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Old March 28th, 2008 #31
Alex Linder
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Jonathan Kay on Marc Lemire, Dean Stacy, and Tuesday's landmark disaster for the Canadian Human Rights Commission

Posted: March 27, 2008, 2:09 PM by Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay

Earlier this week, I argued that Canada's human-rights censors have managed a seemingly impossible task: They've found a way to rehabilitate the public image of alleged neo-Nazis, transforming them from the odious dirtbags we know and hate into principled free-speech martyrs. Consider this role reversal: At this week's much-anticipated human-rights hearing in Ottawa, a team of journalists and bloggers were campaigning openly in support of hatemonger Marc Lemire. The villains were Canadian Human Rights Commission Dean Steacy and the other Ottawa apparchicks who've made a career out of parsing Lemire's phobic web postings.

Tuesday's hearing probably won't change the outcome of the case against Lemire: Like a five-star hotel that guarantees its guests full satisfaction, the CHRC provides its handpicked complainants with a 100% success rate on hate-speech cases. Better than that: The Commission actually lets complainants waltz into their Ottawa facilities to fiddle with the evidence-gathering. Ezra Levant, who is presently locking horns with various human-rights agencies over his decision to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons when he published the Western Standard, puts this lack of professionalism in its proper context: "If this were a real investigation of a real crime with real police, and the alleged 'victim' were to walk right into the crime lab, hop on the officers' computers, and poke around the evidence, a judge wouldn't have to throw the case out — prosecutors would be too embarrassed to even bring the case to trial. Not so at the commission."

But even if the CHRC nails Lemire, Tuesday's eight-hour hearing will still be remembered as a landmark disaster for the commission. Despite efforts by Steacy and others to stonewall on specific questions of CHRC procedure, observers were nonetheless able to extract a fairly detailed picture of work practices at the Commission. The impression that emerges is an overstaffed shop in which bored, unionized desk jockeys sit around "investigating" obscure web sites in search of some scrap of actionable hatred. And when they don't find anything actionable, they try to stir things up by logging in and participating under their own house alias — a practice Lemire describes as a form of entrapment.

The image of these busybodies acting out their amateur-hour version of The Wire would be funny — if they weren't spending millions of dollars, and turning the lives of the accused upside down. I don't consider myself a libertarian, and I don't have any problem with the government running electronic surveillance on, say, drug gangs or terror suspects — or even hatemongers, if there's any proof that they're engaged in actual violence. But of course, that involves the messy inconveniences of showing probable cause, and getting a judge to issue a warrant. Human-rights types aren't into all that. That would require real legal training, which they don't have. In fact, for an organization that is supposed to promote "human rights," the HRC's agents seem curiously oblivious to basic aspects of Canadian constitutional law. In one famous on-the-record exchange during the Lemire case, Steacy was asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?" — to which he replied "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value … It's not my job to give value to an American concept."

I guess Section 2 has been excised from his copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — no doubt, because it might serve to arouse "hatred" against human-rights commissioners.

Privacy is another value that the CHRC seems to find confusing. The most scandalous disclosure to emerge on Tuesday involved the manner in which investigators logged on to Lemire's web site. In what appears to be a ham-fisted attempt to avoid broadcasting the Commission's IP address to Lemire, they tapped into the unsecured wireless Internet hub of a 26-year-old woman who lived down the street from the Commission's 344 Slater Street headquarters. On Tuesday, a Bell Canada employee read out the woman's name, address, and phone number. A National Post reporter contacted her and found that she'd never heard of Lemire, Steacy, or his investigations. Unless she is a brilliant actress who is secretly working undercover for the Commission (in which case, I suppose this counts as her Valerie Plame moment), it appears that the Commission cynically invaded the privacy of an innocent citizen in order to pursue an obscure web-trawling vendetta; and then caused her name to be read out to the Canadian public, thereby identifying her as a conduit to neo-Nazi web sites.

Nice work. No doubt, the privacy commissioner will be having a chat with Dean et al in coming days.

This is the beginning of the end for Section 13.1 of the Human Rights Act, the legislation that (nominally) mandates this kind of fishing expedition. For years, Canadians have averted their eyes to the sort of shenanigans going on at our nation's human-rights commissions under the theory that any means used toward such a noble end as "human rights" must somehow be justified. What we saw this week turns that conceit into a pathetic joke.

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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/b...28/162902.aspx