The CHRC Defenders Of Censorship

Although I applaud Ezra Levant’s attempt to deal with what was obviously a difficult situation in being snubbed by Jennifer Lynch and the Canadian Human Rights Commission when she refused to do an open debate on CTV, I feel that there are many people who still don’t quite understand the liberties being threatened by the existence of such a Commission. Ms.Lynch confirmed in an article she contributed to the Globe and Mail on Friday, that she isn’t interested in debate about who should choose what constitutes free expression in this country. It is at the sole discretion of the government, and it is they who will decide what is hateful and what is not.

Many of those who defend the Commission as being something that roots out hatred and discrimination inherent in our society are fighting against an enemy which is largely illusory. Many of the complaints that the commission investigate turn out to be benign, and yet there are those who are forced to defend themselves against the terrible accusation of breaching “human rights”. The problem with human rights, as defined in the Canadian Human Rights Code, is that it isn’t all that well defined whether speech rights supersede the right not to be offended by speech. For instance, the CHRC exists to investigate possible breaches of human rights, and in particular has investigated and gone after people expressing their views on the internet:

13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

The main problem with the CHRC is the underexposure they have in the media. People quite simply don’t know, or don’t care about their existence. They believe that the commission exists to prosecute hate speech and investigate human rights, and so they believe that only speech that constitutes hatred is likely to be subjected to investigation. Fortunately, thanks to the case with Ezra Levant, brought before the CHRC for nothing more than publishing the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, we know this to be untrue. The commission has the power, and it is an abusive power, to bring forth frivolous charges against members of the press for expressing their opinions, and reporting on commonly distributed information.

The idea that it can’t happen to me, is the greatest fallacy in accepting governmental restrictions on free speech. And it isn’t just about “free speech”, as the term is tossed around, but that the government gets to decide based upon arbitrary and discretionary powers, what is allowable and what isn’t. People think that only racists and Nazis will be brought before these commissions, but instead we’ve seen witch hunt after witch hunt of people being prosecuted and investigated for things as ridiculous as a man being turned away from an all-woman’s gym because he hadn’t had a sex change operation yet.

The worst aspect of all, indeed the most nefarious, isn’t whether someone actually said something hateful or whether they meant it in a hateful way. No, the point that so many people miss when arguing about the CHRC, is spelled out in Section 13.1 of the code. Any matter that is “likely” to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination, can be subject to an investigation. In other words, if any persons who belong to a group of a prohibited discrimination [to be announced, of course] are “likely” to be exposed to hatred as a result of something said on the internet, that is a crime against the Canadian Human Rights Code. So when Tamil demonstrators, a prohibited group to discriminate against, decide to block parts of Toronto and disrupt traffic, if you fly a plane over the city with a banner reading “Protect Canada, stop the Tamil Tigers”, that can be investigated as a possible hate crime. Not because it is a crime, but because of the loose definition of discrimination in the code as being an incident in which that group is likely to be exposed to hatred as a result of the act.