During a hearing into the complaints last fall, Pankiw told the tribunal he simply believes aboriginals should not be given special treatment by governments or society.
“You can’t discriminate in favour of someone without discriminating against someone else. Discrimination is wrong,” he said. “I am an egalitarian. I believe in equality of all people.”
Pankiw gave as an example the case of a woman he knows who didn’t get into law school because a certain number of seats were set aside for aboriginal students.
“In my opinion, she was discriminated against,” he said.
Ezra Levant wrote about the case last year:
Smith found proof of Pankiw’s racism in the colour of ink used in the brochures: black and red, on white paper.
Those are “colours very much associated with aboriginal people, for whom four colours have come to be associate with the four cardinal directions and have great spiritual significance,” wrote Smith. “One can hardly claim that the symbolism in this pamphlet is not inflammatory.” A real judge would laugh that out of court. A real prosecutor would be too embarrassed to run with it.
The suit against Pankiw is clearly unconstitutional. In 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that human rights commissions could only pursue “hate” cases against Canadians whose messages were pure evil — they were explicitly forbidden from touching political speech. Whether or not Pankiw’s views on Indian crime are “right” should therefore be up to the voters.
