Over the years I’ve written in newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries and have attracted my share of libel suits and other legal difficulties. But today’s a first for me. The Ontario “Human Rights” Commission, having concluded they couldn’t withstand the heat of a trial, decided to cut to the chase and give us a drive-by conviction anyway. Who says Canada’s “human rights” racket is incapable of reform? As kangaroo courts go, the Ontario branch is showing a bit more bounce than the Ottawa lads.
If I’m charged with holding up a liquor store, I enjoy the right to the presumption of innocence and to defend myself in court. But when it comes to so-called “Islamophobia” – a word which was only invented a few years ago and which enjoys no legal definition – all the centuries old safeguards of English Common Law go out the window. I’d be interested to know whether the Justice Minister of Ontario thinks this is appropriate behaviour. At one level, Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall appears to have deprived Maclean’s and me of the constitutional right to face our accusers. But, at another, it seems clear the OHRC enforcers didn’t fancy their chances in open court. So, after a botched operation, they’ve performed a cosmetic labiaplasty and hustled us out.
Oh, and in the full statement they say:
The Commission intends to further consider these issues in the coming months as it embarks on its new mandate.
“A new mandate”, eh? That sounds reassuring, doesn’t it? In what Paul Wells calls her “barely lucid, rambling meditation”, Ontario’s head commissar gives the game away: Unfortunately she doesn’t have the jurisdiction to jail Steyn for “Islamophobia”, but she would if she could – so she’s going to seek the power to do so when the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission is “reformed”. I hope the Government of Ontario is dumb enough to give her the extra powers she seeks, and perhaps then she’ll be man enough to haul me and Ken Whyte into her pseudo-courtroom and actually convict us of the crime rather than merely issuing the verdict in a press release.
TODAY’S EDITION of The Globe & Mail is well worth picking up. This is Canada’s establishment paper, and it doesn’t like what it’s hearing from Barbara Hall, Chief Commissar of the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission, the world leaders in labiaplasty jurisprudence.
First, star columnist Rex Murphy:
The press release wasn’t limited, however, to lamenting the absence of competence and declaring the HRC wouldn’t be proceeding in the matter.
It went on, seizing the educative moment, to light into Maclean’s for its ‘Islamophobia’ over ‘a number of articles’, illustrating a ‘type of media coverage [that] has been identified as contributing to Islamophobia and promoting societal intolerance towards Muslim, Arab and South Asian Canadians.’ More, it regretted that in Ontario, with the statute as written, it is not ‘possible to challenge any institution that contributes to the dissemination of destructive, xenophobic opinions.’ Meaning Maclean’s and whatever of that ilk trails in the familiar and long-tenured magazine’s presumed xenophobic and racist wake.
I’m not a lawyer, so I merely ask the question: Is it normal when declining a case (or, in this case, a complaint) for a commission, court or tribunal to then deliver a guilty verdict? For that’s what the press statement, directly, or by forceful implication, did.
And hasn’t it always been in free society a human right (old-fashioned, I know) not to be judged without a hearing? But here there was no hearing. Neither Maclean’s nor Mr Steyn made a case or presented arguments. And yet the commission’s release damned them in harsh and condemnatory language that was a verdict in everything but name.
Furthermore, it did so before – mark that, before – two other tribunals, which, we presume, listen to and read this HRC’s words, have themselves even begun proceedings on the same complaint. Do judges in real courts act this way? Do they telegraph verdicts to other jurisdictions? Do they make up what they are delighted to call their minds in vacuo? Do they decline cases, then pass judgment anyway, and issue stern and rebuking releases?
And Mr Murphy’s column bears the headline:
Vive Le Canada Libre!
Oh, well, columnists are (or were) licensed to peddle eccentric and contrarian views. What of the sensible sorts who pen the Globe editorials? What have these solid citizens got to say? Here’s their headline:
Alarmingly Pro-Active
And here’s how they begin:
‘Looking forward’ was an explicit theme of Wednesday’s press release from the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), which, without a hearing, attributed Islamophobic racism to Maclean’s magazine and the writer Mark Steyn.
The commission is looking ahead to a pro-active new role… The broad, if not vague, criterion of the public interest will be the basis for the commissioners’ own initiating of inquiries into such practices, whatever they may be.
In turn, the commission’s appointees can enter any premises (except a dwelling), without a search warrant, and demand any relevant ‘document or thing’, and remove such things, not quite for indefinite periods, but for ‘a reasonable time’. Hindering all this is forbidden…
The closing, ‘looking-forward’ paragraph of Wednesday’s press release evokes the OHRC’s ‘broader role in addressing the tension and conflict that such writings [as the Maclean’s article in question] cause in the community’.
Or to put it in a nutshell, as the editorial concludes:
Be afraid.
This was the Globe’s second editorial on the subject. Yesterday the editors wrote:
When is a decision not a decision? The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) performed just such a deft manoeuvre on Wednesday, announcing there would be no hearing on whether Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn had violated human rights. Nonetheless, the commission concluded in a press release that they were both guilty of racism…
One of the most basic maxims of justice is Audi alteram partem: Listen to the other side. By pronouncing Maclean’s and Mr Steyn to be racist, the commission has violated that fundamental principle.
Well, so much for the writers and editors. But what do the readers, that great mass of moderate centrist reasonable Canadian opinion, think about all this? Under the headline “Commissioners, Not Commissars”, James Marvin of Toronto writes:
A case could be made that, instead of berating Mark Steyn and Maclean’s, the Ontario Human Rights Commission should have been defending them (Unproven Racism – editorial, April 11). We don’t want a situation where commissioners act like commissars and hate laws become gag laws.
So that’s what a casual Globe & Mail reader will see on a quick scan of the paper this weekend: “Vive le Canada libre!”; “Alarmingly Pro-Active”; and “Commissioners, Not Commissars”. I wonder if even Commissar Hall is so secure in her cocoon of cowardly bureaucratic thuggery that she doesn’t realize she and the grotesque system so embodies so perfectly have fewer friends by the week.
WEIMAR CANADA
More hate, please