Yes, we’re all getting sick of it, but we have to keep writing about them until they are destroyed…
As usual, the online debate rapidly devolved into tedious discussions about the finer points of recent Canadian law and history. Meanwhile, Canadian human rights commissions and tribunals, while slightly wounded by one of their own, lived to tyrannize our fellow citizens another day.
Not being a lawyer myself (thank goodness), I’m not inclined to enter into such conversations. Instead, my online response to the Hadjis development was simply this: “For 20 years, the bad guys got to pretend that something was constitutional. For the next 20 years, we get to say it isn’t.”
Because the human rights commissions and tribunals were never “real” to begin with, arguing these finer points of the law simply accords them legitimacy to which they aren’t entitled.
I don’t just mean that Section 2 of the Charter grants all Canadians freedom of speech and almost any restriction on that freedom therefore does not merit my adherence.
I don’t just mean that the 1990 Taylor decision (in which a split Supreme Court declared it legitimate for the state to prosecute “evil” speech) was a case of “legislating from the bench” and that therefore, again, I’m not obliged to adhere to Section 13 either.
I mean that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is itself – to borrow back a locution Mark Steyn has since borrowed from me – “a worthless piece of crap.” (…)
the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired and crafted by geniuses the likes of which the world had never seen and will never see again; the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on the other hand, was cobbled together a few years ago by a bunch of mediocrities.
It. Doesn’t. Matter. What. It. Says.
The Charter has as much import and impact upon my life as the instruction manual that came with my microwave.
