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 National Post editorial board: From Saskatchewan, a great idea on human rights
This is the best idea we’ve heard all week: Saskatchewan’s Justice Minister says his province could soon dissolve its Human Rights Tribunal and move its caseload over to the Court of Queen’s Bench. There, defendants would enjoy something that human rights Star Chambers have long denied the accused: due process, including a proper hearing in front of a judge fully trained in Canada’s constitutional traditions.
Human rights, of course, has long been the mother’s milk of Canadian political life. But in recent years, it has become clear that the provincial and federal tribunals that operate under the human rights banner are even more problematic than the waning social ills — racism, sexism, homophobia — they are meant to address. Unlike in a proper civil trial, the accuser in a human rights tribunal proceeding gets his prosecution paid for by the government: He merely has to scrawl out a complaint to get the process going, and then watch his prey squirm under years of costly, often Kafkaesque, prosecution. In censorship cases — involving, most famously, Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn — human rights mandarins have made it clear that they have scant regard for free speech.
All this would be justifiable if there were a backlog of truly awful human rights cases to be adjudicated in this country. But bald-faced discrimination has been illegal, not to mention unfashionable, for decades. So the cases that human rights tribunals typically rule on these days are just bickering matches sparked by a cranky, politically correct agitator. In Quebec, for instance, a human rights tribunal recently ruled for an obese woman who wanted a parking space a few feet closer to the door of her apartment complex. A B.C. human rights tribunal is spending thousands of dollars of taxpayer money prosecuting a comedian who made fun of a jeering lesbian at a comedy club.
Human rights commissions, including Saskatchewan’s, do have a place in Canadian society. They can promote human rights principles through education and outreach, compile statistics on the dwindling phenomenon of bigotry, and perhaps even provide legal aid to those few litigants who truly do need to prosecute their cases in court. But dedicated human rights tribunals should be scrapped. We already have a place in this society where citizens can get their legal grievances heard: It’s called a courtroom.
(2010-04-18 / National Post)
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