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This is a very sound overview of the Canadian "human rights" fiasco, with two distinctive features: It's from Quebec, where most of the action on the free speech front has been left to the excellent website Point de Bascule. More to the point, its author, Anne Humphreys, is from the NDP end of the political spectrum. Mme Humphreys was the Dipper candidate for Marcus Aurelius-Fortin, but withdrew following the NDP's decision to rescind the nomination of Francis Chartrand, the candidate for Rivière-des-Milles-Iles, after some remarks he made on his blog with respect to "reasonable accommodation" of minorities. In other words, both M Chartrand and Mme Humphreys have paid a price for their dissent from multiculti orthodoxy.
M Chartrand has reprinted Mme Humphreys' piece at his website en anglais but run through the Babelfish wringer, where it loses an awful lot. Notwithstanding a very fetching picture of the author over the "English" translation, I would encourage francophone SteynOnliners to read the original. Even if you don't spikka da lingo, you'll be rewarded with an at-a-glance graphic showing the ludicrous and deeply corrupt monopolization of Section 13 by Richard Warman. This alone would be enough to trigger reform in healthy polities.
But I'm especially gratified to see Lower Laurentian NDPers enter this discussion. When Ezra and I spoke in Ottawa a couple of months back, there were Tory, Liberal and Bloquiste parliamentarians present - but not, as far as I'm aware, any members of the New Democratic Party. Mme Humphreys even quotes Kathy Shaidle, which, alas, is not something a lot of Quebeckers do.
She also cites the legendary Mario Roy of La Presse. I have taken the liberty of translating M Roy's remarks out of Babelfish and into English:
The extract from America Alone published by Maclean's is essentially factual. Its principal aim is to demonstrate that western society is crumbling and that 'the future belongs to Islam'' - above all, in a demographic sense, but also from a political, psychological and moral viewpoint. This kind of exercise has illustrious precedents: for example, in 1976, in La chute finale, the historian and sociologist Emmanuel Todd predicted, 15 years before the fact and using demography as his starting point, the collapse of Soviet society. Those who've read America Alone in its entirety know that Mark Steyn, whether right or wrong, embarks on many flights of fancy far more audacious.
But above all, his picture is a wide-angle snapshot of reality, and there's no reason it should be censored in a society that likes to say it believes in free speech and is open to ideas.
Thank you, M Roy. Mme Humphreys also has the pithiest explanation as to why I, unlike the Reverend Boissoin and others, got away with it:
Relaxé parce que célèbre.
"Acquitted because famous". That's right, and that's what should really bother the leftie "social justice" bloggers who say, well, the Maclean's/Western Standard verdicts show that the system works so what are Steyn and Levant making a fuss about?
No, we got away with it because we're noisemakers with pre-existing megaphones. We can say anything we like in Canada now and no "human rights" commission is ever going to want to tangle with us again. Is that what you lefties want? Blowhard justice? One law for the bigmouths and another for the nobodies?
The title of Anne Humphreys' essay gets to the heart of the matter: Jennifer Lynch, Barbara Hall and the rest of the "human rights" regime (including the new Mausoleum of Human Rights in Winnipeg) represent a secular religion and they're determined to stamp out l'hérésie et le blasphème. Read it all.
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