Rex Murphy's column...perpetuates two serious misapprehensions about human rights and rights commissions. First, he recounts the myth that the "central" human right is "free speech and thought." All students of human rights are agreed that there should be no hierarchy of rights, but if there were, it would probably be the right to life. For untold numbers of the world's hungry millions, it is more important to be able to put bread on the table than to indulge in delivering oneself of controversial columns of newsprint. And even in an affluent society like Canada, who would defend the view that the right to free speech is more "central" than, say, equality rights for women or the rights of the child?
Second, Mr. Murphy perpetuates the falsehood that human-rights commissions "take aim" at the right of free speech. Rights commissions in Canada do not take aim at anything; they take complaints that are lodged with them and that they are obliged by law to investigate.
I think Mr. Murphy would be well-advised to stick to his polysyllabic musings on Canadian life and leave human rights alone.
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I would defend the right to free speech as more "central" than equality rights or rights of the child.
Free speech is the best tool we have to protect (or bring into existence) other rights. Other than violence, or placing faith in a (benevolent?) dictator, I'm not sure what other tools there are.
Imagine a nation with equality rights but limited expression rights. We all know that reasonable people can disagree on the content of rights like "equality". So who gets to decide what equality means? It will no doubt be whoever is in charge of deciding which speech is appropriate and which isn't. How do you change things when your speech is silenced by those in power?
Human Rights Commissions, as presently constituted, are a real danger to legitimate discourse in Canada. Controversial speech, like Mark Steyn's theories about Islam and demographics, or even the Mohammed cartoons, makes people think and take positions, whether they agree with the speech or not. It forces them to confront ideas that they disagree with, instead of silencing them. Sometimes, when you try to confront something that you don't like, you find that you don't have a good answer, and eventually you find yourself agreeing with that point of view. Isn't it better for ideas to compete among the people than to have a government body telling us which ideas are acceptable?
While someone like Steyn, backed by Macleans, has the deep pockets to successfully defend a Human Rights Complaint, many other people don't. They're more likely to cave in to complaints, or avoid expressing themselves in the first place, when they know that they have the potential to be bankrupted by legal fees.
Some speech can be characterized as immediately dangerous. We have criminal law provisions to deal with this sort of expression. As for the rest, we should let it be tested by all of society, not the select few appointed to a commission and the complainants who initiate the cases.
Whether commissioners want to "take aim" at free speech or not, their enabling statutes allow other people to force them to. It's time to repeal those sections of the various human rights acts which give jurisdiction over speech.
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