The dismissal by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) of the complaint against Maclean’s magazine and columnist-author Mark Steyn was the right decision.
The complaint, under the hate message provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was brought by Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC).
It may be fairly surmised that the CHRC did not rule in favour of Elmasry and the CIC—given the record of its past rulings being almost without exception in favour of complainants—because the defendant was the widely read Canadian weekly newsmagazine, and its publishers would have appealed any decision against it.
The reason complaints of the sort brought against Maclean’s are not dismissed out of hand by federal and provincial human rights tribunals is due to section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, and similar codes in provincial statutes.It reads in part that any communication “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred” can be prosecuted on the “prohibited ground of discrimination.”
Section 13(1) covers the same ground as does the hate-propaganda Section 319 of the Criminal Code. The difference is that anyone taking offence has recourse under the human rights act provision—a National Post editorial explained—to “have an investigation launched and force a fellow citizen to undertake a legal defence, without having to comply with the rules of due process or the evidentiary standards that prevail in an actual courtroom.”
Freedom of speech
CHRC and its provincial counterparts should never have been given authority to prosecute matters relating to freedom of speech protected by the Canadian constitution. Those who insist that free speech is not unlimited and the Canadian tradition in this respect is somewhat different from that of the United States, are not denied recourse to law by bringing their complaint under the Criminal Code to a court properly constituted where the rights of all parties are fairly treated.
The problem with the CHRC’s use of section 13(1) to put a chill on free speech has been known for some time, and decried mostly by those of conservative persuasion subjected to the farcical hearings of the human rights tribunals.
But it took the clownishness of the CIC complaint to make it amply clear to an increasing number of Canadians why the censorious provision of section 13(1) is a blot on Canadian democracy.
There is irony here that it took Elmasry and his cohorts in the CIC to lodge their complaint of no merit against Maclean’s, and in the process put the human rights tribunals in the dock of public opinion as no other previous complainant had done.
Through the ages clowns have served many purposes apart from providing humour.
Shakespeare and Moliere used clowns to illuminate absurd situations, to expose the emperor when he is without clothes or when the law is an ass, and to make clowns utter words others would dare not say out of propriety or fear of reprisal.
This is what the CIC cohorts did as clowns for Canadians, revealing to them the scandalous redundancy of the Human Rights Act section 13(1).
It is now for Canada’s Parliament to do the right thing by revoking the section and saving Canadian democracy from dishonour as a result of its use.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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