The Business About The CHRC
As much as many of us question the power of the CHRC to censor speech (after the fact, mind), it is important to note that it is also a government department that is very successful at what it does, particularly with regards to Sec. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act:
Interesting that a government department that actually recovers money from offending parties singled out for investigation, prosecution and a verdict of guilty (it has won 100% of the cases it takes on, so - no supposedly typical government inefficiencies there, that's for sure) seems so questionable - now that we know about it. There was a similar reaction several years ago to a plan by HRDC's Emloyment Insurance Department to detect E.I. fraud by checking with customs to compare its travel records with their E.I. records. It would have nailed anybody collecting E.I. while travelling (a no-no because you're supposed to be available for work) and recovered lots of $$$s, but the Privacy Commissioner, Bruce Phillips, a Tory appointee and former media guy, vetoed it as an invasion of privacy - once he found out about it.
(I'd be more inclined to question why a media guy friendly to the Tory government had been appointed to a government watchdog position, but, such is the small pool of talent in Canada that becomes our Overlord Class, I guess.)
Anyway, I see the Internet (and media) as one big sitting duck for Sec. 13 and am not at all surprised that the CHRC does, too, and would wonder if it wasn't prosecuting hate speech spotted on assumed white supremacist sites, why it wasn't. They're gold, baby - gold! But it occurs to me as well that Canadians of all political stripes really don't like it when the government acts like a business, as the CHRC has been doing while nobody was paying much attention until it affected the media itself, at which point it was all over the story like a cheap suit. And wanting the government to act like a government, not like a business.
And that's a good thing. Because if there's one person we should never trust with our vote, it's the politician, supported by the media, who wants to run the government like a business.
So, why do Canadians continue to elect them to public office?
