Stephen Harper used to have very clear—and colourful—ideas on human rights commissions and what should be done about them.
“Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society,” he said in a 1999 interview with Terry O’Neill of BC Report newsmagazine.“ It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.” He went on to complain about the “bastardization” of the entire concept of rights in modern society.
Of course, that was back when Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition. Today he’s Canada’s 22nd Prime Minister. And he appears to have lost his fear of totalitarianism.
In an interview this past January with Maclean’s, the Prime Minister was asked what, if anything, he intended to do to halt the encroachment on individual freedom by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in the name of regulating hate speech.
It is an issue of crucial importance to this country and our strongly held traditions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
This magazine understands only too well the dangers involved in putting those rights at risk. Following a 2006 cover story by columnist Mark Steyn titled “Why the future belongs to Islam,” we were visited by a group of law students from the Canadian Islamic Congress. We were given the option of handing over editorial control of our pages for a rebuttal to Steyn’s piece or face a series of human rights complaints. As the first option was anathema to our obligations to our readers, the students launched their complaints.
That we were vindicated in all instances, notwithstanding the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s attempt at an unofficial smear, is beside the point. Under the guise of human rights, the ability of any news organization to produce truthful and reasoned articles was questioned by a variety of government bodies. Scary stuff indeed.
So we asked Harper if he intended to correct this threat to the basic existence of a democratic society.
“The government has no plans to do so,” was his casual reply. “It is a very tricky issue of public policy . . . It’s probably the case that we haven’t got the balance right, but I’m not sure the government today has any answer on what an appropriate balance would be.”
To summarize: the issue of human rights commissions running amok over Canadians’ basic rights and freedoms is something Harper has followed—closely and with obvious passion—for at least a decade. As Prime Minister he admits it is still a problem. And he says he doesn’t have a clue how to fix it.
We do. He should repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
A wave of informed opinion and public sentiment is in agreement that the CHRC and other provincial rights bodies have become a menace to many of the freedoms Canadians consider central to our way of life. Besides, even if we are concerned with the possible proliferation of hate speech, Section 13 is wholly unnecessary.
In 1970 the Criminal Code was amended to outlaw the promotion of genocide and the distribution of hate propaganda. Penalties of fines and jail terms were established, but the rights of the accused were also protected through due process, a need to prove intent and, crucially, the defence of truth.
Parliament later created the Canadian Human Rights Commission to cover a variety of potential discriminatory practices in Canada. Section 13 of the act deals with the transmission of materials “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred.” As this body was intended to be conciliatory and to rely on cease and desist orders for enforcement, its legal standards are set lower than in the Criminal Code; due process is missing, intent is not necessary to prove, and truth is not considered a defence for the accused.
The constitutionality of Section 13 was tested in 1990 in the Supreme Court’s Canada v. Taylor decision. A narrow split decision found that due to the CHRC’s remedial nature, it was not a threat to free speech. A dissenting opinion, however, written by current Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, worried that Section 13 was “too broad and too invasive” and so “intrudes on the fundamental freedom of expression.”
Since then, the scope of the CHRC has grown in many worrisome and unexpected ways. In particular, it can now levy fines and impose other punishments. And the CHRC staff has become fixated on aggressively pursuing Section 13 cases. Approximately 11 per cent of all complaints made to the CHRC are sent to a tribunal for a hearing. The rest are dismissed or settled “out-of-court.” Among Section 13 complaints, however, 68 per cent are sent to tribunal.
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Canadian Business Network 
Repealing Sec 13 would be a good start. The whole HRC boondoogle should be shut down. These people are politically appointed hacks sucking off public funds because they couldn’t make anywhere near the same money any real job they could get. They will always try to create, exaggerate and expand “human rights” and their authority. They are pretentious posers who presume to be the people who can judge what are human rights and what are not. Doesn’t Macleans get it yet? Fire. Them. All.
When you think of it all Section 13 is about is prosecuting pre-crimes. Remember Minority Report? Your opinion could possibly in some 7 degress of Kevin Bacon result in a crime being committed against some unknown minority at some unknown time. In fact it is far worse than the program envisioned in Minority Report. Fact is something happened to Harper's courage along the way from the NCC to Ottawa.
The editorial cites MacLeans sense of “responsibility to its readers” – a responsibility, first and foremost, to get facts right, and avoid fabrication. But a few months ago, spectacular errors were pointed out, with no correction or acknowledgement from editors, despite requests. MacLeans claimed that “about 10 million Finns died under Lenin, almost half due to starvation”.
Finland’s population of 5 million was smaller during Lenin's time (about 3 million). 10 million of them could not have died. Nor would any have died under Lenin, who never ruled Finland (Finland was independent in 1917 when Lenin arrived in Russia). The article may be confusing Finland with the Ukraine, where, some estimates suggest, casualties from the “Holodomor” (starvation under forced collectivization) ranged from 2.6 million to 10 million. But this event occurred decades later, under Stalin, not Lenin, who was then dead.
Not only does MacLeans have the wrong country, but apparently the wrong leader and wrong time period.
An error of this magnitude requires a correction, and an acknowledgement from the editors who signed off on it. When and if editors acknowledge errors like this, we might trust that MacLeans takes seriously its “responsibility to readers”, and deserves the freedoms it claims.
Harper is weak-kneed on abolishing section 13 of the Human Rights Commission law; He needs to be prodded to do the right thing as he did by having Canada's UN delegation walk out on the Iranian President's so called "address" to the member states. To their everlasting credit, several other member nations walked out as well.
I can’t believe that Canada fought against Nazi Germany and participated in the cold war against the Soviet dictatorship only to allow de facto censorship committees to take root a few decades later. That’s what the Human Rights Commissions are, they are a disgrace and must be abolished even if the brain-dead leftists see an attack on these commissions as being an attack on human rights. To abolish these commissions is the best safeguard for Canadians’ basic right to free expression.
Historical note—during the 1930′s the Nazi government had a lot of influence outside its borders and it successfully persuaded the socialist Belgian goverment, among others, to pass laws that barred the press from reporting anything negative about Nazi Germany. Later, when war finally came, many Belgian citizens sympathized with the Nazi’s because they had never been allowed to here the truth about them. The moral of this story: never let a government commission censor free speech, no matter how lofty its proclaimed values are.
As an American I should be thankful for the first amendment, but to me that's not the real lesson here: it is the practice of all bureaucracies to expand their mandates and budgets, to the point where rights are infringed and original purposes are lost. That, it seems to me, was the real wisdom of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams et al — to recognize this point. Not that we in the US have followed it very well. Anyway, a good article — and for us, cautionary.
One must commend Maclean's, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant for exposing this fraud on the Canadian people.
I would also hope that the writers keep pursuing this outrage until someone goes to jail.