Saving the Canadian Human Rights Commission through amputation

Great article by George Jonas:

Richard Moon is the law professor retained last year by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to write a report about the regulation of “hate speech” on the Internet. He didn’t strike people as a libertarian when he got his commission, so he surprised many when he recommended the repeal of Section 13, the controversial “hate speech” provision, from the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The other day, Moon outlined in the Saskatchewan Law Review Annual Lecture how he arrived at his recommendation, leaving little doubt he threw the dead ballast of s. 13 overboard to save the leaky vessel of the CHRC. He reasoned, he said, that speech should be prohibited only if it advocated, threatened or justified violence against an identifiable group, not if it merely defamed or stereotyped it, and that prohibition against preaching violence should come under the Criminal Code, not the Human Rights Act.
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A law that takes an “expansive” view of discriminatory conduct based on the subjective feelings of groups selected to be immunized against existential trauma, then bases censure or sanctions against conduct that falls short of this standard, not on what the “actors” had actually done or intended to do, but on the effect their actions may have had on the most hostile or sensitive or vulnerable member of an immunized group, and finally adds insult to injury by describing this arbitrary, coercive and iniquitous process as “a non-adjudicative resolution of a ‘dispute,’” turns society into a mixture between Orwell’s 1984 and a Monty Python skit.

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Hopefully, removing section 13.1, will be just the first amputation in a series of many, that will result in the Star Chamber being dismantled and its mandate - transferred to the court of law. Even when it comes to the HRC's original mandate, which is preventing discrimination in housing and employment - that too can be handled by the courts. It could be the Small Claims court or some other judicial body where the common law rules of evidence do apply and where the truth qualifies as defense. After all, an individual's right to file a complaint over discrimination should not trump the defendant's right to a fair trial.

In addition to that, the courts that assume the HRC mandate should ensure that filing similar complaints in multiple jurisdictions is not allowed and that bogus complaints are filtered out promptly, without forcing the defendant to go through a couple years of legal turmoil, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses one would face because of that. The latter, by the way, is yet another form of abuse that must end. Currently the complainer gets all his legal expenses paid by the taxpayers, regardless of his income level. I understand why we may offer some legal aid to the low-income complainers that don't have the money to pay their legal fees, but then, same legal aid should also be available to the defendants - for fairness sake.