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Richard Moon has decided to join Pearl Eliadis and Bernie Farber as a last-ditch defender of Canada's "human rights" commissions. He's certainly entitled to his opinion. Oh, wait, no. This is Canada, so he's not. But, fortunately for Prof Moon, his opinions happen to coincide with the state regulators, so he's okay.
Ezra Levant responds to Professor Moon here. Let me make just one point. The professor sets out in this speech to demolish the claim that Section 13 has a 100 per cent conviction rate. As he says, I have made this statement frequently:
When Mark Steyn makes the claim he likes also to point out that not even Iran and North Korea have a 100% conviction rate.
True. I said it to Parliament and I stand by it. How do we know the professor is a weasel? One giveaway line. This is how he rebuts my outrageous falsehood - by conceding the point:
It is true that all s. 13 complaints adjudicated by the Tribunal have been upheld.
In other words, it's not a falsehood. Ezra and I were right all along. Until last month's judgment in the Lemire case, nobody prosecuted under Section 13 had ever been acquitted - with the sole exception of the "Canadian Nazi Party", which was let off on the quaint grounds that it did not in fact exist. But, if you had the misfortune to enjoy corporeal existence and you were charged under Section 13, you would be convicted of the crime. As Professor Moon admits in plain English, Ezra and I are right on this.
So his "rebuttal" consists not of demonstrating, as he promises his unfortunate audience, that our claims are "false and malicious" but that, even though they're true, they're nothing to worry about. Relax, he says. Sure, everybody prosecuted under Section 13 gets convicted, but don't worry about it, because the "human rights" commission prosecutes very few people so the 100 per cent conviction rate simply demonstrates their shrewd eye for a good case, and their ability to winnow out all the ones where the defendant would be acquitted.
Really? So the 100 per cent conviction rate is just a tribute to the fine judgment of CHRC agents? In that case, why has one man been the plaintiff on every case since 2002? Moon goes into a lot of statistics about the proportion of Section 13 complaints that never come to trial, so perhaps he could give us the following figures: What proportion of Richard Warman complaints are rejected? And what proportion of non-Warman complaints are rejected? If we are being invited to trust in the finely balanced sifting processes of CHRC investigators, why is one lone individual among 30 million Canadians the sole plaintiff? Why did this institution abet the transformation of Section 13 into Warman's Law?
At any rate, that's Moon's rebuttal: The wretched Steynd and Levant are right on the facts but it doesn't matter because of the benign wisdom of the state apparatchiks. Did his audience fall around hooting with laughter? A Deputy US Attorney made a similar argument to me during the Conrad Black trial: "We only go after the bad guys so we have a high conviction rate." A high conviction rate. Not a 100 per cent conviction rate.
A courtroom that offers the 100 per cent certainty of a guilty verdict is not justice. It is, indeed, an institutionalized miscarriage of justice, using "miscarriage" in the most literal sense.
Shame on Professor Moon for his defence of the racket. He's being far more "false" and "misleading" on the point than anything Ezra and I have said. And, for a statist blowhard who huffs and puffs about how "malicious" the critics of the CHRC are, you're getting a politer response than you deserve. Straighten up and fly right, daddy-o.
More from Scaramouche and the incendiary feline.
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