There are a number of other issues raised in the recent tribunal hearing:
- The Commission is supposed to be complaint-based, yet commission employees were lurking on discussion groups, and apparently posting entrapment hate speech, in the absence of any complaint. In other words, they weren't doing their jobs; they were just goofing off on the internet. It is no wonder that Canadian human rights commissions are horrifically backlogged.
- Once a complaint is received, I can understand obtaining passwords to lurk on a password-locked discussion group that is the subject of the complaint (of course, given allegations of Commission trickery, we have to question the origin of all 'complaints', not to mention the peculiarly conspiratorial relationship between complainants and Commission staffers). There is no possible way to justify any postings by Commission investigators. These postings are, at the very least, entrapment, and are probably actionable hate speech themselves. Canadian human rights law will be a mockery if the staffers making these postings aren't prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
- In at least one case, the Commission obtained a computer hard drive which had been seized by the police, which they then examined, in the absence of any warrant, to attempt to make their case. I'm not sure how many sections of the Canadian Constitution and Canadian law were run over in that little exercise in thuggery.
- It appears that the Commission has been sharing information with the Canadian spy agency, CSIS. There needs to be a full judicial investigation of this outrage against the privacy rights of Canadians, with the appropriate bureaucrat criminals fired and prosecuted.
"In fact, for an organization that is supposed to promote 'human rights,' the HRC's agents seem curiously oblivious to basic aspects of constitutional law. In one famous exchange during the Lemire case, Steacy was asked 'What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?' - to which he replied 'Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value.' (I guess Section 2 has been excised from his copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights.)"
The Commission considers itself to be on a Mission From God to eliminate hate speech. Since there are no values higher than thought control, Commission staffers felt themselves unconstrained by any concepts of law or decency. This has to change.
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