Christina Blizzard aghast after interview with Barbara Hall:
I asked Hall for her response [to Mark Steyn’s testimony condemning the Human Rights Commission at the Ontario Legislature]. In a telephone interview, she made some astounding comments.
First, she said, the OHRC has two roles — a judicial one and one that comments on issues such as the articles. So she was perfectly within her mandate.
“We said the complaint process doesn’t apply here.
“We find this series of articles to promote stereotypes and that’s harmful and we would like the media to think more about the impact on people of what they write,” she said.
Well, sorry. The role of the media is to report, review, criticize, comment. If sometimes we hurt people’s feelings, well, oops. This is still a semi-free society.
It was her response to Steyn’s criticism of OHRC’s silence on honour killings that shocked me.
“There are thousands of things that happen in the province of Ontario on a daily basis and we don’t comment on all of them,” she said.
But, I spluttered, women are being murdered.
“As I said, we are a small commission.
“There are many problematic things that happen in our community and we have to make choices because we can’t respond to everything,” Hall said.
So honour killings are merely “problematic”?
