Two Out of Three IS Bad

As a wag once observed, the Holy Roman Empire was none of the above (that is, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). The Canadian "human rights" system can at least lay claim to being two of the above--it is a "system" of sorts and it is definitely Canadian. It's the middle bit, the "human rights" part, that's rather a stretch, as Ian Hunter observes in the National Post. Hunter uses two recent examples to illustrate how our "human rights" law in Canada is a pretty hit-or-miss affair. The first example: Mohawk elders who are evicting non-Native (spouses of Natives) from their reserve, a feat of racism that's apparently permitted to Mohawks. The second example: that obese chick in Quebec who complained to her province's "human rights" body when her condo refused to take away another resident's parking space and give it to her (because it was closer to the building, and she was "disabled" by her fatness while the other resident with the closer parking spot had a less-disabling "sore shoulder"). Hunter concludes:

Well, it's reasonable for the obese Ms. Myrand, perhaps less so for Ms. Nolet of the sore shoulder. It has long been clear in human rights jurisprudence that there is a hierarchy of prohibited grounds of discrimination; race and sex always trump, say, religion or age. We shall now await the formulation of a hierarchy of disability; obesity, we now know, trumps a sore shoulder.

Just what was the condo board supposed to do? Unless both women drove Smart cars (unlikely in the case of Ms. Myrand), the Solomonic precedent of cutting the space in half wouldn't do the trick. One of the two residents had to be disappointed. And it's the iron fist of the human rights bureaucracy that picks which one.

The evicted property owners of Kahnawake are without a remedy because Canadian law is not applied on Indian reserves. Ms. Nolet is without a remedy because human rights law is applied to private parking places -- but in a manner that any reasonable person would consider to be totally arbitrary.

I remember years ago participating in a panel on human rights law at the University of Ottawa with, among others, the late Gordon Fairweather, the first chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. He severely upbraided me at the time for suggesting that human rights rhetoric stands common sense and meaning on its head and leads, inevitably, to fantasy land. Gordon, wherever you are, I rest my case.

Hierarchical; arbitrary; fantastical: quite a trifecta. Hard to see any fairness--the stated aim of human rights legislation--in that.