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Gloriously starts the morning when there is good news to report!
The good news out of Canada is that a brand new national paper, The National Post, having had its debut less than a week ago, has apparently decided not to play coquettish lapdog to the predatory, censorious Canadian Human Rights Commission and its fellow travelers. What a breath of spicy air!
In one of its early editorials, titled "Human rights that rest upon the law," October 31, 1998, the following is put forth courageously in unmistakable black ink with not a hint of red:
National Post:
"Cap in hand, Michelle Falardeau-Ramsey, chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, appeared before the public accounts committee in Ottawa this week asking for more money. But is cash the answer to the ongoing muddle at the CHRC?"
For Ms. Falardeau-Ramsey had been called to task for a litany of problems unveiled by the federal auditor general earlier this year at both the CHRC and its quasi-judicial cousin, the human rights tribunal. These included delays in handling complaints, potential conflicts of interest, and repeated errors in interpreting the law."
Zundelsite:
Three things, up front and for the record one more time:
First, as already noted but well worth repeating, the average wait for a complaint, we have been told, takes 27 months. Not in the Zundel case there wasn't in the Holocaust Enforcers' Crusade against their Number One Arch-Enemy! It took a miserly four months! What Canada was treated to was practically a Holocaust Lobby stampede to be part of a Human Rights lynching - and trust you me, quite a few people noticed.
Secondly, ". . . potential conflict of interest?" My foot! How about a provincial HR commissioner turned HR Tribunal member sitting brassily in judgment of a man who had already been prejudged in a press release by her very own commission more than ten years ago? Here's to proverbial chutzpah?
Finally, ". . . repeated errors in interpreting the law"? How about the cheeky ". . . the Internet is just a telephonic sort of communication?" A telephone answering machine? Odium is not too strong a word. It's stinking to high heaven!
National Post:
"Yet Ms. Falardeau-Ramsey displayed a cavalier indifference toward these criticisms. Brushing aside virtually every substantive issue, she simply requested additional funds to clear her backlog of cases."
Zundelsite:
Makes me remember the elegantly pirouetting Mr. Duval who told the judge in Ottawa in response to the precedent-setting Bell Canada/McGillis ruling that it was ". . . business as usual" when asked how the ruling of Judge McGillis in the Bell Canada case was impacting on other CHRC cases. The Name of the Human Rights game: "Business as usual" - and Anglo-Saxon law, fairness, decency and precedent be damned!
National Post:
"Admittedly, part of the problem at the CHRC is that Ottawa is continually expanding its mandate with new violations of human rights invented annually."
Zundelsite:
Sure. This will guarantee the Human Rights industry a parasitic existence for decades to come with this new technology if they can snatch the Internet! As one observer commented: "It's the salami approach." Slice by slice, in other words.
National Post:
"Indeed, it sometimes seems human rights are more at risk in Canada than in Rwanda or Indonesia. Exploding mandates have also been the bane of provincial human rights commissions."
Zundelsite:
Those who watch what's being said in cyberspace know that Canada is now the armpit of this continent, courtesy Holocaust Enforcer censorship. Doug Collins called the so-called Human Rights Commission enterprise "stink weasels" - which makes me think he must have spoken euphemistically.
National Post:
Witness the Prince Edward Island commission whose inclusion of "political belief" as a legitimate ground of complaint gave rise to 658 separate complaints in 1997. When more than 98% of all cases closed concern "political belief," then either Prince Edward Island has been taken over by radical totalitarians without anyone noticing, or the people there have extravagant notions of human rights and political beliefs."
Zundelsite:
We couldn't have put it better ourselves. Totalitarians have taken over more than just Prince Edward Island. Watch someone's feelings being hurt by truth, and in march your beloved Kommissars, flanked by their intervenors. And you? Why, of luck and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars!
National Post:
Plainly, the more complaints -- and the more types of complaint -- there are, the more financial strains there will be for budgeteers to handle.
Zundelsite:
Such as, to add to the above, ". . . ***likely*** to lead to feelings of hatred and contempt"? Where is the empirical evidence that the Zundelsite has ever caused a single person to have bad feelings of hatred and contempt - except the very ones who hate to hear the truth and hate to have their schemes exposed to public scrutiny?
National Post:
It is the other issues raised by the auditor general, however, that are really disturbing. In particular, the Federal Court has repeatedly found the federal human rights tribunal has an impoverished grasp of the law. Of 19 appeals since 1996, the court has overturned the tribunal 11 times owing to errors of law. With $5-billion at risk in the CHRC's current row with Ottawa over pay equity for public servants, taxpayers can ill afford such a slipshod record.
Zundelsite:
Ask yourself why the legitimate courts, judges, professional bodies such as the Judicial Council and even professional magazines of lawyers have permitted that kind of encroachment into their professions - without ever as much as a peep? Would doctors let someone do surgery outside the bounds and boundaries of the medical profession - and keep silent when the quacks victimize innocent people? Never!
National Post:
Both the Federal Court and the auditor general, moreover, have pointed to the interdependence between the commission and the tribunal as a potential problem. And within the CHRC, there is a multitude of potential conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, that commission staff can both mediate the rights disputes before it and assist a complainant to take his case before the courts. Indeed, the commission may solicit a complaint about discrimination, help draft the complaint, investigate it and then appear before the human rights tribunal to argue it. Impartiality is largely a myth when one party serves as both prosecutor and patrolman.
Zundelsite:
Ask yourself why the Commission, and not the complainant, calls witnesses! Ask yourself why the Commission keeps on fighting tooth and nail to prevent a judicial review! Is that impartiality? They are co-prosecutors or, to speak bluntly, henchmen who, by their own interference and unfair rulings, are helping to create a lynch mob atmosphere at the hearings. All students of the current censorship struggle have to do is to study the Zundelsite transcripts to see gross corruption in action.
National Post:
In light of these problems, it is worth returning to first principles. The CHRC was set up in 1977 to offer an alternative to the lengthy and often costly process of adjudicating discrimination cases through the Federal Court system. It was meant to focus on mediation and conciliation, and to raise awareness of discrimination in society -- although that latter aim is now redundant, Canada and most Western countries being almost rights-crazed, as illustrated by the mayor of Fredericton being forced to mouth assent to gay rights.
Zundelsite:
Mediation? Where was there ever meaningful, impartial mediation? Was I ever asked? I was right there in the courtroom the very first day of the hearing and could have aborted that freakish show right then and there. Was I allowed to speak and tell them how I ran the Zundelsite and how Ernst Zundel didn't run the Zundelsite? But see? That would have spoiled the lynching.
National Post:
What has happened in the intervening 20 years? Sad to say the commission has become another example of the administrative state whose agencies have been gradually replacing the law as a method of adjudicating disputes between citizens for most of this century. The CHRC and the human rights tribunal, far from constituting a cheaper and less contentious way of mediating disputes to the satisfaction of both parties, simply duplicates the court system -- but in a way that lends itself to legal bungling, conflicts of interest and one-sidedness.
Zundelsite:
Right. Uncle Joe Stalin business as usual.
National Post:
There should be a very strong reason of public interest to justify a state agency, backed by the taxpayer, intervening on one side in civil dispute. All too often there isn't. And, in addition, according to the auditor general's report, the present method of dealing with discrimination complaints is "cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming." So it is not an improvement on the courts in that respect either.
Rather than give the CHRC any more money or new responsibilities, let us cut it down to a size appropriate to a nation living under law. Let us abolish the CHRC's prosecutorial role -- and the entire human rights tribunal along with it -- and restrict the CHRC to education, conciliation and mediation. Should such a reformed CHRC fail to achieve a satisfactory solution for a particular complainant, he or she would then be free to pursue it in the courts -- with whatever unofficial help the publicity had created.
Yes, the court system may be just as cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming as the CHRC. But at least Canadians can be confident in its impartiality and respect for the rule of law -- and they are important human rights.
Zundelsite:
What you just heard is called the Voice of Competition, or more apropos, competing ideas making themselves be accepted in the marketplace. Canadians who have not yet lost all sense of common good will appreciate this gritty, gutsy paper - provided it can stay the course. Canadians have been aching for an honest journalistic counterweight to the fossilized Globe and Mail and the stagnant Toronto "Red" Star. Let's hope it stays that way.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim, denounces it, and excites the public odium and the public hatred to conceal its own abuses and encroachments."
(Henry Clay)