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I felt a huge sense of relief as my flight taxied down the runway and left Ottawa yesterday. I've been in courtrooms in several countries over the years, and it's always claustrophobic. It's a closed world and you get a little goofy when you're walled up with a case. Events in the outside world impinge only insofar as they relate to your parking-ticket case: "Didja hear? They nuked Paris!" "Gee, is that good for us or the prosecution?"
But, even by these minimal expectations, Warman vs Lemire was discomforting. For a start (as noted below), the absence of one of the parties: Richard Warman has moved on. He shrugged off the case when it became clear it wouldn't be easy money. Everybody else, by contrast, has dug in. On one side of the court, Marc Lemire and his counsel, plus Paul Fromm and Doug Christie, have assembled a vast amount of arcana on "human rights" commission investigative techniques and are eager to pounce. On the other side of the court, intervenors on the CHRC's behalf - the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal - sit bored out of their skulls, scrolling through their Blackberries. They have no interest in whether Dean Steacy gets his jollies posting as "jadewarr" on white-supremacist sites. They're there merely to protect their franchise. As Ezra Levant dryly observed, if you hear "Death to the Jews!" in Calgary it's not from the neo-Nazis it's from Muslim firebrands about whom liberal Jewish lobby groups are largely silent.
As for the judge, Athanios Hajdis was brisk but impatient. He knows how he's going to rule, and he appears eager to add Marc Lemire to the mound of Section 13 losers. "We're done," he said at several points during the day. I don't get the impression he's planning on letting Mr Lemire buck the 100 per cent Section 13 conviction rate.
As for the CHRC, it's hard to believe their lawyer and witnesses could have got away with being so ill-prepared in any other court. For example, I spent six months under the iron fist of Judge Amy in Chicago's federal courthouse during the Conrad Black trial, and Her Honour (actually, in this case, Her Honor) wouldn't have been impressed by the succession of "I don't remembers" from the first witness Ms Rizsk; or the contradictions (often within the same answer) of Dean Steacy; or the curious oversights of Ms Blight, the CHRC's lawyer, in neglecting to bring routine files from the last session back to court with her; or even the absence yesterday of the blind Mr Steacy's assistant, which necessitated various operational adjustments. Even Ms Blight's habit of referring to Mr Lemire's lawyer as "my friend" seemed poised somewhere between open contempt and condescension toward someone too obtuse to know that "they're done".
Nonetheless, a couple of things became clear. This is not the "Canadian" Human Rights Commission. That's to say, it does not treat all Canadians equally. Dean Steacy's testimony made plain that, if you belong to certain approved groups and you make an exploratory phone call to the CHRC, he'll get right on it, dust off his "jadewarr" pseudonym and start posting on the targeted websites: That's what he did to Free Dominion (which is not a "hate site" unless "hate" is now defined openly as anything Dean Steacy disagrees with): Steacy was registered under an alias on Free Dominion six months before any formal complaint was launched. On the other hand, if you don't belong to certain groups, Dean Steacy will reject your complaint on "format" grounds. When Marc Lemire filed a complaint about Sgt Stephen Camp of the Edmonton police posting "hate messages" about "redskin" "animals", Mr Steacy rejected it because it was "double-sided" - even though Lemire faxed it in. When serial plaintiff Richard Warman couldn't locate a particular post on one of the websites he'd complained to the CHRC about, he strolled over to their office where his old pals allowed him to log on under Steacy's "jadewarr" pseudonym. To put it at its mildest, this would raise eyebrows in any other justice context other than the "human rights" racket.
Marc Lemire recently complained that his team has done all the hard work exposing the CHRC only to have johnny-come-latelies like Ezra and I waltz in and get all the kudos. Well, tough. That's life. Mr Lemire is never going to be a sympathetic character - and to say so is only to point out the obvious. Neither are Ezra and I: As Warren Kinsella keeps tutting, we're self-promoting blowhards. I don't know who in this context would be a "sympathetic character": David Suzuki? The cast of Air Farce? Actually, that last one isn't so far off: the BBC children's character Basil Brush - a glove-puppet fox who's been a mainstay of children's TV for 40 years - is currently under investigation in Britain because members of the "travellers' community" complained about a sketch involving a gypsy. The point is the special powers the CJC and co think are appropriate for punishing neo-Nazis cannot be so confined, and eventually all kinds of other folks are caught in their nets. Mr Lemire will never be a "free speech hero". And, if it's any consolation to him, nor will I. In fact, I would bet by the time the Supreme Court hands down its decision four years hence my career in Canada will be long over. It's a slow battle: Lemire did a good job in uncovering the abusive techniques of Steacy and co. But no mainstream media covered it. Ezra and I have a more mainstream profile, and we got the story pushed out into The Globe And Mail and the CBC - the arena where conventional wisdom forms and gets shifted. Keith Martin, Margaret Wente and Rick Mercer pushed it out to a wider constituency still, which is what matters.
It's important to keep the pressure on the CHRC - to make them understand that they can no longer take their routine expectations of "secret trials" for granted, and that any such order will be met with legal motions emphasizing that, notwithstanding their assumptions, they can still be compelled to submit to the norms of the Canadian justice system. This battle to restore ancient liberties (like the presumption of innocence) will be won in the open air not in the fetid "hearing rooms" of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
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