Avenue and Ridley reviews Shakedown

Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights by Ezra Levant, McClelland & Stewart, 216 pages, $28.99 (2009)

When I was a staffer on Parliament Hill, I always looked forward to the Western Standard arriving in my MP's mail. Shakedown is a recounting of this journal's publisher Ezra Levant's last hurrah at the Western Standard which included a prolonged encounter with the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

The book argues that Human Rights Commissions, state mechanisms formed in the 1960s and 1970s, have morphed from commissions to fight obvious discrimination into quasi-judicial forums for people with political axes to grind. To make this point, the book cites some astounding successful examples: a pre-op transsexual male who sued because he was refused a councillor position at a rape clinic; a McDonald's Restaurant employee who refused to wash their hands as frequently as required and a right-wing preacher who was silenced from preaching because a newspaper printed one of his letters that spoke against same-sex marriage.

This part of the book paints a picture of what can be called a Human Rights industry. When reading the examples, one can only marvel at the surreal nature of them. Unfortunately for the reader, there is no example of what a normal human rights complaint is so we do not learn if the author’s extraordinary examples that slipped through the cracks or are normal complaints.

The second part deals with the ordeal between Levant and the Alberta Human Rights Commission and focuses on the Section 13 'hate speech' provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act. This is an interesting account of what happened at the Western Standard after it published the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. This ordeal culminated with an interview between Commission representative Shirlene McGovern and Levant, which you may have seen: it was posted immediately afterwards on YouTube. This part of the book is largely self-aggrandizing, but it makes the point: the Alberta Commission was reaching and the complaint against the Western Standard was unfounded. It is also very interesting to read how the AHRC folded its case when exposed by modern technologies such as blogs and YouTube.

The book itself is a quick read and -- while a couple years old -- is still interesting. Levant has done Canada a service by exposing these commissions as parallel systems of justice, devoid of hard fought common law safeguards such as the right to face one’s accuser, or sensible rules such as the loser paying legal costs. Proponents of the Commissions will undoubtedly see Shakedown as an attack but this would be a mistake. If Human Rights Commissions are to remain relevant in an increasingly accepting and tolerant Canada, their raison d’être must be explained and proponents should seize this opportunity. Currently, Avenue and Ridley agrees with Shakedown and sees Canada's Human Rights Commissions as government mini-empires that are severe hindrances to the freedom of speech our society has long prized. Kafkaesque courts are never the answer to bad ideas: exposure, debate and ridicule is.