Quebec human rights folly

"In the Internet age, any attempt to exclude all racial or other prejudice from public discourse would require extraordinary intervention by the state." So argued University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon. In his 2008 report to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Moon opined that the police are better suited to dealing with hate mongers. In other words, freedom of expression trumps over-board minority rights legislation.

The Quebec National Assembly in June tabled a proposed law empowering the human rights commission to investigate websites or individuals it suspects of inciting violence or hatred against an identifiable group.

Definitions of violence and hatred need not be the same as those used in courts of law. With regulatory boards, words change meaning to suit the desired decision.

Those who complain of violence and hatred remain anonymous even through the complainant be not part of the identifiable group allegedly attacked. As happens too often in other jurisdictions, the complainant is registered to share in the financial penalty that follows commission rulings. Human rights commissions are rightly viewed as cash cows even for non-victim bounty hunters.

The Quebec law would give the commission authority to shut down websites, Facebook accounts and any other form of expression even before the investigation is complete. No innocence until proven guilty for these people.

Back in 2009, Ontario Human Rights Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall advocated the investigation and censoring of websites. She called for a national press council with compulsory membership for all on-line services. She sought to empower it to expose any breach of professional standards on the Internet, as she deemed them to be.

Commenting on the failed Hall initiative, The National Post editorialized, "...making all writers, bloggers and broadcasters hostage to a national press council is merely the first step toward letting the Barbara Halls of the world decide what you get to hear, see and read."

Undeterred by history or common sense, the Quebec government forges ahead.

See my blog post "Folly continues at the Ontario Human Rights Commission" Feb 16, 2009.

Erasing Toronto history

Letter to the Toronto Star, June 3, 2015. Unpublished.

The Star shows concern for the erasure of aboriginal street names (Ojibe street signs bold reminder of aboriginal heritage, June 3), yet none for the disappearance of other historic names. 

I refer to the changing of Cawthra Square in downtown Toronto to Barbara Hall Park. Surely there was some better way to honour the former Human Rights Commissioner than by blotting out the name of one of our early families? 

For more than a century, Cawthra Square was the name of a plot of land in the Isabella and Jarvis area near where William Cawthra's widow lived after her husband's death in 1880. William was a businessman and philanthropist.

Folly Continues at the Ontario Human Rights Commission

In 2008, the Ontario Human Rights Commission smarted at the realization it had no jurisdiction to punish a journalist for what it perceived as "Islamophobia."

The Commission's website purports to define Islamophobia. The result is a wandering, erroneous and grammatically embarrassing effort. Such commissions wallow in vagueness, preferring to deal with feeling rather than fact. They exclude objective judgement, a condition favoured by the Utopian activists who inhabit such institutions.

Unable to impose political correctness on the media in Ontario, OHRC Chair Barbara Hall called for a national press council with compulsory membership for on-line media services. She would empower this yet another bureaucratic overseer to expose any breach of professional standards on the Internet, as she would like them to be.

In a manner exemplary of its communication skills, the Commission articulated, "Ensuring mechanisms are in place to provide opportunity for public scrutiny and the receipt of complaints, particularly from vulnerable groups is important, but must not cross the line into censorship."

From an editorial in The National Post: ". . . making all writers, bloggers and broadcasters hostage to a national press council is merely the first step toward letting the Barbara Halls of the world decide what you get to hear, see and read."

This attempted expansion of government intrusion was in reaction to the proposed curtailing of human rights commissions' jurisdiction as recommended by Law Professor Richard Moon. He wrote, "The use of censorship by the government should be confined to a narrow category of extreme expression --- that which threatens, advocates or justifies violence against members of an identifiable group."