Saturday, December 12, 2009

"Human Rights" Machine Suffers Another Setback

Jonathan Kay has the skinny on the latest HRC smackdown--a real judge in a real court telling the hellacious Babsy Hall to get stuffed (in so many words). Babsy had argued that it was okey-dokey for Oshawa "landlords" to buy up properties in a nice residential neighbourhood and turn them into cheap squats for drunken students--part of her "fair" housing fatwa. Kay picks up the story from there:
Enter Ontario Human Rights Commission chief Barbara Hall — best known to Canada for a creepy 2008 manifesto, urging government to give human-rights mandarins the power to censor media publications they don't like. Litigating the Oshawa case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, she argued that preventing lodging houses from operating in the disputed neighborhoods would compromise the students' "access to housing."

"We feel ... students should have access to various parts of the city in which to live and that we all should have that kind of access, and the bottom line is that none of us can choose our neighbours," Ms. Hall said in an interview. "Sometimes we're lucky and sometimes we're not."

In this case, fortunately, the outcome was "not": The Supreme Court last month rejected her argument. Hallelujah.

This is the second news story in recent days that has shown us just how out-of-control the human-rights industry has become in this country: Last week, in a scathing opinion, a judge struck down a renegade opinion from an Alberta Human Rights Tribunal that improperly tried to muzzle a socially-conservative pastor with anti-gay views. And before that, there was the scandalously spurious human-rights prosecutions of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, conservative media figures who were hit with nuisance human-rights prosecutions after criticizing radical Islam.

How long are Canadian taxpayers expected to bankroll "human rights" commissions that champion censorship, political correctness, and the rights of flophouse denizen to invade family neighborhoods? It's a question that Ontario's opposition Conservatives may want to put to voters when the province goes to the polls in 2011.

For years, Premier Dalton McGuinty and his predecessors have used the Human Rights Commission as a dumping ground for bothersome activists — under the theory that they could be safely ignored once ensconced within the government's own bureaucracy. The same pattern more or less holds in other jurisdictions. But the joke's on the taxpayers — who have watched from the sidelines as these bureaucrats have used the machinery of state to undermine basic Canadian principles.

When will Ontario — and the rest of the country — get a politician willing to stand up for our core values?
When, indeed? This monstrous machinery is out of control: instead of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey we've got BARB in 2009: An HRC Idiocy. Alas, it seems so far our parliamentarians have lacked the stones and the good sense to mothball the machine--for good.

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