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On December 4, the four of us announced at a press conference that we had launched several human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine with respect to its October, 2006 article, The Future Belongs to Islam, written by Mark Steyn.
At the time, we expected to hear some criticism of our complaints, which were filed as a result of Maclean's refusal to negotiate space for a response to the aforementioned publication. What we did not expect, however, was the almost paranoid assault launched on the respective human rights commissions for accepting our complaints and, in one case so far, for moving ahead to schedule hearings into the matter we have brought to their attention. The latest to attack the commissions is Ezra Levant, whose commentary appeared in this space yesterday.
These human rights commissions — whose extensive and considered judgments can be located on any legal database — have been referred to disparagingly as "kangaroo courts" that reach judgments "on the basis of no fixed law," while the distinguished and legally-trained commissioners who serve on them have been referred to as power-grabbers who have "scant regard for the freedoms they suppress." One commentator has gone so far as to call for "political action" to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves! Although this blow-back heat comes as the direct result of our specific complaints, such attacks on the very principles of the provincial and federal Commissions to whom we submitted our case threatens the interests of us all. Canadians in all walks of life have come to rely on them to assert their basic human rights as employees, as persons living with disabilities, as women, as ethnic and cultural minorities, as gender-orientation minorities, and as visible religious minorities, to name only a few.
And it is not just a mere handful of Canadians who look to our provincial and federal human rights commissions. Whether we know it or not, the vast majority of us benefit from decisions and rulings by these commissions, which are filling part of the chronic access-to-justice vacuum that has resulted from the high cost of Canada's civil justice system. In March 2006, for example, the Toronto Star reported that an average three-day civil trial is likely to cost at least $60,738 — more than the median family income in Canada of $58,100. The Chief Justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, recently urged governments and the legal profession to find solutions to the access-to-justice crisis that has made this country's legal system punitively expensive for ordinary citizens.
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Even though most of us cannot afford the going price of accessing the civil justice system, we have the comfort of knowing that there exists an affordable avenue for us to assert the most fundamental of our rights. Therefore, victims of the grandiose fury now being directed against the human rights commissions are none other than ordinary Canadians.
The importance of human rights codes in Canada is not limited only to affordability. These commissions guarantee our human rights against eventualities not covered by the existing Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which applies only to state entities. Thus, a diminishment in the human rights codes and the commissions that enforce them would leave a gaping hole in our rights protections — an outcome being lobbied for by a few disproportionately loud "activists."
Unfortunately, this turn of events is all too familiar to the Muslim community. Faith-based arbitration was not a "problem" until the Muslim community decided to pursue a facility already available to the Christian and Jewish communities. Similarly, funding for religious schools was not a "problem" until Ontario's Conservative leader John Tory included Islamic schools in his funding proposal. And human rights commissions were not a "problem" until the Muslim community decided to pursue the right to respond to publications that subject identifiable communities to hatred or contempt.
The "problem" is not the human rights commissions or the human rights codes they uphold. The "problem" as some choose to see it — is that the Muslim community in Canada is actually using them for their intended purposes.
The authors are students and recent graduates of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto.
