So today The Ministry of Justice issues a long “shut up, we explained” style defense of Section 13.1 — the “future crime/thought crime” section of the “hate speech” law.
A junk history-riddled, illogical and highly fiskable defense riddled with “scholarly” quotations from…
an American professor on Ted Kennedy’s payroll.
You think I’m kidding.
Nope: Teddy’s lawyer-friend has tossed our Feds, and fans of censorship everywhere, a life preserver. Too bad it’s full of holes.
It will be hard to top Ezra Levant’s incredible fisking of this pathetic document.
Nazism in Germany was odious not because of its “audaciously false propaganda”, but because it murdered people by the millions. It’s not the propaganda that killed the Jews; it was the fact that their property rights, their rights to self-defence, their economic rights, their mobility rights, their rights to life and liberty were taken away.
But look at the second half of that sentence: tolerant, liberal societies can be fragile. First, the Weimar Republic had within it the legal and constitutional seeds of Nazism, that Hitler exploited — anti-hate speech laws being amongst them, and weak constitutional protections of real rights, too. But more importantly, what is the government’s implication here? That tolerant, liberal societies are not strong? That, instead, we need the stern hand of a state political censor? Isn’t that exactly the opposite of the lessons of Nazism?
It gets even more muddled. (…) The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we’ve seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?
But he’s asking other bloggers to try, so knock yourselves out.
What’s sad, and frankly insulting, is that the Feds used a clearly biased American law professor to make their points about Canadian law and society.
You see, Tsesis’s writings are being relied upon extensively in this apologia for Section 13.1.
Tsesis’s claims suggest that this “Minority Report” style law — which makes, say, Mark Steyn liable for any “hate crimes” that might be committed, but haven’t even necessarily BEEN committed, by persons unknown, some day in the far off future, because they claim they got the idea from reading Steyn’s stuff — is absolutely essential to preserve the security of the entire country.
This is kinda weird, though, because a) Canada seems to have been more or less secure for hundreds of years before they passed that wacky law a few years ago, and b) “the entire country” has never charged anyone under Section 13.
Only one guy actually ever seems to use Section 13 at all these days.
A guy named Richard Warman.
Why yes — that IS the guy who is suing us! Weird, huh?
See, he’s mad cuz we write stuff like this:
It’s impossible to criticize section 13 without criticizing Warman, because without Warman, section 13 would have been defunct years ago – almost no-one else in this country of 33 million people uses it. I’d call it “Warman’s Law”, but I’ve already given that title to another law enacted because of Warman. Warman’s Law is a law brought in by the B.C. government specifically to protect libraries from Warman’s nuisance defamation suits. (We should find some way to set up a Warman’s law to protect universities from Warman, too.)
Warman doesn’t just “use” section 13. As I’ve documented here before, he actively interferes with other CHRC investigators working on his complaints. For example, he called up Hannya Rizk, a fellow investigator he trained, and told her to improperly withhold information from the person Warman had complained about; he told Rizk to slow down her work to fit his other plans; he tried to get Rizk to improperly disclose confidential information about cases to third parties.
And then there’s Warman’s direct interference in the investigation of his own complaints – wandering right into the CHRC offices, hopping right on investigator’s computers, using their passwords, and just having a ball – violating not only privacy and confidentiality, but the integrity of the CHRC’s evidence – not that such sloppiness has detracted from their 100% conviction rate.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn weighs in…
Nobody who gave it ten minutes’ study would think that the Dominion of Canada, one of the oldest, peacefully evolved, constitutional democracies on the planet, is as “fragile” as the Weimar Republic or the Kingdom of Italy. So the most obvious “audaciously false propaganda” on display there is from the audaciously false propagandists on the Justice Department payroll.
(…)
As I always say, the CIC lawsuits objecting to America Alone’s thesis in fact confirm it — that in the long run free societies are at risk not from fellows flying planes into skyscrapers but from a misbegotten alliance between the likes of the CIC and bovine western “progressives” only too willing to sign away ancient liberties.
