SHAIDLE: Canada's Human Rights Kangaroo Court

Why is the Canadian Human Rights Commission permitted to employ high-tech Stalinist tactics?

 

April 4, 2008 - by Kathy Shaidle

 

Next time someone threatens to “move to Canada” over real or imagined Patriot Act overreach, present him with this scenario:

Having settled into his new Ottawa digs, your expatriate pal is reading his morning paper when a familiar name leaps off the newsprint: his own.

Turns out Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling your friend’s neighborhood for unprotected wireless internet connections, and leached onto his.

Why? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on “neo-Nazi hate sites,” then charge the site’s owners with … publishing hate speech.

That’s how your innocent friend’s name and address got read aloud — then hastily broadcast by Blackberrying bloggers and journalists — in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases.

So now your left-wing expatriate friend is widely suspected of being either a neo-Nazi racist or part of a secret government entrapment scheme.

His phone starts ringing. It won’t stop for quite some time.

Kind of a buzzkill after all those (highly exaggerated) reports about “gay marriage” and “legalized pot” up here in the Great White North, eh?

On March 25 there were gasps in an Ottawa hearing room when testimony during Warman vs. Lemire revealed that just such Soviet-flavored tactics were being used during CHRC “hate speech” investigations.

Gasps are rarely heard during CHRC hearings — they’re normally not open to the public or the press. Macleans magazine sued to get columnist Mark Steyn access to Tuesday’s event, which had originally been declared in camera for somewhat shaky “security” reasons. (Steyn and the magazine face an unrelated CHRC kangaroo court case later this year, charged with “flagrant Islamophobia” for publishing an excerpt from Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone; the commission became Steyn’s de facto “beat” after he and the magazine were served in December 2007.)

“Free societies do not hold secret trials except for the most serious reasons of national security: mid-level servants of the Crown who get their jollies by posing as racists on unread websites do not fall into that category,” wrote Steyn before heading to Ottawa, adding, “I’ve been received in Buckingham Palace and the White House; I’ve passed the security checks at the Pentagon and the European Commission. … And yet I’m too big a security risk to be allowed anywhere near minor civil servants of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Why don’t they just cut to the chase and rename it the Human Rights Politburo?”

See the rest at:  http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/canada%E2%80%99s-human-rights-kangaroo-court/