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On Monday (as noted below), Maclean's filed a motion requesting that Charlie Gillis, yours truly and other representatives of the magazine be permitted to attend the secret hearing of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal at which employees of the CHRC will be questioned about their addiction to posting on "hate websites" under false names. Our man Julian Porter, being a real lawyer and QC and whatnot, made a legal argument. That's to say, Julian cited legal precedents - CBC vs New Brunswick, Ambard vs Attorney-General of Trinidad and Tobago, etc - and eminent jurists from Viscount Haldane to Judge Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada. That is what lawyers do. Catholic Insight, which also seeks to attend the hearing, referenced R. vs Amato (1982), R. vs Mack (1988), etc.
We now have the counter-argument* from the Canadian Human Rights Commission. There is no appeal to precedent or legal principle. There is no legal argument at all. Instead, there is an emotional whine that "a great deal of anger has been expressed on various websites" against the CHRC's employees. A "great deal of anger"? This is the usual "human rights" arithmetic, as Orwellian in its way as Orwell's 1984 line about 2+2=5. At the CHRC, 1+0="a great deal". The only evidence of "a great deal of anger" is one poster at one website. So the CHRC's proposition that there is "a great deal of anger" out there is true in the same sense that there are a great deal of neo-Nazis out there, and a great deal of human rights victims bringing legitimate Section 13 complaints, as opposed to just one - Richard Warman - using this provision of the law as his personal payback machine.
So, on the one hand, we have legal arguments consistent with Canadian law. On the other, we have an emotive whine unsupported by any evidence. In a sense, this is the logical reductio of Section 13: now it's not just the "human rights victims" but the Commission itself complaining that all that matters is that their feelings have been hurt. Reading this "legal response", you'd think the CHRC had seceded entirely from the Canadian justice system. Which they have, more or less. That's why they're so determined to resist attempts to get them to conform to the norms of Canadian law. If the CHRC gets away with this, they will have established an important benchmark in confirming that the Star Chamber is now a law unto itself, in which the principles and precedents of Canada's legal inheritance are entirely irrelevant.
On the other hand, notice the offers to compromise in the final paragraphs. Those would not have been made had Maclean's not filed its motion, and other parties, from Catholic Insight to The National Post, from Free Dominion and other bloggers to (as I still quaintly think of us) free-born Canadian citizens, not weighed in on the issue. That's why it's important to keep the pressure up.
Ezra Levant makes the following point:
On pages 4419 and 4494 of the transcript, Rizk states that Warman filed his CHRC complaint against Lemire while Warman was still working at the CHRC himself. Put aside the fact that CHRC policy is to not generate its own complaints. How outrageous is it that Warman would file a complaint to the commission, as a "private citizen", while still working at the commission?
The problem for the Star Chamber is that Canada is not a terribly lucrative hate market, so to justify the racket they in effect act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and plaintiff. That's at odds with our entire legal tradition. And the fact that they have to do that is the strongest evidence that Section 13 is entirely irrelevant to keeping the Queen's peace. Perhaps in recognition that they need more plaintiffs than their 24/7 complainant Richard Warman, the CHRC has taken to trawling various lobby groups such as the Canadian Arab Federation in order to drum up business - or, as they put it, "networking with key stakeholders". See too this letter from Harvey Goldberg, head honcho of the CHRC's "Proactive Initiatives (ie, the Drumming Up Business Unit), to the Canadian Arab Federation about his interest in working with "any group of Canadians who may be the victims, or potential victims, of hate on the Internet". They designate certain lobby groups as representatives of "potential victims" and then invite them to find something to be a potential victim of.
The operation of Section 13 by the "human rights" apparatchiks is a scandal. Keith Martin is right. We need a Royal Commission - and, in the meantime, a cease-and-desist order from the Minister of Justice.
*By the way, Margot Blight, the CHRC's lawyer, provides various appendices in support of her argument that the Great Angry Mob of Haters are releasing detailed physical descriptions of the CHRC's employees. They boil down to a couple of brief references to the fact that Dean Steacy is blind. I sat in Judge St Eve's courtroom in Chicago for months on end reporting on Conrad Black's trial. Like all of us on the press benches, I referenced aspects of the judge's, jury's, lawyers', defendants', wives' and witnesses' appearances and demeanor. Certainly, if a blind man had walked into court with a white cane, I would have mentioned it. That is perfectly normal and acceptable court reporting in any free country in the world. CHRC employees may feel, for peculiar psychological reasons, that they need to be in the witness protection program, but Ms Blight's ridiculous appendices provide no compelling evidence.
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