“As a key player in the first major expansion of these commissions under the decidedly-red-Tory government of Bill Davis, Borovoy simply scoffed at those of us who predicted this would happen.
“It didn’t take a great genius to foresee the results. After all, if you set up an all-powerful, all-knowing commission, with little if any responsibility to anybody, stacked with true believers, and tilt the entire system so that anyone accused is guilty until proven innocent — a proof that rarely happens — it should have been obvious to anybody that the human rights zealots would continue to expand their powers in the most undemocratic and offensive ways possible.
(…)
“Things moved along relatively well until [‘conservative’ Ontario Premier Bill] Davis, to the chagrin of many in his own cabinet and caucus, tabbed Elgie to rewrite the human rights code, the result of which was a proposal to give human rights officers more power than police to search for and seize private documents without a warrant and based solely on a complaint, whether frivolous or not.
“It is sickening for Borovoy to now lament this state of affairs. This is the same Borovoy who, during an instructive two-week period in 1981, appeared at both the federal investigation into RCMP wrongdoing in Quebec and the hearings into Elgie’s infamous Bill 7. In Ottawa, Borovoy argued passionately that the police should not have the power to search and seize without a warrant. At Queen’s Park [the Ontario legislature], he argued just as passionately that human rights officers had to have the powers or search and seizure without a warrant.
“At the end of the day, some of Elgie’s proposals — although not many of them — were modified slightly, but the result still was an overweening, totally biased bureaucratic juggernaut which, although supposedly set up only to deal with discrimination in housing and employment, has continued to expand its power and influence into every facet of our lives.
“It’s time to blow them up and start again. And it just shows what happens when a politician — in this case Davis and his crew — is more interested in catering to mouthy militants than in dealing in a reasonable way with the vast majority of people who, despite what the zealots may claim, are decent, law-abiding Canadians.”
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