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When we flag these short posts over on the home page, they come under the umbrella heading "Canada vs Free Speech". And occasionally I get e-mails objecting to that billing and tutting: "A little hysterical, aren't we, Steyn? You're not seriously suggesting that the Government of Canada is really clamping down on free speech, are you?"
Actually, yes, I am. What else would you call it when 13 servants of the Crown are paid by taxpayers to investigate one small website for two-and-a-half years (so far)? Anyone who spends ten minutes at Free Dominion understands that it's a website of more or less conventional conservative opinion well within the mainstream of right-of-center thought, while prone - as is every popular political site - to occasional moments of overheatedness in the comments section. That's it, that's all. There's nothing going on at Free Dominion to warrant legions of hack bureaucrats investigating it at public expense for a quarter of a decade, and counting. I was in court on the day Dean Steacy, Canada's top-secret "Jade Warrior" and Number Two undercover Internet Nazi (after Richard Warman), compared Free Dominion to the US white supremacist website Stormfront (see page 5766 of the transcript), and my first thought from the public seats was that the comparison was almost certainly libelous. But my second thought is the more relevant one: the remark demonstrates that Mr Steacy is simply too stupid to play creepy fantasist secret agent in cyberspace all week long.
When he revealed that he shared public "concerns" about the "human rights" commissions, the Prime Minister suggested that many of those concerns were, in fact, over the provincial franchises. Yet it's clear that the one for which his ministry bears direct responsibility - the federal HRC - is a rogue agency that does not regard itself as subject to the normal rules of accountability in a constitutional democracy. If you need any explicit evidence, look at the CHRC's response to Free Dominion's "Freedom of Information" request: 23 pages in which everything has been redacted except the automated e-mail signatures of the CHRC bureaucrats. Ezra Levant thought the honor roll of the Canadian State Censorship Directorate was worth printing in full:
1. John Chamberlin
2. Natalie Dagenais
3. Philippe Dufresne
4. Kathleen Fawcett
5. Harvey Goldberg
6. Fiona Keith
7. Sandy Kozak
8. Catherine Labelle
9. Vera Pantalone
10. Marie-Anne St-Amour
11. Dean Steacy
12. Richard Tardif
13. Marie Wankam
These are not normal civil servants. Some members of the Lynch Mob are no doubt relatively harmless mediocrities enjoying the perks of a make-work racket wholly irrelevant to the Queen's peace. Others are ideological warriors, corrupt bullies, wannabe 007s, and loser misfits who get paid by Canadian taxpayers to sit around the office self-Googling all week long. All of them should be relocated to gainful employment.
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