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The Globe And Mail restricts much of its content online but today’s print edition is well worth picking up. This is Canada’s establishment paper and it doesn’t like what it’s hearing from Barbara Hall, Chief Commissar of the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission, the world leaders in labiaplasty jurisprudence.
First, star columnist Rex Murphy:
The press release wasn't limited, however, to lamenting the absence of competence and declaring the HRC wouldn't be proceeding in the matter.
It went on, seizing the educative moment, to light into Maclean's for its “Islamophobia” over “a number of articles,” illustrating a “type of media coverage [that] has been identified as contributing to Islamophobia and promoting societal intolerance towards Muslim, Arab and South Asian Canadians.” More, it regretted that in Ontario, with the statute as written, it is not “possible to challenge any institution that contributes to the dissemination of destructive, xenophobic opinions.” Meaning Maclean's and whatever of that ilk trails in the familiar and long-tenured magazine's presumed xenophobic and racist wake.
I'm not a lawyer, so I merely ask the question: Is it normal when declining a case (or, in this case, a complaint) for a commission, court or tribunal to then deliver a guilty verdict? For that's what the press statement, directly, or by forceful implication, did.
And hasn't it always been in free society a human right (old-fashioned, I know) not to be judged without a hearing? But here there was no hearing. Neither Maclean's nor Mr. Steyn made a case or presented arguments. And yet the commission's release damned them in harsh and condemnatory language that was a verdict in everything but name.
Furthermore, it did so before – mark that, before – two other tribunals, which, we presume, listen to and read this HRC's words, have themselves even begun proceedings on the same complaint. Do judges in real courts act this way? Do they telegraph verdicts to other jurisdictions? Do they make up what they are delighted to call their minds in vacuo? Do they decline cases, then pass judgment anyway, and issue stern and rebuking releases?
And Mr Murphy’s column bears the headline:
Vive le Canada libre!
Oh, well, columnists are (or were) licensed to peddle eccentric and contrarian views. What of the sensible sorts who pen the Globe editorials? What have these solid citizens got to say? Here’s their headline:
Alarmingly pro-active
And here’s how they begin:
‘Looking forward” was an explicit theme of Wednesday's press release from the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), which, without a hearing, attributed Islamophobic racism to Maclean's magazine and the writer Mark Steyn.
The commission is looking ahead to a pro-active new role… The broad, if not vague, criterion of the public interest will be the basis for the commissioners' own initiating of inquiries into such practices, whatever they may be.
In turn, the commission's appointees can enter any premises (except a dwelling), without a search warrant, and demand any relevant “document or thing,” and remove such things, not quite for indefinite periods, but for “a reasonable time.” Hindering all this is forbidden. Mercifully, the new rights police cannot use force, or enter outside business, or daylight, hours. For that, they would need a search warrant, thus returning to the realm of familiar legal standards...
The closing, “looking-forward” paragraph of Wednesday's press release evokes the OHRC's “broader role in addressing the tension and conflict that such writings [as the Maclean's article in question] cause in the community.”
Or to put it in a nutshell, as the editorial concludes:
Be afraid.
This was the Globe’s second editorial on the subject. Yesterday the editors wrote:
When is a decision not a decision? The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) performed just such a deft manoeuvre on Wednesday, announcing there would be no hearing on whether Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn had violated human rights. Nonetheless, the commission concluded in a press release that they were both guilty of racism…
One of the most basic maxims of justice is Audi alteram partem: Listen to the other side. By pronouncing Maclean's and Mr. Steyn to be racist, the commission has violated that fundamental principle.
Well, so much for the writers and editors. But what do the readers, that great mass of moderate centrist reasonable Canadian opinion, think about all this? Under the headline “Commissioners, Not Commissars”, James Marvin of Toronto writes:
Few words in the English language are more misused than “racist” and “racism.” A case could be made that, instead of berating Mark Steyn and Maclean's, the Ontario Human Rights Commission should have been defending them (Unproven Racism – editorial, April 11). We don't want a situation where commissioners act like commissars and hate laws become gag laws.
So that’s what a casual Globe And Mail reader will see on a quick scan of the paper this weekend: Vive le Canada libre; Alarmingly pro-active; and Commissioners, not commissars. I wonder if even Commissar Hall is so secure in her cocoon of hack bureaucratic orthodoxy that she doesn’t realize she and the fraudulent system so embodies so perfectly have fewer friends by the week.
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