...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

‘Roo story: The NRO's Mark Hemmingway has a good summary of how we got from there (having freedom) to here (sans freedom). It started back in the late 70s, continued when our Supreme Court deferred to our faux-courts, and

As a result, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is stunningly effective: In its 31 years of existence, not a single complaint brought before it has been dismissed. That's right: Everyone is guilty before God and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

But that’s only half the story. With the legal hurdles cleared, the national commission wasn’t alone in being empowered — the regional Human Rights Commissions and their corresponding tribunals were too. There’s a labyrinthine series of these kangaroo courts in Canada; there are also the provincial human-rights commissions and their corresponding tribunals, each with its own differing laws.

So when a group of Muslim law students filed suit against Steyn and Maclean’s, they didn’t just go to the CHRC. They also went jurisdiction-shopping. In addition to the national complaint, they filed complaints with the British Columbia and Ontario tribunals as well, as those were the two provincial commissions whose laws they felt would be most favorable to their case. That’s how this week’s hearing in Vancouver got underway, and the national tribunal is pending.

Ontario’s commission said it would decline to take the case because Ontario’s Human Rights Code “does not give the Commission the jurisdiction to deal with the content of magazine articles through the complaints process.” But in their statement, they took the opportunity to condemn Steyn and Maclean’s because they have “a broader duty to express [their] opinion regarding issues that are brought to [their] attention which have implications from a human rights perspective.” They continued:

The Commission is concerned that since the September 2001 attacks, Islamophobic attitudes are becoming more prevalent in society and Muslims are increasingly the target of intolerance, including an unwillingness to consider accommodating some of their religious beliefs and practices.

Unfortunately, the Maclean’s article, and others like it, are examples of this. By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to “the West,” this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice towards Muslims and others. An extreme illustration of this is a “blog” discussion concerning the article that was brought to the attention of the Commission which, among many things, called for the mass killing, deportation or conversion of Muslim Canadians.

So Steyn and Maclean’s are thus responsible for a “blog” discussion they had nothing to do with about killing Muslims? Can I file a complaint with the Canadian Logic Commission?...

Alas, there is no Canadian Logic Commission (or, for that matter, Groucho, any Sanity Clause). And if there were, we couldn’t possibly find enough Canadians to staff it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:01 | link | comments

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