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The Globe And Mail's Margaret Wente has been a ruthless flayer of the Ontario Human Rights Commission since they made the mistake of catching her eye. And I couldn't be happier about that, given the fatwa Chief Imam Barbara Hall issued against me and Maclean's. Commissar Hall's latest "human right" is the right to "fish without fear". Ms Wente guts it:
Do you detect something fishy here? Maybe it's the smell of empire-building. The Ontario Human Rights Commission's new report, Fishing Without Fear, takes a long-simmering fishing dispute in small-town Ontario and blows it up into a widespread race-based assault on Asian-Canadians. Combatting this assault will require police helicopter patrols along our shores, as well as the concerted action of armies of teachers, mayors, anti-racism trainers and bureaucrats from every nook and cranny of government...
"Racism played a role in the harassment and assault of Asian-Canadian anglers," declared chief commissioner Barbara Hall. She is right. But that's not the whole story. For years, illegal poachers have been a problem in some Ontario lakeshore towns. Some poachers are Chinese, sometimes operating in large groups in the middle of the night. Despite repeated complaints, Ministry of Natural Resources staff have failed to deal with the problem... "Some Asian people aren't respecting the law when it comes to fishing," said Raymond Zee, head of the Toronto Chinese Anglers Association, last fall. "In my own opinion, this does not have anything to do with racism."
Unfortunately, you won't learn these things from the report, which, by insisting that small-town white Ontarians are broadly guilty of "racial profiling," indulges in a bit of racial profiling of its own... The OHRC has obtained agreements from a broad array of government ministries and school boards to implement an elaborate list of measures needed to stamp out racism for good. On top of that, the commission wants a tougher hate-crimes law, because the current one has a "regrettably narrow focus."
And so it goes. The more you expand the "hate" bureaucracy, the more everything will be framed within the parameters of "hate". It would have seemed incredible a mere generation ago that you could pass off what's essentially a poaching issue that should be the province of fish-and-game enforcement as the human right to "fish without fear". But, if a largely unhateful society refuses to commit enough real hate crimes to keep Commissar Hall in the style to which she's accustomed, don't be surprised that every human activity gets redefined to fit her needs.
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