Below are excerpts from two different reports of last week's events in a Canadian "Human Rights" tribunal
Gestapo methods
We read:
"This week, during final arguments at a CHRC hearing into hate-speech complaints against Marc Lemire (who is typically portrayed as a white supremacist, but who insists he is just a "certified computer expert who ran a website critical of immigration and the CHRC"), it was revealed that commission investigators are not above entrapment, telecommunications fraud and invasion of an innocent person's privacy to harass suspects into a conviction.
After years of investigating Lemire, CHRC investigators had too little proof that he was a hatemonger to proceed to a hearing. So they began logging onto his website under an assumed name, "Jadewarr," and posting provocative comments in hopes of obtaining racist replies they could then use in their case again Lemire.
To cover their activities, it appears commission employees logged onto the Internet through a wireless connection they detected in a woman's apartment near their offices, rather than using the commission's own server. They neither sought the woman's permission nor acquired a judicial warrant to tap into her computer. During this week's hearing, the woman's name, address and telephone number were also revealed in public testimony.
These are the actions of people who have become a law unto themselves. They have convinced themselves that their goal -- the eradication of hatred as they see it -- gives them licence to run roughshod over traditional legal protections against wrongful conviction. If they are convinced you are guilty, yet cannot gather enough evidence to prove it, they are not above manufacturing proof. There is no innocent until proven guilty. You are guilty once they decide you are and they will prove it no matter what.
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Amazing arrogance: Free speech is un-Canadian
We read:
"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 image of neo-Nazis, transforming them from odious dirtbags into principled free-speech martyrs. Case in point: 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 (HRC) investigator Dean Steacy and the other apparatchik who've made a career out of parsing Lemire's phobic Web postings.
But even if the HRC 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 HRC procedure, observers were nonetheless able to extract a fairly detailed picture of commission work practices. The impression that emerges is an overstaffed shop in which unionized desk jockeys sit around "investigating" obscure web sites in search of some scrap of actionable hatred. When they don't find anything, they log on and try stirring things up themselves -- a practice Lemire describes as entrapment. This amateurhour version of The Wire would be funny -- if the HRC weren't spending millions of taxpayer dollars in the process, and turning the lives of the accused upside down.
In fact, for an organization that is supposed to promote "human rights," the HRC's agents seem curiously oblivious to basic aspects of constitutional law. In one famous exchange during the Lemire case, Steacy was asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?" -- to which he replied "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." (I guess Section 2 has been excised from his copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights.)
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