Section 13 is deeply destructive. There are some 33 million people in Canada, yet as Ezra pointed out, one individual citizen has his name on every section 13 prosecution since 2002. I’m sure some of you are familiar with Matthew Hopkins, who in 1645 appointed himself England’s witch-finder general and went around the country hunting down witches and turning them in for the price of one pound per witch. In 2002 Richard Warman appointed himself Canada’s hate-finder general and went around the Internet hunting down so-called haters and turning them in for lucrative tax-free sums amounting to many thousands of dollars. Hate-finder Warman and his enablers at the commission abused the extremely narrow constitutional approval given to section 13 by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision and instead turned it into a personal inquisition for himself and his pals.Abolish section 13, and life in Canada would be affected not one jot, except that Mr. Warman, Dean Stacey, and the other rogue civil servants would have to write their anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist website ravings on their own dime.Let me take the most recent example of a section 13 conviction. The sole charge on which Marc Lemire was found guilty a month ago was for a post that appeared at his website, written by somebody else. That piece was read by a grand total of just eight people in the whole of Canada, which works out to 0.8 of a Canadian per province, or if you include territories, 0.6153 of a Canadian. And almost all those 0.6153s of a Canadian going to this website and reading this piece were Richard Warman and his fellow dress-up Nazis at the Human Rights Commission, salivating at the prospect of having found another witch to provide more bounty.
In other words, no one in Canada saw this post. No one in Canada read it. Nothing could be less “likely to expose” anyone to hatred or contempt than an unread post at an unread website. Yet Canadian taxpayers paid for Jennifer Lynch and the Nazi fetishists at the commission to investigate this unread bit of nothing for six years.
In the course of securing this itsy-bitsy single conviction, these psychologically disturbed employees of the Human Rights Commission wrote and distributed far more hate speech of their own. As the recent rulings of Judge Lustig and Judge Hadjis confirm, there is no justification for what Richard Warman and the CHRC did. This is the sad truth about this disgusting agency at the beginning of the 21st century. There would be less hate speech in Canada–less hate speech–if taxpayers did not have to pay CHRC employees to go around writing it and publishing it.
The entire presentation, which includes Ezra Levant, and exchange with the parliamentarians is worth reading.
