Taki's Mag

Canada’s Human Rights Commissions (HRCs) are the bureaucrats who fined a comedian for heckling back at lesbian hecklers and persecuted a magazine that published the so-called “Muhammad cartoons.”

The HRCs’ leftist defenders say these tribunals were originally created to mediate housing and employment disputes that smacked of racial or gender discrimination. They insist that if only we heartless right-wing troglodytes who demand the HRCs’ immediate abolition understood this, surely we’d soften our stance. They say these commissions only need a little reform; a few tweaks and they’ll return to their original, well-intentioned mandate.

That’s exactly what some of us fear.

Even when they are supposedly sticking to their “housing and employment” knitting, the HRCs add to the discrimination, division, and social discord they pretend to ameliorate.

Last year, Ontario’s HRC declared that certain commonplace phrases found in online apartment ads were illegal. For instance, expressions such as “ideal for student” now constitute “age discrimination.”

But when a reporter brought over thirty “Muslim only” online apartment ads to their attention, the HRC claimed their organization was suddenly too small and overworked to prosecute these cases.

I support these Muslim landlords’ right to rent to whomever they wish—as long as everyone else can do the same. But they can’t, in part because Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t formally recognize private property rights.

When it comes to public housing, shouldn’t the government exercise the same color-blindness it demands of private landlords?

That’s a good one.

A man named Kirk Munroe says that while he and his family were staying at Ottawa’s Carling Family Shelter last year, immigrant residents were being moved up the 15,000-name public housing waiting list ahead of “white Canadians” such as himself. He took the city to the Ontario HRC tribunal last month, claiming discrimination on the grounds of “race, color, disability and reprisal.”

The HRC agreed to hear this case, even though are notoriously hostile to white Christians; in one hundred Section 13 “hate speech” cases, 100% of respondents were white. (Meanwhile, a complaint against a Montreal Muslim who calls for beheading homosexuals was dismissed without even being heard.)

In Munroe’s case, the tribunal dismissed all but one of the grounds, that of reprisal. The bureaucrats’ reasons were typically arbitrary and flaky. (For example, they just ruled that a man doesn’t have to have his penis removed to be legally considered female.)

Particularly amusing was the conclusion that “while Munroe was diagnosed with an undisclosed ‘chronic medical condition,’ he was not dying and in turn did not qualify for priority housing.” (Apt. for rent—corpses preferred.)

Furthermore, the tribunal heard testimony that “the immigrants in question may have been victims of domestic violence, which…would account for why they were offered social housing so quickly.” (Room to let—bruised females only.)

We can object that government should get out of the housing and “shelter” business altogether and/or that Mr. Munroe should devote his ample free time to seeking gainful employment. But in the here and now, Mr. Munroe’s allegations of anti-white bias seem believable.

News of Munroe’s case broke around the same time that Frank Field, England’s “poverty tsar,” declared that “up to half of all social housing lets [in London] are given to those born abroad.”

In the United States, HUD’s Section 8 and public housing programs are open to both US citizens and those holding “eligible immigration status.” State programs have their own criteria; in Massachusetts, you can apply for housing “no matter what your immigration status is.”

In 2009, it emerged that Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango, a native Kenyan, had applied for asylum in Boston in 2002, moved into federally funded housing in 2003, and stayed there even after a judge ordered her to leave the US. Onyango eventually moved into a state-funded apartment, where, conveniently, her immigration status could not be questioned. Her deportation order has since been waived.

Many of those illegal immigrants have US-born “anchor babies” who automatically become American citizens. Their means they (and their parents and siblings) are eligible for federal public housing as “mixed families.”

And now, Obama’s Department of Justice is fighting alleged discrimination against blacks and Latinos applying for Section 8 housing in LA County’s Lancaster and Palmdale, “even though 86% of the Section 8 recipients in both cities are minorities.”

When it comes to public housing, there appears to be no room at the inn for “white privilege.”