The CHRC’s chief commissioner claims she is seeking a ‘balanced debate.’ Here’s my offer.
And so it is that the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, after lying low during the worst year-and-a-half in its existence, now feels it safe to poke its head above the parapet. A year ago, at the height of publicity over its investigation of Maclean’s for publishing an excerpt of my book, the CHRC sought to get itself off the hook in the traditional manner: commission a report. They signed up professor Richard Moon, who’s no pal of mine and is distressingly partial to state censorship. Yet, amazingly, his findings, published at the end of last year, recommended the abolition of Section 13—not, alas, on the grounds that this abominable “law” licensing ideological apparatchiks to police the opinions of the citizenry is at odds with eight centuries of Canada’s legal inheritance, but on the narrower utilitarian basis that in the age of the Internet Section 13 is unenforceable.
Still, this came as a bit of a shock to the CHRC thought police, who regard it as entirely natural for the state to regulate the bounds of public discourse. They decided that the Moon report was now merely the “first phase” of their analysis, and that a second would shortly follow. So this month the CHRC’s chief commissar, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C. (which I believe stands for “Queen of Censorship”), presented a special report to Parliament called “Freedom of Expression and Freedom from Hate in the Internet Age.”
By the way, lest you think I’m exaggerating about incipient fascism, consider that title: it appears to be “balancing” two “human rights,” but, in fact, it’s doing no such thing. “Freedom of” denotes a genuine human right: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. “Freedom from” (with the exception of “freedom from government control”) denotes not a human right but a government right—the right to erect a massive enforcement regime in pursuit of some statist goal. “Freedom from want” or “freedom from inequality” sound, to Canadian ears, very benign, but they presuppose, at minimum, a giant government regulatory regime and a restraint on real, actual humans’ rights. “Freedom from hate” is an especially repugnant concept to a free society, since “hate” is a human emotion that beats, to one degree or another, in every human breast. To be human is to hate and be hated: see the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives or whatnot in which it’s patiently explained to the hero how much more smoothly everything operates once you’ve had all those beastly, turbulent, destabilizing things called “emotions” ironed out and you’re just wandering around with a glassy-eyed expression and a flat monotone voice, like Jennifer Lynch reading out the fraternal greetings from the Sudanese Human Rights Commissioner at the CHRC Christmas office party. A society “free” from “hate” is, by definition, totalitarian, because such a “human” right is fundamentally inhuman: it can only be granted and policed by the state. And the fact that Commissar Lynch attempts to make it one end of her balancing act to be weighed against “freedom of expression” is very revealing: for the chief commissar and her colleagues, “rights” are not inalienable, but something which is essentially in the gift of the state, and therefore which it is necessary for the state to constrain and “balance” until it achieves the appropriate degree of harmony:
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But, in the absence of any willingness to debate, reasonable people pondering Canada’s strangely ambitious Official Censor might object not just philosophically but on Professor Moon-like utilitarian grounds: if you’re not smart enough to debate Ezra Levant, you’re not smart enough to police the opinions of 30 million people.
