Sunday, 3 May 2009

Canada Dry (info # 010305/9 EV) [analysis]

thank you france.


By Sébastien Castellion © Metula News Agency

 

If you asked an educated Westerner to draw a list of countries where fundamental freedoms are best protected, Canada would probably be among the first mentioned. Rightly so, for the most part. Canada has a tolerant political culture, a democracy almost without fraud, a sophisticated and uncorrupted judicial system (admittedly, other public services are sometimes another matter).

 

The country offers freedoms an additional source of protection, that of federalism: if laws in one province seem overly restrictive to a citizen, he has nothing more to do to escape these constraints, than move into a neighboring province.

 

It is all the more revealing to discover how, in one of the most mature democracies and the quietest on the planet, a branch of government can adopt the logic of a totalitarian state.

 

In this case, the branch of government is the network of Human Rights Commissions, established in the 1960s as a means to fight racial, ethnic, religious or sexual discrimination.

 

Those commissions are “quasi-judicial”. They have a Tribunal’s power to punish by imposing fines or publication requirements. They also have considerable investigative powers and may demand, without limitation, any document they want.

 

But Human Rights Commissions are not bound, as are real courts, by the constraints of procedure. There are no rules defining what type of evidence may be accepted or not. The decision to try in public or in camera is at the sole discretion of judges. A fundamental inequality is established between the plaintiffs, all of whose costs are borne by the State, and the defendants, who must pay for all their costs.

 

Neither are they subject to the ethical and professional obligations of real courts. No legal training is required to work there: they have been staffed for the most part, by fervent human rights activists who have the political connections necessary to be appointed, but without qualifications as judges.

 

No rule prohibits, as is the case with real judges, conflicts of interest: human rights judges are not forced to withdraw when they have to try a case where the result may impact their personal affairs.

 

Human Rights Commissions remained relatively unnoticed for a long time. They are, after all, a rather marginal institution, dealing only with few cases per year. People subject to their judgments were obscure and weak: employers accused of racial discrimination, country pastors accused of homophobia, Internet users hauled before the Commissions for leaving hateful posts on far-right discussion groups.

 

More importantly, the commissions were protected from outside scrutiny by their name and their mission. When “human rights” is part of your title, and when you are responsible for fighting discrimination, you can only be a Good guy.

 

Such, at least, was the reasoning held by majority of Canadians until early 2008. They only made the same error as most of us. We all often forget that words are not the real thing. You can be called “progressive” and passionately strive to hold back civilization, or call a “people's democracy” the rule of a small elite that hates and suppresses the people. You can also call “Human Rights Commission” the main threat against human rights to have appeared in an advanced democracy.

 

Today, however, Canadians Commissions no longer enjoy the same indulgence from public opinion. Politicians from right and left have called for their elimination.

 

Even the man who inspired their creation, more than forty years ago, the old human rights activist Martin Borovoy, has publicly denounced them as the greatest threat to free speech in Canada.

 

The origin of this reversal of opinion lies in the unfortunate decision by the Commission of the Province of Alberta, which decided, on 11 January 2008, to initiate a prosecution — not, as the Commissions used to do, against an employer or some obscure person on the Internet — but against Ezra Levant, the editor of the Western Standard — a newspaper which, until its recent bankruptcy, ranked among the important press outlets in Western Canada.

 

One year later, in his book Shakedown (McClelland and Stewart, 2009, 215 pages) - after winning a legal battle, watching the ruin of his newspaper and publicly exposing the true nature of the Commissions — Levant documents the details of his case. He also describes, and that is much more important, the discoveries he has made about the absolute ethical depravity of the Committees in their daily operations.

 




An upside-down world, where human rights judges threaten freedoms

 

Ezra Levant had been hauled before the Commission on Human Rights, because his newspaper, the Western Standard, had reproduced the famous Mohammed cartoons published by the Danish provincial newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

 

He was the only one in the Canadian press to be condemned. The other papers either were afraid of the consequences, or sincerely believed that publishing them would only unnecessarily worsen relations between communities. (Considering the difference in demographic realities, intimidation in the face of Islamist physical threats would be less believable in western Canada than in European cities.)

 

Nevertheless, the publication of the cartoons by the Western Standard had the misfortune to offend a resident of Calgary, born in Pakistan and trained in Saudi Arabia: Mr. Syed Soharwardy, a computer professional and the imam of a small mosque of forty believers.

 

Soharwardy tried first to sue in a real court, where they laughed at him. Unlike the French one, where Charlie Hebdo was brought to court in 2007 for publishing the cartoons, the Canadian justice system — the real one — takes freedom of expression seriously.

 

Undeterred, Soharwardy turned to the Human Rights Commission of the Province of Alberta, asking it to force the Western Standard to make a public apology. In a decision they doubtless regret to this day, the judges of the Commission (probably flattered to go for the first time after larger game) summoned Levant for questioning on “discrimination” charges.

 

In a few months, Levant has managed to destroy completely the grounds of the Soharwardy complaint and the credibility of the Commission. After obtaining permission to record the interrogation, he began by responding to the judge Shirlene McGovern, who asked him what his intentions were in publishing the cartoons:

 

“The government has no legal or moral authority to ask me, or anyone else, questions about the publication of those caricatures […]. It is particularly perverse that a bureaucracy that calls itself Commission for Human Rights in Alberta should be the branch of government which violates my human rights […]. I am not the one dragged to court; the freedom of all Canadians is […]. I could answer your questions about my intentions — I have answered dozens of those on the same issue — but I will not today because you have no authority to ask them."

 

And so on. This cross-examination quickly became one of the biggest hits on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 7 million times. The most delicious episode is probably the one where Shirlene McGovern, looking weary, concedes “You are entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure ...” to be immediately interrupted by Ezra Levant with a triumphant “Of course I am not! If I were, it seems to me that I would not be here!”

 

The lawsuit, in which Soharwardy and the Commission had seen an opportunity to limit Canadians’ freedom of expression in the future - the former, on behalf of Islam, the latter, in the name of political correctness — was clearly having the opposite effect.

 

Light had begun to shine on the actual mode of operation of the Human Rights Commissions and the legal tactics of political Islam. Soharwardy decided to withdraw his complaint to avoid further embarrassment after a few months.

 

Levant had won his own battle, but he was not finished with the Human Rights Commissions. Using his talents as a journalist, he went in search of facts about the functioning of those Commissions throughout Canada. The result of this survey, which represents more than half of the book, is quite instructive.

 

We learn, for starters, that the conviction rate of those accused of discrimination before the Human Rights Commission is 100 percent (Ezra Levant’s victory does not alter that statistic, because the complaint was withdrawn before sentence was passed). Even the judicial system of North Korea cannot boast of such a record. If the Western Standard case had gone to trial, Levant would have been sentenced — for the simple reason that it is clearly the only possible decision for human rights judges.

 

We also discover to what extent those judges routinely disregard the basic rules that could ensure the quality of their judgments. One of the judges of the Federal Commission, Richard Warman, had been the sole complainant in all but one of the “hate speech” cases put before the Commission between 2002 and 2008.

 

He asked for damages each time. Since the success rate for plaintiffs has been 100%, Warman, in practice, used the system he knew from within in order to reap more than $ 50 000 in bonuses from those he accused, with the blessing of his colleagues on the Federal Commission.

 

To avail himself of those payments, Warman had made a specialty of roaming far-right Web sites under a false name and starting racist discussions, in order to summons before the Commission those who had answered him in the same spirit.

 

And, for some time, to prevent Internet users from following up his URL to discover his true identity… he simply hacked the connection of a Canadian citizen living opposite the Commission building in Ottawa to go roaming on neo-Nazi sites.

 

Other judges in the Federal or Provincial Committees are clearly, by their personal history, unfit for their office. Ms. Sandy Kozak, for instance, active at the Federal Commission, had been dismissed from the Canadian police force for corruption.

 

Mr. Arman Chak, from the Alberta Commission, spends a lot of time contributing to Islamic Supremacist web sites, where he expresses his hatred for India, Israel and Bangladesh. This hatred is, like any opinion, protected by Canadian law, since Chak never incited to violence, but could he claim to judge impartially if any accused from one of these three countries appeared before him?

 

In spite of all that, none of the Canadian Commissions has provided for any procedure to monitor the activities of its own members or respond to complaints from aggrieved citizens. The mixture of incompetence, bias and power-madness, which characterizes the staff of the Human Rights Commissions, has produced, as could be expected, a jurisprudence verging on delirium.

 

The owner of a restaurant has been convicted for “discrimination” for asking a client to refrain from smoking hashish near other clients. A Pastor from Alberta, Reverend Boisson, who had expressed somewhat unpleasant opinions on homosexuals, was ordered never to express his opinions on the subject — whether in writing or orally, until the end of his days.

 

In an interesting moment of creative jurisprudence, the Federal Commission refused to disclose the identity of a complainant to a couple whom they accused of posting distasteful comments on the Web.

 

The case is officially called drumsaremybeat@aol.com vs beachesboy@aol.com. This case however did not come through, because “beachesboy” — who did not want his identity known, even though that of the couple he had accused had been revealed — failed to appear at a judicial “chat” organized to enable him to present his case. He was probably too busy visiting other sites from his parents’ attic.

 

As always, tyranny is accompanied by cowardice. When Ezra Levant, after his victory in the cartoon lawsuit, learned of the verdict against Reverend Boisson, he immediately republished the entire article which had led to the latter’s conviction, openly defying the Alberta Commission to launch a prosecution against him. He is still waiting: the Commission knows how to crush the weak, but now knows about the hazards of attacking Levant.

 

The main risk now is that Canadian society (often slow to take any decision that is not fully consensual) will fail to act in the face of the evidence of the excesses of a part of its repressive system.

 

All the immoral or incompetent judges cited above are, as far as I know, still in function today. Despite the protests of politicians, intellectuals and real human rights activists, no bill seems to be in the works to reform or abolish the Commissions. It remains that, after the publication — and the huge commercial success in Canada — of Ezra Levant’s book, aspiring tyrants in the human rights network will have to come down a little from their high horses.