As Ms Wente pointed out, you can see what got the “human rights” commissars’ juices going. Here was an opportunity to lay down a lot of landmark “jurisprudence” on the issue of “transsexuals’ access to medical care”, and if, in the end, it destroys Dr Stubbs and his business, hey, that’s a price worth paying: The human right to a labiaplasty is too important to a free society. So the Ontario “Human Rights” Tribunal is solemnly deliberating on whether the party of the first part is obliged to take apart the party of the second part’s parts.
Dr Stubbs is a bigshot plastic surgeon, so, like Maclean’s, he can probably withstand a few years of “human rights” heat. The system is risk-free for the plaintiff: the Crown picks up the tab for the “complainant”, while the “respondent” – ie, defendant – has to pay his own legal bills no matter what the eventual verdict is. Ted Kindos of Burlington, Ontario has already spent $20,000 of his own dough defending himself against a “human rights” complaint and estimates he’ll add another six figures to that before it’s all done. Mr Kindos owns a modest restaurant, Gator Ted’s Tap and Grill. So what outrageous “human right” did he breach? Well, he asked a guy smoking “medical marijuana” in the doorway of his restaurant if he wouldn’t mind not doing it. Mr Kindos felt that his customers – including young children – shouldn’t have to pass through a haze of pot smoke being to enter his establishment. But apparently in Canada there’s a human right to light up a spliff in some other fellow’s doorway. The other man’s grass is always greener, and in this case the plaintiff’s grass will cost Mr Kindos an awful lot of green. He faces financial ruin, while there’s no cost to the complainant.
Canadians are not notably “hateful” people. To be sure, deep in the human heart lurk dark prejudices that may occasionally be furtively expressed to likeminded persons over a drink or two. But discrimination in housing and employment on the grounds of gender and race – the original justification for creating the “human rights” pseudo-courts – is all but extinct, so a self-perpetuating nomenklatura has moved on to invent new rights – like the human right to a labiaplasty or a joint on someone else’s property. You’ll recall the Osgoode Hall law students who objected to my book excerpt in Maclean’s demanded a five-page cover story in response, unedited, with the students determining the artwork and the cover art, along with a financial contribution to their “cause”. As any self-respecting publisher would, Kenneth Whyte told them he would rather go bankrupt – much as Mr Kindos seems likely to. The Osgoode students have since explained that they went to the “human rights” enforcers because they were only trying to “start a debate”, and mean old Maclean’s was preventing their voices from being heard. They have repeated this mournful plea in lengthy editorials they’ve written for, at last count, The Globe And Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, The London Free Press, and no doubt a few other publications. That’s the reality of Canada’s “Islamophobic” media: They’ve been given acres of op-ed real estate to yell that their voices are being silenced and all they want to do is start a debate – even though, in none of their many columns, do they actually start it.
Incidentally, although they characterize themselves as the “complainants” in these suits, they’re not. In the two “human rights” complaints against Maclean’s that are going forward, the complainants in British Columbia are Dr Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and Naiyer Habib, and, in the federal case, Dr Elmasry alone. Mohamed Elmasry is the man who announced on Canadian TV that he approved of the murder of any and all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. One can understand why such an unlikely poster boy for the cause of “anti-hate” campaigns would prefer to hide behind his fresh-faced Osgoode sock puppets. But the fact that every major newspaper in Canada has opened its page to turgid recitations of imagined victimhood by three students who have no standing in these cases tells you everything about how “excluded” and “marginalized” they are. That’s the “racist” Canadian media of 2008: All you have to do is claim to represent some community with a grievance and, even though there’s no evidence you represent anything other than your own peculiar obsessions and you have nothing substantive to say, nine out of ten editors will turn their pages over to you – no matter what your interminable victimological prose does to their circulation.
Dr Keith Martin, a Liberal Member of Parliament, the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (ie, John Ralston Saul and the rest of the CanCon literati) support the repeal of Section 13 of the Human Rights Code, under which Maclean’s and Ezra Levant, former publisher of The Western Standard, have been hauled before the “thought police”. Others talk of Maclean’s appealing its case (after we lose, as all federal Section 13 defendants do) to the Supreme Court. Last time round, their lordships upheld Section 13 by a four-three majority, announcing confidently that there was “little danger that subjective opinion as to offensiveness will supplant the proper meaning”. Of course, that’s exactly what has happened, as could have been foreseen by anyone but a Supreme Court judge. This is a philosophically flawed and corruptly administered system that is an affront to Canada’s legal inheritance.
That may be why, as even Liberal MPs and PEN Canada understand what’s happening, the only defenders of the system are its beneficiaries, like Pearl Eliadis, the former director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, who accused me in the Montreal Gazette of “disturbing tactics” for having the impertinence to resist being ruled a hatemonger by a kangaroo court. She claims that I am trying to “disentitle” acknowledged human-rights experts, by which she means herself and other members of a small and unrepresentative clique that has done huge damage to real human rights like the presumption of innocence. “Human rights” plaintiffs are professional activists: Since filing her complaint, the lead transsexual in the labiaplasty case has been given a government job investigating the health status of transsexuals. Richard Warman, the plaintiff in over half of all federal Section 13 cases, is not even a transsexual or a member of any other approved victim group. You can write a piece about Jews, gays, Muslims, transsexuals that offends not a single Jew, gay, Muslim or transsexual. But if Mr Warman, a former employee of the CHRC, decides to get offended on their behalf he’ll drag you before the kangaroo court. He has been a plaintiff on every single federal Section 13 case in the last six years. No other provision of Canada law has such a deformed profile that it is, in effect, the personal plaything of one very strange man.