A small victory in Canada

The Ontario rights commission wimps out on a technicality:

"The Ontario Human Rights Commission announced yesterday it had dismissed a complaint about allegedly Islamophobic articles in Maclean's magazine because it lacked jurisdiction over printed material.

At the same time, however, the commission denounced the newsweekly for publishing articles that were "inconsistent with the spirit" of the Ontario Human Rights Code, and doing "serious harm" to Canadian society by "promoting societal intolerance" and disseminating "destructive, xenophobic opinions."

"When the media writes, it should exercise great caution that it's not promoting stereotypes that will adversely impact on identifiable groups," chief commissioner Barbara Hall said in an interview. "I think one needs to be very careful when one speaks in generalities, that in fact one is speaking factually about all the people in a particular group." ....

The complaint, brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress and a group of law students, was about a selection of news articles, columns and a book review about Islam and Muslims published between January 2005 and July 2007. Two similar complaints remain active; one is to be heard by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in June, and the other is before the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The Ontario complaint was rejected because the relevant portions of Ontario Human Rights Code only address discrimination via signs or symbols, not printed material.

Source

So printed materials contain no signs of symbols? What is a letter of the alphabet if it is not a symbol??