Mark Steyn addresses the Ontario Human Rights Commission
Mark Steyn testified before the Ontario Human Rights Commission on Monday February 9, 2009. Hat tip to Post-Darwinist for the following transcript of his main statement:
I’d just like to make a brief statement and then answer any questions.
The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property or the human right for a transsexual labiaplasty – in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence.
Far from reducing racism or sexism, the Ontario Human Rights regime explicitly institutionalizes racism and sexism from its inability to view any dispute other than through the narrow prism of identity politics.
It’s at odds not just with eight centuries of this provinces legal inheritance, but with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Canada likes that one so much, it sticks it on the back of the $50 bill, even though Ontario’s Human Rights regime is in sustained, systemic breach of Article 6, Article 7, Articles 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21, and 27 of the UN Declaration. The good news is that Ontario is not in violation of as many articles as Sudan or North Korea.
If you are not rich or powerful, “the Ontario Human Rights regime will destroy your savings, your business, your life, for no good reason.”
“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” That’s how it was said It’s not true in Ontario. The Ontario Human Rights Commission effectively gave Maclean’s and myself a drive-by verdict. They couldn’t be bothered taking us to trial but they decided to pronounce us guilty anyway. That evades the most basic principle of justice: Aude alteram partem. (Hear the other side.)
[Human rights commissioner] Barbara Hall didn’t bother to hear the other side. She simply declared us guilty. That is the very defining act of a police state. An apparatchik announcing that a citizen is guilty of dissent from state orthodoxy.
But, and here’s the point: Maclean’s and I have no fear of Barbara Hall, the Commission, or the Tribunal. You are welcome to try to your worst with us. We have deep pockets, we push back, and we filled the newspapers with stories about all these wacky cases that Barbara Hall and others are so obsessed about.
And like all tinpot bullies, the Commission couldn’t take the heat and backed down. If you’re just a fellow who happens to own a restaurant in Burlington, the Ontario Human Rights regime will destroy your savings, your business, your life, for no good reason. The verdict’s irrelevant. The process is the punishment.
When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.
I’d like to say one third thing. When Mohamed El-Masry announced his suits against Maclean’s, he was supported by Terry Downey of the Ontario Federation of Labour. And, Ms. Stanley, explaining her support for El-Masry, said, “There is proper conduct that everyone has to follow.”
Sorry, I pass on that one.
For one thing, there is no proper conduct in the wacky world of pseudo-human rights in this province. The rules are made up as they go along, so even if you wanted to follow them, you can’t. In John Locke’s words, “They dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily.”
Secondly, it’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril. And that’s the state in Ontario today.
Thank you.
Visit Post-Darwinist for further commentary including the question and answer session. Visit The Daily Offices for a full preliminary transcript of the day’s events.
