April 24, 2012
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.)
