Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, by Ezra Levant, McClelland & Stewart, 216 pages, $28.99
Ezra Levant is the No. 1 advocate for, and defender of, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought in modern Canada. His story, and the reason he has written Shakedown , began with the now famous Danish “Mohammed” cartoons.
Levant, then publisher of the Western Standard newsmagazine, republished the 12 cartoons after their original publication had sparked riots in a number of countries in which an estimated 100 people died, spurred death threats against the cartoonists, led to the burning of Danish embassies in at least three countries and thus became a massive worldwide news story. (I wish to note that these cartoons, by any standards of Western news caricature, are bland and innocuous.)
Levant made the case that since the cartoons were news, and were alleged to be the occasion that brought about such mayhem, his readers should actually be able to look at the cartoons themselves – to see the items that were said to be stirring such a storm. He was a publisher making a news judgment.
In Calgary, an imam, who claims to be a descendant of Mohammed – having first tried to have Levant arrested – made a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
Thus began Levant's long, costly, surreal descent into the whirlpool of human-rights investigation and adjudication. In every case brought before Canada's HRCs, the complainant merely launches the action and bears no cost. The “target,” if he doesn't not bend and break immediately, has to deal with the extended legal process and its government lawyers and functionaries.
It's very costly: $100,000 so far for Levant. As he has said very often: “The process is the punishment.”
Levant didn't bend or break. Therein lies this tale.
Now, some people do not like Levant's style. They say he is too aggressive, too noisy and assertive, that he courts controversy and publicity. They should read Shakedown , and they will quickly realize that anyone less “aggressive” or “noisy” would have long ago been suffocated by the remorseless, inequitable, taxpayer-funded, bureaucratic grinding of Canada's human rights tribunals and commissions.
On the matter of his alleged taste for controversy and publicity, again, after reading Shakedown , they will realize that without his ability to withstand controversy and generate publicity, an insidious and largely unaccountable process of diminishing the central concepts of our democracy – freedom of speech, press and thought – would largely have gone unnoticed, and what is far worse, unchallenged.
Next there is the matter of Levant's politics. He is a stalwart conservative, a Harper supporter. He worked for the Conservatives in the last federal election. He was himself an MP. In the lesser universe of political partisanship, this makes him a toxic commodity to partisans of the centre or the left. Which is fine as far as it goes. Partisans will disaccommodate other partisans.
But in judging the cause that he has for three years now championed, and the gruelling effort he has been forced to put in to defend that cause, of which Shakedown is both the diary and the rationale, partisanship should have zero leverage over judgment.
Ezra Levant, for my taste, could be the love child (ideologically speaking) of Noam Chomsky and Ontario human-rights impresario Barbara Hall, but his indictment of the procedures, practices and ideology of Canada's human rights commissions, their Orwellian character, shameless amateurism and overweening reach is simply right. He has their number. He has experienced their practice. He has documented their absurdities and pettiness.
