Ezra Levant and the Alberta Human Rights Comm

http://www.steynonline.com/content/blogcategory/15/100/

This is probably THE freedom of speech issue at the moment. Canada is usually assumed to be a jolly good Anglosphere country with hearty lumber-jack folks quaffing Labatts Bleu with hearty mounties, toasting the Queen. Sadly, the Canada of 2008 is much closer to the Netherlands of 1990- brimful of self-hating lefty do-gooders and multi-culti moral-equivalancers. It turns out that all Canadian provinces have one of these 'Human Rights Commissions' which police thought crimes and other contraventions of ideological purity. This despite the fact that actual hate-crimes in Canada are by world standards vanishingly rare.

Who sets up quasi-legal courts to solve a problem that doesn't exist? People who have talked themselves into believing their own propaganda about white Canadians being oppressive and racist, perpetrators of multitudinous crimes against the poor and brown. Unsurprisingly, until the Islamists discovered them, they had virtually nothing to do. How funny is this?

'In its entire history, over half of all cases [brought before the Federal Human Rights commission] have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn't have to demonstrate that he's been deprived of his human rights, only that it's "likely" (i.e. "highly un-") that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime. Who is Richard Warman? What's his story? Well, he's a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission: an investigator. Same as Shirlene McGovern.'

I recently used the word Kafkaesque in anger, and I'm about to do it again. In the last six years ONE person has been the plaintiff in every case brought. If that doesn't bring to mind visions of the Soviet Union at its most 'Big Brother'-ish nothing will. Or you're Jon Stewart, who never gets round to lampooning stuff like this because satire is about beating the same Republicans over the head every day of every year until he gets cancelled.

As Mark Steyn points out, despite this whole 'Human Rights' kangaroo court thing being a huge laugh, there is also a serious side. Now that the Islamists have discovered a place to enforce Koranic law, they will avail themselves of it at every opportunity. And given that the standard of proof necessary for conviction is ludicrously low, they're almost guarunteed convictions against their ideological foes.

Why are we so determined to despoil our own systems of law (and government) by creating idiocies like these ideological straightjacket-enforcers? Political parties seem loath to critique these things and make them an issue. Time for new political parties?