dozing in his canoe as it drifts to the falls.