Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (28 page)

The essential point is that the most basic rights, those of freedom of thought, speech and expression, belong to the individual. That is why we call them intrinsic or human rights. They are rights that inhere in our basic status as human beings. They are our most profound rights, belonging to our character as human beings. And, for that reason, we neither multiply them trivially nor dilute their force and meaning by placing them in piecemeal cohabitation with less fundamental accommodations. Like the right not to wash one’s hands while working in a fast-food restaurant, or
the alleged right to strip past a certain age, or the right not to be offended by a Mark Steyn article.

These “cases” may have merits, and some wild-eyed philosopher may articulate those merits. But they do not abide, as rights, on the same plane as freedom of thought, speech and expression. They may be something, but what they are will not be inscribed on any cenotaph: They are not human rights.

Human rights, the real ones, are ours from the beginning. They are not bestowed by the state, because the state does not “own” them; they are not a state’s or a ruler’s—or, for that matter, a human-rights commission’s—to give. It equally follows that they are not a state’s or a commission’s to abridge, circumscribe, tamper with or make a toy of.

The concept of human rights, real human rights, has been long with us. But only in modern times did we learn what immeasurable darkness falls on the world when they are nullified. The butcheries of Auschwitz and Buchenwald followed as a straight and bitter line from Hitler’s assumption of absolute power in 1933 and his cauterization and extinction of the concept of freedom in the German Reich. Nothing less than the Holocaust underwrites the modern understanding and appreciation of human rights.

Human rights are as profound and central a concept to the democracies of the world as we have. They constitute the core of human freedom. They are the antidote to tyranny. They are fundamental.

Of late, however, in Canada, this most painfully acquired
understanding has been utterly unmoored. The various provincial human rights commissions and their federal godfather have been cutting away at the core of, and extending into utter fatuity, the term “human rights.” They are capricious, agenda-driven, a great mishmash of political correctness and “right thinking” bulldozing away at the basic freedoms of thought, speech and expression while they, under some osmotic impulse, investigate, prescribe and torment with zealous and self-righteous abandon.

Which is why I find Ms. Lynch’s presence at Remembrance Day ceremonies odd. Because Canada’s human-rights commissions are diluting and trivializing and thereby offending the very core of the concept that gives them their name. And a Remembrance Day ceremony is an awkward occasion to be reminded of that.

I read in Thursday’s newspaper of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s determination to declare Bill C-10, dealing with tax credits that support the making of Canadian films, a matter of confidence. C-10 is an attempt to tie which films receive tax credits to certain government-determined standards with respect to violence and sex.

Bill C-10 has, to my mind, rightfully inflamed what we often refer to as the artistic community. It is not quite, as is
argued, censorship, but it is close enough to it to be worrisome. When it comes to the making of films, the matter is best left, however imperfectly, to the judgment and skill of the writers and filmmakers who will actually make them. Mrs. Grundy and her prissy avatars should be kept out of the screening room.

I’m still puzzled, however, that Mr. Flaherty—and, by unquestionable extension, Stephen Harper—should make this a matter of confidence. Should a government fall over an argument about tax credits and whether a film is too “sexy” for its overseers? Good luck with the next election.

Were Mr. Harper, however, looking for an issue centred unequivocally on a matter of the most profound principle, I think we would have heard from him by now on the wretched intrusion of human rights commissions into the domain of this country’s free expression and free speech.

These commissions have stealthily migrated from their original and defined mandate to prevent discrimination in housing or employment, from deeds of discrimination, to an activist and capricious role of monitoring speech or thought. Under the hopelessly elastic and malleable rubric of “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt,” they investigate and rule on everything from bishops to magazine editors, from genital surgery to hand-washing protocols at McDonald’s.

A single complaint triggers their attention and zeal. Their procedures conform to a pattern known only to them. They leave those complained against to endure the
process entirely on their own resources, while those who originate a complaint are nursed with all the resources of the state. They travel wide waters. Their writ runs from letters to the editor to the furthest reaches of the Internet.

Complaints may be started and then idly dropped by the complainant, dropped without penalty, or indeed, remark, from the commissions concerned. This was the case just recently when one of the complaints against former publisher Ezra Levant, for printing the controversial Mohammed cartoons, was withdrawn by the Calgary imam who first brought it. Mr. Levant, for nearly a year, bore the cost of the aborted “investigation” and wore the shadow of having been under investigation for exposing people to hatred and contempt—not a pretty allegation for a citizen of an exemplarily tolerant country. And then, poof, the process ends, without comment, apology or compensation. Eerily, another on the identical issue still continues.

The rulings of human rights commissions have the flavour of an agenda. They seem to have a problem with traditional religious organizations and religious speech. They are the very hall prefects of “progressive” political correctness, answerable in their judgments and methods, it seems, only to themselves.

These commissions have wandered so far from their original purpose as to be, in these matters of speech and expression, disowned by the respected civil libertarian Alan Borovoy, who, more than any other man, brought them, in their early restricted mandate, to birth. They are, in their
very real capacity as censors and judges on what is to be said and not to be said, a blot on the central dynamic of any self-respecting democracy.

Yet Mr. Harper, with all his tactical prowess, has let the controversy over human rights commissions go on without so much as a comment. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, outlandishly, can decline the now-celebrated complaint against
Maclean’s
and then proceed to mercilessly slag
Maclean’s
in public, and Mr. Harper’s Tories sheepishly let the whole mess pass by without a word.

He will have Mr. Flaherty say that an election will be triggered over the grey question of tax credits and film content. But he is mute as a beach rock over a fundamental offence to democracy. So, too, it should emphatically be noted, is one of Pierre Trudeau’s successors as leader of the Liberal Party, Stéphane Dion. Liberals used to have regard for free speech.

Real Liberals—take a bow, Keith Martin—still do. Dr. Martin has presented a motion calling for the repeal of the most noxious provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Dr. Martin still knows what a real parliament is about. Mr. Harper, and Mr. Dion, should adopt his cause and tame these commissions.

It’s not a contest, but were it to be, it’s the right kind of contest. The tsunami relief efforts of so many countries, and so many people, is something of a phenomenon in itself.

The speed with which the citizens of so many countries are making donations to aid those struck by the tsunamis is astonishing. As are the amounts (in most cases) being raised. Governments around the world are acting with equal celerity and generosity. Australia is an astonishment. The government of John Howard has pledged $800 million (U.S.) toward assisting victims of the disaster, most particularly the citizens and government of Indonesia. Mr. Howard has a fine ear, as displayed in his comments announcing the aid:

“This is a terrible tragedy for mankind. But what we are saying, to the people of Indonesia particularly, is that we are here as your friends. There’s an old saying in the English language that charity begins at home. Our home is this region
and we are saying to the people of our nearest neighbour that we are here to help you in your hour of need.”

It is worth remarking that “giving” has its canons of tact and delicacy. How people give is as important sometimes as what they give. Whether on a public or a private scale, people can be aggressive or blunt in their charity—help can come with a snarl of superiority or rancid with condescension.

It is one of the finer moments of our time, in which there are so few fine moments to begin with, that the response to the present catastrophe is so little stained—as these words of Mr. Howard demonstrate—by the wrong spirit behind the giving.

The Americans, God bless ’em, are acting with their usual dispatch and generosity. Who would have guessed that an aircraft carrier, the nuclear-powered USS
Abraham Lincoln
, would be among the first and most vital contributors to the tremendous challenge of offering succour and relief to the survivors of Sumatra?

It will take all the desperate and jaded ingenuity of the genetically anti-Bush crowd to turn this marvellous example of benign intervention into a parable of imperialism and Yankee hegemony. But I have faith in them. I am sure they will. I look forward to the speculation that Halliburton had the contract for the
Lincoln
’s propellers, and Dick Cheney’s aunt’s getting a dollar for every helicopter takeoff from the carrier. Very likely, Michael Moore has a documentary in the works proving that the invasion of New Zealand is the real object of this exercise, and Naomi Klein
is even now readying to pen “Let’s bring Sumatra to Seattle,” or some equally fastidious essay on the perfidy of American goodwill. “No quinine for oil” might strike the right note.

Those less hospitable to the anti-Bush monomania see this wonderful conjunction of an aircraft carrier and the crisis in South Asia as being just what it seems to be: America being generous, and quick with its generosity when it counts.

George Bush himself has been engagingly alert to this disaster from the beginning. When we see him asking his father and Bill Clinton (!) to be joint fundraisers in the private relief effort, we know he’s not posturing. Anything that could unite Bush the First with “Elvis,” under the sponsorship of Bush the Second, goes beyond even the scripted fantasies of
The West Wing
.

The Canadian public and government are reacting with a wide spirit and an open pocketbook. I agree with a number of people who point out that we seem to be feverishly self-conscious about what we’re doing, and that there’s far too much self-congratulation in our response. Even that criticism can go too far. The itch to be seen as benignant is a hell of a lot better than studied neutralism of indifference. An anxiety to be seen to be doing good is a stress we can live with, especially as it is a prompt to the actual doing of that good.

Our wish to act is circumscribed by the chronically reduced circumstances of our military. However bountiful the spirit of Canadians may be, what we can actually do
depends, in very large measure, on having the mechanical and logistical resources to act. Depends, in other words, on how well-equipped and prepared of a military we are ready to support.

A military is never just a war-making machine. It is always the only ready instrument for practical and trained intervention in a time of catastrophe. We cannot short-fund the military and simultaneously extend our reputation as a benign and humanitarian nation.

That seems like a paradox. But so does a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier on an errand of mercy.

The word “disastrous” is a more choice or Latinate version of “ill-starred.” The word evokes an old idea of fate as the influence of a star—a famous and easy example being the story of Romeo and Juliet. The play itself tells us they were “star-crossed.”

Belief in astrology, that the juncture and rotation of
the planets is meaningful to one’s life, is a feeble, though durable, idiocy, often accompanied by a taste for wind chimes or the equally melodious gurgling of PBS’s pet mystic, Deepak Chopra.

The etymology of “disaster” is useful in one particular. It speaks to the dark grandeur and enormity of a given calamity. For, if a mischance or calamity is on such a scale that it speaks to the operation of menace birthed in the cosmos itself, then the mischance, the catastrophe, must be mighty indeed.