The Canadian Human Rights Commission: Is The Fork Already In Their Asses?

Mark Steyn was bound to ruffle some sensitive but plucky feathers at the Human Rights Commission Headquarters (the one located right next to the Hall of Justice. I think it's a community rehab center for former Scientologists) with his recent article "Human-Rights Commissions Make Me Gag."

And it did in a Letter to the Editor in The Montreal Gazette. Consider:

"It is a pity that space is given to Mark Steyn's self-serving campaign to ridicule human rights. Steyn's representation of marginal cases as the be all and end all of the work of human-rights commissions shows a lack of understanding of the system or, worse, a deliberate attempt to distort it.

Oh that we could move on and focus on the real issues such as the discrimination that people do face every day in Canada."

Ruth Selwyn - Former Executive Director Canadian Human Rights Foundation.

What this letter does is unwittingly prove Steyn's point: The CHRC is wasting its time attacking Canadians for questionable "rights" issues. What more it trivializes the travails that the two people named in the article are going through.

So, for Ms. Selwyn, even though the CHRC are bankrupting a businessman because he wouldn't allow some trouble maker to smoke medicinal marijuana in his establishment or have a cosmetic surgeon caught in a catch-22 for refusing to perform on a transvestite for lack of expertise, this is pitifully inconsequential to what the CHRC really does? So why bother with them?

I think we need to revisit the the idea of what constitutes "rights" in this country. That a person can't spark a doob in public to relieve some back pain is not a human rights issue. It's a human privilege issue. Odd that we are being asked to tolerate drugs in public for medical purposes but exhibit a wicked witch hunt mentality towards smokers?

That a writer expresses an opinion in a lousy magazine that happened to offend some flunkies at Osgood Hall (this is what happened to Steyn regarding excerpts from his book 'America Alone' in Maclean's) is also not a human rights issue. The Tyee has a thoughtful piece about the Canadian Islamic Council's decision to take Steyn and Maclean's to the court.

These are all the same people who claim that censorship is destroying our ability to debate. Duh. They're part of the problem. No one is capable of listening or reading different opinions anymore.

Perhaps we should have a commission to watch over the imbeciles who haul citizens before the gun-totin' CHRC - or its many provincial offspring conceived out of wedlock.

We pick and choose who gets to be accorded certain privileged rights and voila! You could be next. I wonder what Ms. Selwyn thinks about bloggers who do think all this to be troubling.

Or of this blog's soul-mate Rex Murphy on the CBC and this video blurb called Human Rights Gone Awry.

Above all, the scary part is that individuals in a so-called free society are hauled in front of some shlepp from the CHRC and forced to be interrogated. Funny, last I checked I didn't vote on who gets to have such an important post. All we need is another Eliot Spitzer with a combined Napoleon-Pepin the Short complex to run the show.

I have no problem with Mark Steyn bringing forth to our attention what little guys and gals have to fight in the face of Leviathan. Indeed, the patients run the asylum now. That Ms. Selwyn and her ilk would downplay such stressful battles should truly make us all gag.