[Editor’s Note:
An interesting dynamic is developing around the CHRC drama now unfolding here in Canada.
Prior to Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a public foray that had, hitherto, been the sole arena of mainly white, Christian players, overall publicity surrounding cases of HRC abuse was heavily influenced in a negative way against the victims, be they Malcolm Ross or Doug Collins or Canada most heinous example of all, that of Ernst Zundel who now rots in a German prison cell thanks to the despicable machinations of the Canadian courts, the HRCs, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the League for Human Rights of Bnai Brith Canada and their various political courtiers and syncophants. Along with the disgusting actions of these government agents one needs to also include the mainstream media which inevitably joined in the vileness and the calumny associated with such attacks. The media of course, being for the most part exclusively owned and controlled by Zionist Jews, relished roasting Zundel upon their monopolist spit while at the same time enhancing the brainwashing of Canadians into further belief that Zundel was somehow an imminent threat to Canadian security.
Now, for some strange reason (possibly karma or divine retribution?), the tables have been turned and for the first time (from what Ive been able to glean) we have two Jewish stars on the rise in the new firmament of political correctness who are reluctantly on the defensive rather than the usual offensive as has always been the case with complaints of this nature in the past. As Levant states below concerning Marc Lemire chart of HRC victims, even though he finds Lemire website to contain white supremicist overtones he nonetheless could not find fault with Lemire research that proved only white, mostly Christian people were the recipients of HRC vendettas.
But did Levant then go on to elaborate upon how many of those cases such as Malcolm Ross and Doug Collins and Ernst Zundel were instigated by Jews from either the Bnai Brith or the Canadian Jewish Congress or the Simon Weisenthal Centre or some other Jewish organization? Good gosh no! What purpose would that serve other than to draw the public attention closer to the ultimate source of all of this conflict in the first place. No, better to divert people attention away from the Jews and ultimately their Zionist-induced agenda and onto their pet peeve of the day, the radical Muslim Jihadists and any others of similar ilk lurking about the fringes of truly mainstream, Canadian society.
Why, Levant bemoans, arent the HRCs going after radical Sikh secessionalists and Tamil Tigers and the traditional lineage of white, ethnic Christian victims like Ross and Collins and Zundel and Lemire and Topham and other similar poor shleps instead of making center-jobs of such noble, law-abiding Jews like Levant and Steyn? Why indeed. As Levant goes on to state, with respect to the forementioned Arab/Muslims, the media has already done such a bang up job of convincing Canadians that these groups are the real terrorists and danger. In his words, There is no shortage of news on each of those groups…. There never is in the Zionist-controlled media but there is also never a mention of those Jews and/or Jewish organizations who lobby and connive endlessly to superimpose their own political agenda upon the overall Canadian landscape.
So now we have HRCs with a sudden and new twist and a challenge to the very instigators of such tribunals. Blowback time? The time of the Quickening? It will be very interesting to see how Levant and Steyn go about thwarting their illiberal enemy and keeping the real culprit in this game of deception (Political Zionism) hidden from the masses of Canadian internet users while they battle the very monster that they themselves created.]
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http://ezralevant.com/2008/03/how-the-canadian-human-rights.html
How the Canadian Human Rights Commission violates the rule of law
By Ezra Levant
The opposite of the ‘ rule of law’ is the ‘ rule of man’. Canadians love the rule of law so dearly because it makes us feel safe: we know what to expect in life; we know if we follow the rules, the police won’t capriciously arrest us. There will be no knock on our door in the middle of the night. We won’t be arrested without a proper reason. The rule of law gives us confidence when we deal with the state and its officers, even its policemen, even its prime ministers. Because we know that they are our servants and that, if anything, they are bound by more rules than we are. They only hold the power that we give them, and they only hold it in trust for us.
We are strict with our police; maybe even too strict, but that’s a better error to make than being too lax. Besides Internal Affairs officers within police departments, we have additional layers of scrutiny. For example, Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit  does nothing but investigate police who are accused of abusing their powers. Canada answers Juvenal’s question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F ? pretty well.
(As a student at law, I attended a hearing of Alberta’s Law Enforcement Review Board http://www.solgen.gov.ab.ca/lerb/role_mandate_member.aspx , the body that considers complaints against Alberta police, ranging from the farcically trivial to the most serious. I was impressed — and frankly, a little bit irritated — at the lengths the province went to ensure fairness. As an example, complaints against officers from Calgary were heard in Edmonton and vice versa, to reduce the risk of collusion or even collegiality between police and those who were investigating the police. The particular day I was there, some nuisance complaints filed by prisoners were being heard. It was clear to me that besides the thrill of causing a hassle for the police and for the justice system in general, the prisoners in question had simply found a way to get out of jail for a day and travel, at taxpayers expense, to a hearing in which they were the center of attention.)
But it’s not just the police who are countered with enormous checks and balances. The other half of the ‘ Law and Order’ duo is hamstrung, too. For example, prosecutors are generally not allowed to tell a jury http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=919600 about an accused’s prior criminal convictions at his trial, unless the accused is foolish enough to claim that he has sterling credibility, or otherwise opens the door himself. This might seem frustrating to those who are ‘ tough on crime’, but cool reflection tells us such information would likely so overwhelm a jury’s views about an accused that they would be likely to convict him even if he were innocent of the new accusations, simply on the weight of the old ones. Even convicted criminals have the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty when they’re charged with new crimes. That’s a form of rule of law, too. It’s not just that the high and mighty (like Eliot Spitzer!) are bound by the strictures of the law; it’s that the lowly and odious are given the benefits of the law, too.
Another example in this vein — and I assure you, dear reader, that I am coming to my point — is that of the ‘ rape shield’ law http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20001012/ctvnews76815?s_name=&no_ads= . It’s an expression of the rule of law, too. Just as the general rule against adducing evidence of an accused’s prior criminal record is done to give even past criminals a fair trial, the rape shield law was designed to give sexually promiscuous women — such as prostitutes, for example — a level playing field when they accuse a man of rape. If any and all of a woman’s past sexual history was admissable in court, it could prejudice a jury against her in a current case of rape — that is, her past behaviour could overwhelm the current facts at hand, and falsely acquit a man charged with her rape. I’m not well-versed enough in criminal law to know if the courts and legislatures have found the right balance here — given that the rape shield law almost exclusively benefits women to the detriment of accused men, it has been called a feminist law that unfairly undermines men’s legal rights. I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that, but my main point remains: in the name of the rule of law, our police and courts go to great lengths to make sure that everyone has the same benefit and burden under law, no matter their personal characteristics or past behaviour.
Which is all a lengthy introduction to this stunning internal Canadian Human Rights Commission document http://ezralevant.com/guille.pdf posted by Connie Fournier of Free Dominion. Here’s http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1156179&sid=80678e297e5d4e5927691e679be345db her analysis. And here’s mine:
Andrew Guille filed a ‘ hate messages’ complaint with the CHRC. He complained that a website called http://www.Recomnetwork.org , run by an ‘ anti-hate’ group, contained hateful messages that contravened section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, by discriminating against people based on race, colour, national origin, religion and sexual orientation.
So what happened? Did the ‘ anti-hate’ group in question, with all of the bigoted remarks on their website, become the first defendant ever to be acquitted in a section 13 trial? Or did Guille pull a Ricardo Warmouse http://www.ricardowarmouse.com/ — slam-dunk a bigoted website and collect a few thousand dollars for bringing the complaint to the CHRC’s attention?
Neither, actually. The CHRC refused to take the matter to a tribunal hearing, ruling it a frivolous complaint. But look at the grounds upon which this complaint was dismissed: Andrew Guille, said CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, is the ‘ sibling of both Melissa and Chris Guille’, who Steacy implies are racist. Steacy — whose job it is to investigate complaints of bigotry — indeed conducted an investigation. But not into the website and its hate messages. He investigated Guille himself. Steacy met with Sgt. Don McKinnon of the London Police Force to get the low-down on Guille; he spoke with ‘ anti-hate’ activists with their own axes to grind and books to sell. None of this was done under oath; none of this was done with Guille there to cross examine his defamers (or to challenge McKinnon’s right as a government employee to disclose Guille’s personal information without permission). But even those offensive procedures aren’t the point: the point is the CHRC simply wouldn’t accept a complaint from someone they didn’t like, for the most tenuous and circumstantial reasons.
Even if their hunches and their gossip was right — even if Guille was, himself, a racist — so what? If a website is bigoted, isn’t it the CHRC’s job (an immoral job, an improper job, but their job nonetheless) to investigate it? Does the offensiveness of the site in question depend on the character of the complainant? Is the question of whether the Canadian Human Rights Act, a law of Parliament, is violated depend on who brings an alleged offence to the attention of the commission?
Compare that sloppy, vindictive, capricious standard to the aforementioned lengths real police and real prosecutors go to, to ensure that the law is applied evenly to all citizens. What Steacy has done here is exactly the kind of arbitrariness the rape shield law was designed to prevent. If a prostitute complains that she was raped, it is improper for the police to say ‘ she has no standing to complain about rape’ or ‘ we know that, in the past, she has consented to sex with strangers — no use investigating.’ An even more exact analogy would be if a convicted rapist complained of having in turn been raped himself. That would not excuse the police from ignoring the rapist’s own complaint.
The CHRC isn’t governed by the rule of law. It is governed by the whimsy of men — in this case, Dean Steacy, who himself admits to making anonymous posts on bigoted websites http://www.freedominion.com.pa/images/answers.pdf .
Which is the other half of the broken system here. Put aside Guille; what about Recomnetwork.org, the hateful ‘ anti-hate’ website in question? Steacy’s memo acknowledges that the site indeed had hateful words on it — including copies of CHRC complaints filed by Ricardo Warmouse, which themselves contained bigoted remarks. But Steacy exculpates those sites by stating that the purpose of the website was to ‘ educate the public about racism’. That may well be true, but the Canadian Human Rights Act doesn’t care about such nuances. Section 13 of that law http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/ShowDoc/cs/h-6/bo-ga:l_I::bo-ga:l_II/en?page=2&isPrinting=false#codese:13 makes it illegal to communicate ‘ any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.’ It doesn’t talk about ‘ intentions’ at all; and, as I’ve lamented before, the truth of the statements made is not a defence, unlike in defamation law in real courts.
The test isn’t good or evil intentions. The test is whether the words are ‘ likely to expose’ someone to feelings of ‘ hatred or contempt’. The rule of law would hold Recomnetwork.org, and indeed Ricardo Warmouse, whose complaints were on that site, to the same standard as the person who originally wrote the hateful words. To excuse them because they have noble intentions is Steacy injecting his own personal views or friendships or biases into the law, which the law does not permit.
By the way, I happen to agree with Steacy on the narrow point that there is a difference between someone uttering a bigoted comment as an epithet, and someone else repeating that epithet, simply by listing it in a complaint (as Warman did); and someone else who writes a report of the whole thing (Recomnetwork.org). But that’s not what the law says. The law doesn’t care about anything other than the likelihood of hurting someone’s feelings, which is one of the reasons the law is so dangerous.
If merely reporting on a controversial communication was acceptable, then surely my own decision two years ago to report the news of the cartoon riots, including showing the cartoons in question, would have been equally lawful, and the complaints filed against me for doing so would have been ruled ‘ frivolous and vexatious’, as Steacy ruled Guille’s complaint against Recomnetwork.org to be. Or at least you’d expect that, if there was a consistency in these human rights commissions — if there was rule of law, instead of rule of men.
If these commissions were governed by the rule of law instead of the rule of men, Ricardo Warmouse and Dean Steacy themselves would be charged with violating section 13, because the Act gives no weight to intentions, and both men have posted on bigoted websites — Warmouse ending many of his posts with a symbol for ‘ Heil Hitler’. If these commissions were governed by the rule of law instead of the rule of men, Mohamed Elmasry, the Jew-hating bigot who filed a complaint against Maclean’s magazine, would be charged with a section 13 violation himself, for publicly excusing the murder of Jews in Israel.
Marc Lemire has compiled a chart of every section 13 decision . One of the line items in his chart is the ethnicity of the respondents — 100% of them are white. When I first saw that chart, I was uncomfortable with that data, especially given the white supremacist overtones of Lemire’s site. But with that caveat said, it is still a fact: not a single radical Muslim jihadi has had a section 13 trial; not a single radical Sikh secessionist; not a single Tamil Tiger supporter. There is no shortage of news on each of those groups, just to pick three. But none have been taken before the CHRC tribunal — even though, unlike the poor shleps who have been, those three groups have actually gone beyond mere words into violent criminal acts.
There are many things I know now that I wouldn’t have likely believed a few months ago, before I stared spelunking around the caves of the human rights commissions. I would never have believed that human rights ‘ officers’ would go around anonymously planting bigoted comments on websites — I would have called that a nutty conspiracy theory. But then I saw the CHRC staff and Ricardo Warmouse admitting under oath to doing just that.
And, before reading Dean Steacy’s memo on the Andrew Guille complaint, I would have thought that the CHRC runs itself at least along some basic concepts of natural justice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_justice . Now I know better.
As a lawyer, I know and accept that not all decisions by the government should be made as formally and rigorously as in a real court of law. But even the most trivial administrative tribunal needs to have basic rules of fair play. I really cannot think of a single element of fair play and natural justice that the CHRC has not violated. And, unlike so many other arms of the state, the CHRC has terrifying powers, from their official powers to fine people and subject them to life-long publication bans (surely an illegal ‘ unusual’ punishment under our Charter), but also their unofficial punishments, such as their abusive, costly processes themselves.
There is not a drop of doubt in my heart or mind: Canada’s human rights commissions, with their illberal mission of political censorship and their perversion of the rule of law, have become a grave threat to our human rights. We simply must stop them.