Kevin Michael Grace, author of the website The Ambler, who has been on a hiatus for quite a while (more than a year, I think), has an article up on Vdare weighing in on the recent HRC high drama. It is a pleasure to have Grace back.
There are a few points, though, that I would like to critique in Grace's article, especially this part:
Canada may have the highest immigration rate in the world, but this is not an issue. Canada’s major cities may have been turned into simulacrums of the Third World, but this is not an issue. Quebec is the tail that wags the Canadian dog, but this is not an issue. There is little left of what we used to be, and what little that exists steadily disappears, but this is not an issue, either.As Grace writes, "The [1977] Canadian Human Rights Act came about as the result of pressure from Canadian Jewish organizations, specifically, in the form of the "Cohen Committee."' From that, the Human Rights Commissions were formed as the "quasi-judicial" body to enforce the CHRA's mandates.
The Cohen Committee was formed in 1966 to combat:
The distribution of hate propaganda and the activities of racist groups [that] have come in two waves since the 1960s. In the middle of that decade, anti-Jewish and anti-black hate propaganda was widespread in Canada, but especially in Ontario and Quebec. Simultaneously, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, based largely in the U.S., became active in Canada. The result was the 1965 Cohen Committee, upon whose recommendations to the Minister of Justice were based the 1970 amendments to the Criminal Code (s. 318-320) adopted by Parliament.So, in effect, the creation of the HRCs was propelled by the fears that immigrants (or non-native Canadian groups - the Jews and blacks) might have of violence and hate directed at them.
Earlier on, Grace quotes section 13(1) of the HRC, specifically the part which includes the groups that might have hate directed at them as: "person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination."
This "protected class" according to section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has grown from the original Jews (and blacks) of 1966 to those defined by "race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability." Later on in 1992, sexual orientation was also added.
Grace states in the conclusion of his article that "The purpose of the CHRA was secret but obvious. It was to kill politics in Canada. And in that it succeeded."
But, this was after the fact! The CHRA was installed in 1977 after the recommendations of a non-political, arguably immigrant group, which was trying to protect its "rights" against aggressors and those it esteemed as anti-Semites (and racists). The CHRA, initially, had nothing to do with politics.
Which is why I think its ultimate purpose is not about silencing political dissent, although this is one of the unintended (although if one's on the other side, happily intended) effects. The point of the CHRA, and the HRCs, is to stop discrimination. And the number of potential discriminatorees (?) has grown exponentially since the original Jewish and black complaints. And this growth is highly correlated with immigration – and I am convinced enough to say that it is caused by - immigration.
Although Lemire’s case was not filed by Jews afraid of his neo-Nazi/white supremacist sentiments, it is nonetheless the birth of Jewish immigrants’ protestations. Another immigrant group, the Muslims, decided to take this easy-win (100% conviction rates to date) phoney court set up to sue prominent Canadians, including the national magazine MacLeans.
Grace, like Levant and many of the “free speech” crowd, is acting like the journalist that he is. He is viewing the whole CHRA and the consequent HRCs as governmental strong-arms to silence dissent - of writers, really. But, the government is using a specific (world) view, that of anti-discrimination, to induce this silence.
It seems to me that the history of the CHRA and the HRCs is intertwined with immigration. If writers like Grace ignore that, then the whole debacle of the high levels of immigrants from countries which are incompatible with Western democracies (like Muslims), will continue to weave around all aspects of Canadian life. It is one thing to dislike "statism", but it is also not recommended to ignore the realities of modern Canadian life. Immigration, and its consequences, are everywhere.
Update: The great Edwin S. Rubenstein from Vdare, who developed (I say invented) the VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI), seems to agree with me with his just posted, September 4, 2009, article. He says:
So gargantuan is America’s post-1965 immigration disaster that there is now an immigration dimension to every public issue—Health Care, infectious disease, mortgage fraud, crime, school overcrowding.You could replace American with Canadian (although it starts a little later in Canada in 1967), and his sentence would be just as accurate.
