Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Human Rights Commissions Are Here To Stay

There must be something going on in TVO these days, and especially with Steve Paiken's program The Agenda. He is consistently producing programs relating to Toronto's (and Canada's) multicultural and immigrant society.

This evening, he hosted a panel on the Human Rights Commission entitled: "Ontario's human rights tribunals: adjudicating injustice ... or hurt feelings?"

All his guests were lawyers, except for one who is a clinical psychologist. One, as well as being a lawyer was also chair of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre.

There will be a video or an audio coming out soon (usually a day after the program), but there was nothing new or insightful that this group brought to the picture. In fact, for bona fide lawyers, one would have thought that at least one of them would have talked about the pseudo-justice system that the HRCs have set up, as Ezra Levant has demonstrated.

The only thing that happened was that I had an epiphany.

The HRCs are not going anywhere. If anything, they will just be fine-tuned to avoid the wrath of ordinary folks who may have realized their fraudulent nature from Levant's and others' exposures .

I got this affirmation when an older black woman, in all sincerity, asked when Canada was going to change the underlying problems of inequality and barriers to minorities, since the HRCs are only there to report the problems that this unequal society produces.

Canada is a multicultural society. Not only that, it is an officially multicultural society, with a Multicultural Act introduced in 1988. It also is not letting up on immigration any time soon. And the majority of immigrants are still coming from non-Western countries.

This means that Canada's society has a built in unequal structure. This inequality, which manifests itself if allowed to run its own course, is forever being reined in by various forces, usually governmental, at times simply social and psychological. The HRCs are the forceful, governmental arm of squaring this circle, of making everyone equal, or at least appear equal. And these strong-arm procedures will continue as long as there is this multicultural society, and as long as 250,000 immigrants, the majority of which will feel part of the stigmatized groups, are let into the country annually.

The HRCs are here to stay.