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Is this the all-time lamest defense ever of Canada's "human rights" regime? The Tri-City News of British Columbia, home of the Steyn/Maclean's show trial, has one of those Count/Pointercount features where they pit opposing columnists on the same subject. On the publication of Ezra's Shakedown, they've put Terry O'Neill, who actually attended the Maclean's trial, up against Mary-Woo Sims, the province's former chief commissar of "human rights". Mr O'Neill stands on a basic principle:
Let people with real conflicts use real courts to settle them.
Ms Sims, on the other hand, says:
Of course I don’t agree. My opinion? Levant is mad as hell that he has been the target of complaints about what he has written and has had to defend himself before the very commissions about which he has written. But he shouldn’t complain — the system worked as the complaints against him have been dismissed.
What makes me doubt his motives more is that he’s only concerned about “hate speech” and not at all about all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate and the concerns they address: sexual harassment, use of racial epithets, unfair workplace practices, etc.
Clearly, Ms Sims hasn't read Ezra's book - which is odd in itself: Here's a bestselling book on the "human rights" racket, and a lifelong "human rights" apparatchik isn't curious enough to want to know what it says.
But you don't need to have read it. If you'd glanced over any 500-word review of it or heard a five-minute radio interview, you'd know that Ezra isn't "only" concerned about "hate speech" but writes extensively about "all the other ways in which human rights commissions operate": He devotes considerable space to the "human right" of disaffected McDonald's employees not to wash their hands after using the toilet, and the "human right" of transsexuals to counsel female rape victims. Like me, Ezra started off principally worked up about the corner of the "human rights" machinery we happened to be ensnared in - its prohibitions on free speech. But he came to see that, in fact, the whole racket is one big stinking heap of ordure - and that the systemic abuses of traditional Common Law protections and its betrayal of the principles of Canada's legal inheritance make it, as his book title suggests, a "shakedown" for creeps, misfits and professional nuisance plaintiffs like Richard Warman.
As for Ms Sims' assertion that "the system worked", yes, it did: By ensnaring Ezra in years of litigation and running up a six-figure legal tab, it ensured that "the process is the punishment", regardless of whether you're eventually vindicated. In the entire Danish cartoons controversy, Alberta remains the only jurisdiction in the western world in which the state has investigated a citizen for the crime of publishing them. That fact shames Canada, and makes a mockery of its worthless Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Tyranny is always whimsical. I see Ms Sims' bio says that she now "primarily looks after her father, who has Parkinson's disease and dementia". Suppose, in some unsought, entirely arbitrary fashion, she were to wind up suffering the attentions of the "human rights" shakedown. Not in a right-wing blowhard freespeechy way, but in the way that the hapless bar owner in the medical marijuana case was, or the health club owner in the pre-op-transsexual-in-the-ladies'-shower-case - ie, you're just getting on with your life when one day the "human rights" commissars knock on the door and destroy it. A half-decade investigation would certainly cut into the time Ms Sims has to care for her father, and eat into the cash reserves. Would she say then that "the system worked"?
As Ezra points out, the "human rights" regime has no defenders other than those currently or formerly living high on the "human rights" hog But, even so, Ms Sims' apologia is worthless. Where's that vicious old bruiser Pearl Eliadis when you need her?
More on this, of course, in Shakedown and Lights Out.
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