Mark Steyn - Lights Out

So I’ll be gone from the Canadian media, which will undoubtedly be distressing to my loyal reader (I use the singular advisedly). But a year or two down the line, many other subscribers to Maclean’s and the Chronicle-Herald and eventually the Globe and The Toronto Star will be wondering why there are whole areas of debate that no longer seem to get much of an airing in the public prints. In 1989, Muslims who objected to Salman Rushdie burned his novel in the streets of England. Two decades on, they’ve figured out that it’s more efficient to use the “human rights” commissions to burn the offending texts metaphorically, discreetly, off-stage… and (ultimately) pre-emptively.

Pace my old editor, I don’t need to see a movie because I’m in one. We’re at that point in the plot where the maverick investigator takes the call saying a third example of the strange spore has been found in a field in Idaho, and he pushes another pin in the map and goes “Hmm” thoughtfully.

But he still can’t get his colleagues to see that something’s going on.

MARK HEMINGWAY is right to say that free speech in Canada “does not exist in any meaningful way”. As the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal’s rambling and incoherent decision makes plain, Maclean’s and I were acquitted of “flagrant Islamophobia” for essentially political reasons – because neither the court nor its travesty of a “human rights” code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. Jay Currie puts it well:

The way I read this decision is that it imposes a two part test: a) are your words offensive and hurtful? b) are you a major media organization with deep pockets represented by serious lawyers. If ‘a’ and not ‘b’ you are a hate monger; if ‘a’ and ‘b’ you are engaged in political debate.

Just so. Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen’s Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the federal “human rights” commission) systemic corruption, the kangaroo courts decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The Ontario “Human Rights” Commission ruled they weren’t able to prosecute the case because of a technicality – I offered to waive the technicality, but the wimps still bailed out. If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you’re just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they’ll destroy your life.

I sympathize with the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose mouthpiece feels that, if the British Columbia pseudo-judges had applied the logic of previous decisions, we’d have been found guilty. He’s right: Under the ludicrous British Columbia “Human Rights” Code, we are guilty. Which is why the Canadian Islamic Congress should appeal, and why I offered on the radio an hour ago to chip in a thousand bucks towards the cost thereof.

ON FRIDAY I had the honor of addressing the Federalist Society in Washington on the matter of my free-speech travails up north. And, in response to a question on whether the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission were surprised that I’d pushed back against them, I quoted that great line from the Kevin Bacon film Tremors , about the giant mutated killer worms terrorizing some town in Nevada. As you’ll recall, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire play a couple of gun nuts with more firepower down in their basement than the average EU army, and when the killer worms come to call they wind up blasted to smithereens and splattered all over the walls. And here comes the great line:

Looks like they picked the wrong rec room to break into.

The giant killer worms of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission picked the wrong rec room to break into. Ezra Levant and I and a few others went nuclear on the Dominion’s thought police and gave them the worst year of publicity in their three-decade existence. The result is that, earlier this month, over 99 per cent of delegates to the Conservative Party convention voted to abolish Section 13 (the “hate speech” provision) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and a brave principled Liberal, Keith Martin, renewed his private member’s motion in the House of Commons to do the same.

This morning, the CHRC issued the so-called Moon Report on free-speech issues. Most of us expected it to be a whitewash. Instead, Professor Moon says:

1. The first recommendation is that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) be repealed so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) would no longer deal with hate speech, in particular hate speech on the Internet.

This is a great tribute to what Ezra calls his campaign of “denormalization” of Canada’s Orwellian “human rights” racket. They’re not yet ready to throw in the towel completely, but the argument’s been entirely reframed. And, if the pressure can be kept up, the deranged Dominion may yet rejoin the ranks of free nations.

FOR THE FIRST three months of my battle with the “human rights” enforcers, I received an e-mail approximately every minute and a half from sensible moderate reasonable bien pensants protesting that, while of course they’re all in favor of freedom of speech, it’s a question of striking a balance, drawing the line and whatnot. At which point they usually trot out the old favorite that “there’s no right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.” Darren Lund does it at the drop of a hat. He’s not a homosexual but he plays one at the Alberta “Human Rights” Commission, getting offended on behalf of gays and lesbians and then filing homophobia complaints. He succeeded in getting the peculiarly thuggish Alberta tribunal to impose a lifetime speech ban on the Reverend Stephen Boissoin, and for his totalitarian pains was the inaugural recipient of the Alberta “Human Rights” Award. So, given that he lives and breathes censorship, you’d think he would come up with a slightly less stale cliché. But no. Whenever The Globe And Mail or anybody else asks him for his thoughts on free speech, he dusts it off one mo’ time. Defending the thuggery of the Boissoin decision in The Calgary Herald , he trotted out the bromide about “falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” and then added that the Alberta pastor’s letter “didn’t just shout fire; I suggest that those words had the effect of setting the fire and locking the theatre door.”

I wonder how many of these liberal Canadians fretting about conflagrations spreading from orchestra to proscenium know they’re quoting:

a) an American;

and, better yet,

b) an American judge upholding espionage charges against an anti-war protester.

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, supporting the indictment of Charles Schenck for distributing leaflets urging draftees not to serve in the First World War.

That’s the “fire”: Cindy Sheehan at a weekend protest in Berkeley.

As The National Post ’s Colby Cosh pointed out, by that standard thousands of Canadian liberals would have been rounded up for protesting the war in Afghanistan.

Many of my leftie critics also say that my interest in the politico-cultural aspects of demographics makes me a eugenicist. Er, no. Again, that’s your boy: Big Government enforced-sterilization eugenicist Oliver Wendell Holmes.