MARK STEYN ON PSUEDO HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF FREEDOM
20/02/09 16:52 Filed in: Culture/
Death of the West
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): I'd first like to ask Mr. Mark Steyn to come forward and join us. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable. Good afternoon, Mr. Steyn. I would just explain to you that we have 30 minutes set aside that you may use as you wish in making comments. Time that is left over then will be divided amongst the caucuses. So please begin if you're ready.
Mr. Mark Steyn: I'd just like to make a brief statement, and then I'm happy to answer any questions.
The present Ontario human rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today, and in the course of such pseudo human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else's property or the human right to a transsexual labioplasty, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process and the presumption of innocence.
Far from reducing racism or sexism, the Ontario human rights regime explicitly institutionalizes racism and sexism through its inability to view any dispute except through the narrow prism of identity politics. It's at odds not just with eight centuries of this province's legal inheritance, but with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Canada likes that one so much, it sticks it on the back of the $50 bill, even though Ontario's human rights regime is in sustained systemic breach of article 6, article 7, articles 8 to 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21 and 27 of the UN declaration. The good news is that Ontario is not in violation of as many articles as Sudan or North Korea.
All are equal before the law and are entitled, without any discrimination, to equal protection of the law. That's article 7. It's not true in Ontario. Last year, the Ontario Human Rights Commission effectively gave Maclean's and myself a drive-by verdict. They couldn't be bothered taking us to trial, but they decided to pronounce us guilty anyway. That neglects the most basic principle of justice: Audi alteram partem; hear the other side. Chief commissar Barbara Hall didn't bother hearing the other side; she simply declared us guilty. That is the very defining act of a police state: an apparatchik announcing that a citizen is guilty of dissent from state orthodoxy.
But here's the point: Maclean's and I have no fear of Barbara Hall, the commission or the tribunal. You're welcome to try and do your worst to us. We have deep pockets. We pushed back and we filled the newspapers with stories about all these wacky cases that Barbara Hall and others are so obsessed about. Like all tinpot bullies, the commission couldn't take the heat and backed down. But if you're just a fellow who happens to own a restaurant in Burlington, the Ontario human rights regime will destroy your savings, your business and your life for no good reason. The verdict is irrelevant; the process is the punishment.
I would like to say one further thing: When Mohamed Elmasry announced his suits against Maclean's, he was supported by Terry Downey of the Ontario Federation of Labour, and Ms. Downey, explaining her support for Dr. Elmasry, said, "There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow." Sorry; I pass on that one. For one thing, there is no "proper conduct" in the wacky world of pseudo human rights in this province. The rules are made up as they go along, so even if you wanted to follow them, you can't. In John Locke's words, they "dispose of the Estates of the Subject arbitrarily."
Secondly, it's all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day primly telling a homosexual 50 years ago that there's proper conduct that everyone has to follow, or a Jew 70 years ago that there's proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That's why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you subordinate legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril, and that' s the state in Ontario today.
Thank you.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. We will begin with the official opposition, Ms. MacLeod.
Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Welcome to our committee, Mr. Steyn. During the summer, this committee convened to interview and review the 22 vice-chairs and the 22 members of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Throughout that process, your case, Maclean's versus the Ontario Human Rights Commission, as well as what happened in British Columbia to you as well as what happened federally to you, was front and centre on our minds. Consistently throughout that process I asked questions of the deputants, those seeking to be appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, if they believed the free press trumped discrimination or vice versa. One of the deputants actually responded. Today, earlier, I asked the same question to the chair of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. He responded and said that neither trumps either. I would like your view on that, because it follows a logical set of questions that I have which are next with respect to freedom of expression and freedom of speech.
Mr. Mark Steyn: With respect to the witness this morning, that has become a standard equivocation at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Whenever tribunal judges take away individual human rights, they do so under the guise of what they call balancing competing rights. So for example, going back to the Scott Brockie case, they claim to be balancing his right to freedom of religion with the right of the gay people seeking printed materials to be free from discrimination. In practice they almost never balance those rights. They always defer to collective rights, group rights, in favour of individual rights. I'm an absolutist on this. I agree with the view that the ultimate minority is the individual and classically, historically, common law has been entirely antipathetic to group rights, because who can speak for a group? The notion of group rights should be an abomination to a settled democracy as old as this province.
Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Has the experience that you and Maclean's faced, do you believe-in your opinion, has that chilled coverage of other controversial events in this province?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes, I would say that's undoubtedly the case. Essentially, Maclean's and I-Maclean's in the corporate sense decided the amount of money it was willing to spend to see off these assaults on freedom, and I made a personal calculation of the amount of money that I was willing to spend on that. I'm fortunate, unlike most people caught in the human rights trap, to have that amount of money that I can spend.
But the reality is that most editors and most publishers don't want to get caught in this business. What you see progressively is the shrivelling of the bounds of public discourse. People say to me, "Don't worry; you'll be acquitted eventually." That happened to that guy in Saskatchewan, in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the fellow who took out the ad, not even quoting the Biblical passages but just citing the chapter and verse. It appeared as an ad in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. Four years later, that was overturned at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. But in reality, nobody can place that ad today. You couldn't take that ad to the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and expect them to run it. So, in that sense, the public space, the space for public discourse, shrivels remorselessly under this regime.
Ms. Lisa MacLeod: You spoke earlier about the drive-by verdict of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Could you inform us of other aspects of natural justice that were lacking in your experience before the Ontario Human Rights Commission?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. There's a reason why-but let's start with the basic thing. For example, truth is no defence. No one was disputing the truth of what I wrote, nobody was arguing that it was libellous or seditious or false, for all of which there would be appropriate legal remedy. In essence, the plaintiffs were arguing that they'd been offended. Well, offensiveness is in the eye of the offended. I have no way of commenting on that one way or another. It's not possible in a legal sense to mount a defence to the accusation that you've offended somebody, which is why the human right not to be offended should not exist in free societies. That's the first and most basic thing that this system fails in.
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Ms. Lisa MacLeod: It's interesting that you bring that up. Murray Campbell, who's one of your colleagues here at Queen's Park-he works for the Globe and Mail-wrote a column on August 28 about this committee and the probe that we put forward with the appointees. He writes that: "Ms. MacLeod is right to explore the grey area between free speech and responsibility and to wonder how the tribunal will operate when it is handed allegations of discrimination from people who don't believe press councils or hate laws protect them." He specifically cites you. He says that it' s time "for Attorney General Chris Bentley to get it going"-and that's more public debate-"before Mr. Steyn writes another book."< /p>
I say this because the defence of you and your freedom to express yourself and the freedom of your opinions-the support ranged from many different groups across Canada, from Egale to PEN to the Canadian Association of Journalists, as well as other journalists that work in the field, in addition to media ranging from the Toronto Star to Eye Weekly to, now, the Globe and Mail. Have you called for the censorship provisions of the Human Rights Commission to be appealed, and did it surprise you that you had so much support?
Mr. Mark Steyn: No, because I think it should be obvious. If anything, I was rather alarmed by the number of Canadian journalists who are quite happy to serve, in effect, as eunuchs of the politically correct state. I can't understand why anybody would want to do that.
It took a while. The organizations you mentioned were late getting on the bandwagon. In a sense, if you want to make this a right-wing, left-wing thing, the international left in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia-people who loathe me personally-got the essence of this far quicker than the Canadian left did: that if you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you don't believe in free speech at all.
Every time you have someone like Haroon Siddiqui at the Toronto Star saying, "Oh, it's all about striking a balance," and all the rest of it-every time someone tiptoes down that primrose path, it leads only to tyranny. If you don't believe in free speech for people you loathe, you hate, you revile, you don't believe in free speech at all.
Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Thank you very much. I know my colleague Christine Elliott has a few questions for you-or my colleague Randy Hillier has a few questions for you.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Okay. I just will warn you that we have about two minutes left for your caucus.
Mr. Randy Hillier: Thank you very much for being here. It is an absolute pleasure to hear people speaking forthrightly, such as yourself today.
The process, you've talked about. The process is the trap. The objective is not important in this whole process. Do you have any comments on if this human rights tribunal ought to be here at all, or how you might offer suggestions or recommendations to improve it?Mr. Mark Steyn: I believe in the abolition of the commission, because I believe the commission is nothing but ideological activists. I have no objection to that; I've been accused of that myself, but I do it on my own dime and I don't see why commissar Hall and her colleagues shouldn't also do it on their own dime.
The tribunal, I think, needs to be brought within the codes and conventions of this country's legal system. At the moment, it upends them. The burden of proof ought to be on the accuser. The accuser should not be allowed unlimited funds to frivolously torment people for no reason, beggaring them for something that serves no public purpose.
Whatever you think of the marijuana thing, it seems initially to arise from a defectively written law. But that great issue, the issue of where you can smoke medicinal marijuana-the burden of that should not be on Gator Ted. The transsexual labioplasty is perfect nonsense. Any sane person understands exactly what was going on when that doctor said that he was not willing to operate on these two transsexual women.
The idea that people should be essentially punished by a system that does not allow them equality with their accuser is a mark of great shame to this province. If there has to be a tribunal, it should be brought within the bounds of normal legal practice and this province's 800-year legal tradition.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. I'll move on to Ms. DiNovo.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: Mr. Steyn, if somebody puts a sign up in their store that says, "No Jews Need Apply," would that be considered okay in your-
Mr. Mark Steyn: We're not talking about "No Jews Need Apply." It's very interesting to me. Even at the time, for example, the famous No Irish Need Apply song, which became a famous hit song in the 19th century that Irish-Americans took up enthusiastically and made one of the biggest hit songs of the mid-19th century-when they actually went looking for "No Irish Need Apply" ads, in the whole of the United States, they found exactly two. It's easy to do. You can go now and search the entire archives of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, all the rest of it: There were only two. So even in its day, the "No Irish Need Apply," "No Jews Need Apply," "No Muslims Need Apply" was a very rare activity. Today, it's almost entirely vanished. That's not what we're talking about. If you look at the tribunal-
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: But why not, if I might interrupt? If freedom of speech is absolute, your freedom of speech to put in your store window "No Jews Need Apply" or "No Muslims Will Be Served" or "Coloureds Sit at the End of the Counter" is surely covered by freedom of speech.
Mr. Mark Steyn: I think that's to do with basic equality before the law. I recognize laws of public accommodation. I recognize, for example, that if you have a restaurant, you can't say that the Jews sit at this table and the Muslims sit at that table.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: Why not? It's your freedom, as an individual freedom of speech, to be able to do so.
Mr. Mark Steyn: No, because I think that once you get into the business, as I said, of public accommodation, where you're offering a service to the public-and again, I think there are exceptions to this. There's the famous case in Mississauga, the latest to make this system a laughingstock, about the woman who claims she was dismissed as a stripper on age grounds. I've never been to this strip club in Mississauga, but it sounds like the top-of-the-line strip joint in town, and obviously they pay better than other strip clubs in that area. Why shouldn't I go along and say, "Hey, you know something? I'd like to work as a stripper here and you're discriminating against me on grounds of"-
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: To bring you back to point, though, the point of the Ontario Human Rights Code and of human rights codes generally is to prevent the "No Jews Need Apply" action. Without the Ontario Human Rights Code, without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of speech, in its absolute and ultimate form, would rule the day. Clearly, hateful words lead to hateful actions.
Mr. Mark Steyn: No. I would say-this is the classic human rights dodge, by the way, to identify a non-problem that you claim to be solving. Nobody is putting up "No Jews Need Apply" signs. As I said, historically-
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: They are paying women 71 cents for every dollar that men earn, however.
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: That is going on. And in fact, they are still spreading a great many hateful words on the Internet-
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes, exactly.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: -and they are still denying transsexuals and transgendered folk employment or housing, quite legally.
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. Let me just talk about this " hateful words" business. This is again the sham of this Human Rights Tribunal, in that it does not treat all hate equally.
You claim, for example, to be interested in women's rights. We have honour killings; we have arranged marriages against the wishes of the brides in this province. The Human Rights Tribunal is silent about that. The Human Rights Tribunal accepts implicitly the two-tier sisterhood whereby if you are a western woman and you're fired from the strip joint in Mississauga and you want to kick up a big fuss, they'll take up your case because you're tormenting some hapless white, male strip joint owner. But if you're 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez and you get killed in an honour killing, they accept implicitly that that's a two-tier sisterhood with multicultural sensitivities.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: No, that's simply not true.
Mr. Mark Steyn: No, no. You brought this up, madam. At the time my case came into the news, there was a fellow in Toronto who went on the Internet and explicitly urged the killing of a minister of the crown and Canadian troops, and nobody bothers to investigate him for hate speech.
Ms. Cheri DiNovo: No more questions.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you. Mr. Zimmer.
Mr. David Zimmer: Mr. Steyn, there was a well-known, indeed famous, American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made a statement in which he expressed his view of the limit on free speech in a case in the 1930s, and I'm wondering if you agree or disagree with this statement. He said that nobody is free to yell "Fire" in a crowded movie theatre.
Mr. Mark Steyn: It wasn't the 1930s; it was 1919 that Oliver Wendell Holmes made that statement. It's interesting, that case. He was an American-
Mr. David Zimmer: I know, but do you agree with that statement or not?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Let me say this for a start: He was upholding espionage charges against an anti-war protester. So by his measure, thousands of Canadian liberals would have been rounded up for protesting the war in Afghanistan.
Mr. David Zimmer: But don't duck the question.
Mr. Mark Steyn: I'm not ducking the question.
Mr. David Zimmer: Do you disagree with that statement or agree with it?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Let me come at it one other way, in which it's not relevant to our discussion-
Mr. David Zimmer: No, no, but then answer the statement.
Mr. Mark Steyn: Because Oliver-
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Excuse me. Could I just have one speaker at a time?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely-falsely-shouting "Fire" in a theatre. The problem with the Human Rights Tribunal is that falsely shouting "Fire" is not at issue. It doesn't matter whether the theatre actually is on fire, because under the Human Rights Tribunal, truth is not a defence.
In my own particular case, no one has ever pointed to a single fact in the Maclean's article, an excerpt from my book, that is inaccurate. So essentially-
Mr. David Zimmer: But back to Holmes's statement, is that a fair limitation on freedom of speech: You can't yell " Fire" in a movie theatre, just as a general proposition?
Mr. Mark Steyn: As I've tried to answer you, I think if the theatre is on fire, you're certainly entitled to point that out. By the way, that, as a metaphor, is simply a ludicrous metaphor. He was talking about gaslight, 19th century theatres. By 1919, the Winter Garden on Broadway-I don't assume you were there for Hitchy-Koo of 1917; I wasn't either-was an electrified theatre, and it wasn't in danger of burning down. The metaphor is lazy and irrelevant.
Mr. David Zimmer: What about this, just paraphrasing Holmes: Nobody is free to yell provocative racial epithets in a multiracial society like Toronto or New York. Would you agree with that?
Mr. Mark Steyn: I think society should have a bias that makes it unacceptable to use, for example, the N-word, as they say down south-
Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce that?
Mr. Mark Steyn: -in public, but I think-well, that' s the point.
Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce that?
Mr. Mark Steyn: A man, a member of the British Foreign-
Mr. David Zimmer: I agree with that. How would you enforce it?
Mr. Mark Steyn: A member of the British Foreign Office was arrested over the weekend for yelling, "Effing Jews. Kill the effing Jews."
Mr. David Zimmer: How would you enforce it?
Mr. Mark Steyn: I don't think he should have been arrested. I think he should be publicly shamed. This is not a hateful province. This is not a jurisdiction where people openly insult and use racist epithets. But what happens when you accord your tribunal the power to regulate speech is that you replace a social ill, people using racial epithets, with a worse ill. It's far worse to allow government the sole power to arbitrate what is acceptable speech or not. If a guy uses the N-word in a bar, I would rather somebody slugged him on the chin rather than him being dragged up before your tribunal.
Mr. David Zimmer: Let me ask just one last question. I understood your point. Your feeling is that an individual right should trump a group right, that you're an absolutist on that point, and I understand that. Now, supposing we have not a group right versus an individual right or individual freedom, but we have an individual right that's in conflict with an individual right of free speech. How would you settle that one? I understand you're saying that in a group right versus an individual right of free speech, the individual right should trump it. Let's take an individual right versus an individual right of free speech. How would you balance that?
Mr. Mark Steyn: I don't understand that question without something more specific. For example, my right to free speech: If I say that you like to dress in women's clothing and go out and pick up truckers on the QEW and that is not true, you have the right to sue me for libel. But if I say, in a more general sense, that I happen to disagree with your political views or whatever, then that's simply a matter of opinion.
Free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion. When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't start a newspaper and print what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up.
I think, actually, we don't need sensitivity training in this jurisdiction; we need insensitivity training. We need to learn to rub along in a much more agreeable, rough-and-tumble fashion.
Mr. David Zimmer: Just my last thought, then, back to this paraphrasing of Holmes: Nobody is free to yell provocative racial epithets on a busy intersection in Toronto or New York.
Mr. Mark Steyn: I disagree-
Mr. David Zimmer: Would you let that person yell a racial epithet or not?
Mr. Mark Steyn: I think that if someone wants to yell things about Jews, obviously, in this town, they're free to do so. They were yelling explicitly eliminationist, genocidal rhetoric about Jews just a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Toronto, and neither the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal nor the Ontario Human Rights Commission seems in the least bit interested in it. So you are identifying essentially something that is not the business-the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is not in the business of people shouting explicitly eliminationist, genocidal rhetoric on the streets of Toronto. That's not what this tribunal or its commission does. They couldn't care less about that.
Mr. David Zimmer: Thank you. I think that's it.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): One minute left.
Mrs. Liz Sandals: I just wondered if we could get a bit of clarification. Is it your understanding that one of the prohibited grounds that the tribunal is dealing with is freedom of speech? It was my understanding that that's strictly a federal issue.
Mr. Mark Steyn: No. I was caught-
Mrs. Liz Sandals: Not the commission; the tribunal.
Mr. Mark Steyn: Yes. I was caught, obviously, in the changeover. Essentially, Barbara Hall, I think, issued her press release about me-
Mrs. Liz Sandals: But you would agree with me that the tribunal has not entered into this area?
Mr. Mark Steyn: Ah. No, no, no. But this is the interesting thing about her press release: She thinks these are exactly the kinds of issues that the commission ought to be bringing before the tribunal, as it does-
Mrs. Liz Sandals: And is it in the Ontario Human Rights Code that this is a prohibited ground-freedom of speech?
Mr. Mark Steyn: I would not read it there as such, but given the expansion-
Mrs. Liz Sandals: So you would agree that this is not terribly relevant to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal?
Mr. Mark Steyn: No, no, no. Given the expansion of the definition that has occurred in the years since the Taylor decision, and given the commission's own words on the kinds of cases it hopes to bring to the tribunal, I think it's clear that the tribunal will be dealing with essentially freedom-of-expression cases, whatever the Ontario code says, in the years ahead.
The Chair (Mrs. Julia Munro): Thank you very much. That concludes the time that we have available. Thank you, Mr. Steyn, for being here.
Mr. Mark Steyn: Thank you.
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