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That's how Margot Blight, counsel for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, described it at last Tuesday's hearing whenever the most notorious pseudonymous posting by a CHRCer threatened to raise its ugly head. You can understand why she'd want the Tribunal to steer clear of the subject. The defendant Marc Lemire alleges that on September 5th 2003 the plaintiff Richard Warman, under a pseudonym, posted the following message at Lemire's Freedom Site:
Cools don't belong in our Senate
Not only is Canadian Senator Anne Cools a Negro, she is also an immigrant! And she is also one helluva preachy c*nt. She does NOT belong in my Canada. My Anglo-Germanic people were here before there was a Canada and her kind have jumped in, polluted our race, and forced their bull**** down our throats. Time to go back to when the women n**ger imports knew their place…And that place was NOT in public!
This message was then used as part of the complaint Richard Warman filed with the CHRC against Marc Lemire, at least until Lemire began inquiring into its provenance, at which point the CHRC mysteriously dropped it from the indictment.
Senator Cools, the first black female member of Canada's Upper House, is something of a political eccentricity, a Liberal Party social worker who over the years drifted right on many issues and eventually became a Conservative. She is, though, a fairly peripheral figure to be singled out for the ire of the average Freedom Site poster. So what had she done in the weeks before September 5th 2003 to attract attention? Well, in August she was in the news all but exclusively for her opposition to legalization of same-sex marriage. See, for example, the following stories:
Liberal Senator Against Gay Marriage
(The Edmonton Journal, August 30th 2003)
Mr. Gallaway and Ms. Cools oppose allowing homosexuals to marry and say they believe Canadian sentiment is running their way. "As far as I'm concerned, the opposition to this has just begun," declared Ms. Cools, a former social worker appointed to the Senate in 1984.
(The Ottawa Citizen, August 15th 2003)
Liberal Senator Anne Cools travelled to the tiny community, about 25 kilometres south of Edmonton, on Friday for the start of the rally. A vocal opponent of the proposed legislation, she said the country is in ''a state of shock and uneasiness,'' and wanted to help people voice their own opinions.
(Canadian Press, August 31st 2003)
The cornerstone of Pierre Trudeau's legacy is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which exists precisely to serve as a shield against Parliament's excesses and a battering ram against its complacency. Nonetheless, Cools and Gallaway have asked for a chance to argue their point when the Supreme Court considers the government's bill on gay marriage.
(my colleague Paul Wells in Maclean's, August 25th 2003)
It seems curious that Senator Cools should become a preoccupation of Freedom Site at the very moment when she'd become one of the leading parliamentary opponents of gay marriage. Freedom Site is not exactly renowned as a pro-gay website. But Richard Warman happens to be a member of EGALE (Equality for Gays And Lesbians Everywhere), which supports same-sex marriage, and his former colleagues at the Canadian Human Rights Commission eventually intervened in the Supreme Court reference on the side of gay marriage rights. Meanwhile, as Paul Wells mentions, at the end of August, Senator Cools announced her intention of intervening before the Supreme Court on the question. A few days later, Mr Warman, under his pseudonym, apparently posts a vicious attack on Senator Cools as a "n**ger import" and "preachy c**t".
The justification for current and former CHRC investigators posting "hate messages" on websites they're targeting is that it's sometimes necessary to their investigation. To the rest of us, it looks like entrapment. But does it in fact go beyond mere entrapment to old-fashioned score-settling? One thing that was very clear in Tuesday's hearing was the sheer pettiness of the CHRC gang. When Marc Lemire's complaint was turned down by Dean Steacy (for being on the world's first double-sided fax) and Mr Lemire then had the impertinence to post something about it, Mr Steacy immediately put on his "jadewarr" alias and started posting disinformation at the site. When Free Dominion merely mentioned Mr Steacy this last January, he promptly climbed into his psychological phone booth, changed into his "jadewarr" underwear and logged on to the site. Whatever its high-minded origins, Section 13 seems to have decayed into a crappy little racket for Steacy and Warman to torment whoever crosses them.
So look at the timing. Late August: Anne Cools becomes the most prominent Senate opponent of gay marriage. Early September: Richard Warman files his "hate message". So was Mr Warman, in his role as gay-rights crusader, steamed at Senator Cools for wandering off the Liberal reservation on the issue?
The reader who drew my attention to the chronology reprises Alberta Human Rights Commission Grand Inquisitor Shirlene McGovern's first question to Ezra Levant at the start of his interrogation: "I always ask people... what was your intent and purpose of your article?"
Steacy and Warman would answer that their "intent" was pure and virtous because they're only posting hate messages to entrap the real haters. So they should get a pass. The CHRC's equivalent of 007, they're licensed to hate. Yet in the extraordinarily ugly message about Senator Cools a far more personal animus seems to be in play.
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