Censure the censors
Human rights commissions are being used to silence Canadians. Can anything be done to stop them?
Kevin Steel - September 17, 2007
You can't prohibit ideas, he believes, whether offensive to some or to everyone. "So it's the responsibility of democratic people to take the arguments, have access to those arguments, and be able to express those sentiments. That's really the function and responsibility we have as sovereign citizens." Mollard says. Therefore, if we allow government to censor that, we have diminished our ability to govern ourselves. "Our organization would say that just because we don't censor those ideas, that doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to act or respond to abhorrent ideas. We do. But we do that with more speech. So if there are particularly odious and reprehensible ideas that denigrate some on the basis of race, religion, sexualization, etc . . . we as a society have a responsibility to fight back with words, using words to condemn those ideas that we don't believe are valid to the rules and policies that we govern ourselves by," he says.
Given that they are prone to rule against fundamental freedoms and thus are grading towards a soft form of socially destructive tyranny, not to mention bogging down the courts with taxpayer-funded nuisance suits, should the human right commissions be destroyed? Borovoy doesn't think so. "I think human rights commissions have an important role to play. There is still much discrimination in our society and this is a big help in counteracting it. The fact that some of them have gone off the rails, doesn't mean that they can't perform very important functions," says Borovoy. He believes there is enough discrimination in our society to warrant this kind of response. "I've never changed my mind about that. I haven't changed my mind at all. I never favoured using this against speech," he says.
So perhaps the solution is to merely curtail them and lobby governments to get rid of the provisions in human rights legislation that suppress free speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press. It would have to be done soon, however, as the case of Free Dominion demonstrated; the commissions are now attempting to stick their fingers of censorship into that great bastion of free expression, the Internet.
On August 16, the online publication WorldNetDaily quoted CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, whose actions dictate whether a complaint goes to a tribunal, stating how the CHRC approaches the liberty to speak freely. "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value," he quipped to a lawyer representing a website. Apparently, Steacy has never heard of John Milton or Martin Luther, and with that kind of ignorance at the CHRC, it should be obvious the commissions can't be reined in soon enough.
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