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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.
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