Hurt feelings aside, the greatest human rights abusers in Canada are the human rights commissions and tribunals themselves.
It’s a power thing.
It goes to their heads, much as it happens at country fairs when you give a community volunteer a security badge.
In Ontario, when running for the Progressive Conservative leadership, Tim Hudak vowed to “scrap the Human Rights Tribunal” in his province, denigrating it as a “kangaroo court.” But it has since fallen off the radar screen as this week’s provincial election beckons.
In Alberta, Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith was equally dismissive of the commission in her neck of the woods but, instead of vowing to protect all freedom of speech, even the offensive, she has since diluted her views to that of dishwater.
Now she wants only to “ban speech that advocates acts of violence or promotes hatred of any individual or group.”
Either we have freedom of speech or we don’t.
Giving human rights oversight bodies the ability to decide what “freedom” represents is an affront to true freedom, particularly when we have criminal and civil law to judge true libel and true slander.
Hurting someone’s feelings, however, is not a crime. Nor are so-called “politically incorrect” viewpoints.
Trouble is, our human rights commissions and tribunals think they are.
On the federal stage, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson was similarly tough-talking when the federal Tories voted in 2008 to bring an end to Section 13 of the Human Rights Act that bans communications “likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.”
Then he, and his government, went mute.
And they remained silent even after a report ordered by the commission itself called for Section 13 to be lanced from its purview.
We have seen human rights commissions and tribunals abusing their so-called powers across this country -- from prosecuting Sun News’ Ezra Levant for running Mohammed cartoons in his former newspaper, to conservative writer Mark Steyn being put through the wringer for his views in Maclean’s on Islamist extremism.
And they’re just the high-profile cases.
The left loves free speech as long as it does not allow any conservative thought, which is why it loves human rights commissions.
And why we don’t.