Confronting the Speech Police - Rebecca Walberg



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Rebecca Walberg

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December 11, 2007 6:00 A.M.

Confronting the Speech Police
The spectacle of Canada’s Human Rights Commission.

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A peculiarly Canadian institution, the Human Rights Commission attracted attention beyond Canada’s borders last week when the Canadian Islamic Congress filed several complaints against author and commentator Mark Steyn, and Maclean’s, the newsweekly that excerpted his bestselling America Alone last year. There is no substance to these complaints, but that is no impediment in the eyes of British Columbia’s commission, which has agreed to investigate the case. The degeneration of Human Rights Commissions into forums for nuisance suits, and their current abuse by the CIC, among others, is indicative of the growing political and cultural gulf between the U.S. and Canada, especially concerning freedom of speech and of worship.

Human Rights Commissions were established throughout the 1960s and 1970s as Canada’s answer to the American Civil Rights Movement. While the U.S. government was involved in the latter, the primary driver of the movement was the widespread conviction that segregation and discrimination were harmful and un-American, and must be made obsolete. The great civil rights activists insisted that people of all races be treated as individuals, and not barred from any privilege because they belonged to a given group. The approach of Canada’s HRCs was, and remains, precisely the opposite, since the commissions exist explicitly to reframe conflict between individuals into a matter of group politics. That one party to a private conflict can — through these commissions — gain access to the resources of the state, adds a huge power imbalance between the parties that would not exist if the complaint were pursued through litigation.

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In the words of the federal Human Rights Commission, the institution is committed to “vindicating [the] human rights [of victims] and…trying to prevent future acts of discrimination.” The presumption that a complainant is a victim, made at the start of any complaint by the commission, is problematic for those who expect a degree of impartiality from the state when it involves itself in private disputes. Equally troublesome are the expansion of a government agency into the business of providing vindication, and the undertaking of social engineering without the legitimacy of elected legislatures or the judiciary. The diffidence displayed by the Canadian public when these commissions were first established is being eroded in light of complaints that are at best frivolous, and at worst dangerous to genuine freedom — but getting rid of Human Rights Commissions, and reversing the damage they have done, will not be easy.

Many of the intellectuals and activists who helped shape the commissions are themselves aghast at the uses to which they are currently put. Alan Borovoy, the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, helped to draft HRC charters decades ago. He now objects to such uses of the commissions on classical liberal grounds, believing that speech codes and anti-hate laws, which concern themselves with statements rather than conduct, invariably devolve into censorship. “A free culture cannot protect people against material that hurts,” he wrote in response to another attempt by a Muslim group to stifle discussion last year. Whatever the architects of the commissions envisioned as the proper role for these bodies, censorship by well-meaning bureaucrats was not it.

The Canadian Islamic Congress, in its complaint against Steyn and Maclean’s, speaks the language of victim-hood well. According to their lawyer, the complainants are acting “in order to protect Canadian multiculturalism and tolerance.” Their passion for defending Canadian values came about only after Maclean’s declined to give four Muslim law students editorial control over a rebuttal, but this is omitted from the CIC’s account. This elision is telling. Having failed to bully the publication in question into ceding control of its own content, and without recourse to any kind of civil or criminal action (since no laws were broken) the plaintiffs are using the Human Rights Commission to do what the courts, the legislature, and the marketplace of ideas will not: coerce publishers into silence on the subject of Islam.

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