S. 13 Dead and Now Buried

A long battle but section 13 is dead

As I write this I am still only being updated by text message on the proceedings in the Senate chamber but I am told Bill C-304 has passed third reading and will receive Royal Assent tonight making it law.

What does this bill do?

There are a number of amendments to the act that help limit abuse but the main one is this:

2. Section 13 of the Act is repealed. blazing catfur

Repealing s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is the right thing to do. It was unfixable and, despite what the SCC maintained, was an unacceptable curb on free speech.

Worse, so long as S.13 existed, the grievance mongers and self-appointed censors were able to use the CHRC and the Tribunal to silence speech they disagreed with.

And, even worse than that, because of the fact the Human Rights biz is driven by a hierarchy of victims, real hate could be uttered by assorted protected – but none the less dangerous – classes with impunity while loons in their basements who represented no threat to anyone could be driven to bankruptcy by the Commission and its minions.

Canada has become a bit more free with the repeal of s. 13.

This repeal was driven by many, many people: front and center were Blazing Catfur, Five Feet, Small Dead Animals, Free Dominion, Ezra Levant, Marc Lemire and Mark Steyn and a host of others. Realistically, the effort has cost those people hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has spawned an assortment of legal actions which the Repeal will do little, directly, to mitigate.

So send the bloggers who made this happen some money!

(And, for those bloggers who are being sued – the fact that your actions and reporting have resulted in the Repeal of an odious law suggests, strongly, that your reporting in particular, was in the public interest.)

A good day.

Steyn! on s. 13 and the idiots who loved it

There is no point in excerpting Mark’s brilliant piece on the demise of s. 13 and his kind words for the people who supported it and used it. All the usual suspects: Bernie, Lucy and the Jackal

Just-us served

Our new friend Det. Constable Terry Wilson apparently did not let too much get in the way of his desire to share his happy cache of evidence with entirely unrelated parties. He was more than happy to let Steacy of the CHRC in on the fruits of his search. After all, Steacy of the CHRC was investigating a complaint from none other than the hate-sniffer general, Richard Warman.

17 MR. STEACY: No, I wouldn’t
18 characterize it like that. I was investigating the
19 Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team, et al complaint and
20 during the course of investigation I interviewed
21 Detective Wilson and he provided me that information.
22 I didn’t specifically go out and ask
23 him to go get Mr. Scott Richardson’s hard drive and
24 give me a copy of it, he advised me that it was there
25 and I asked for a copy, to the best of my recollection,

1 and he said I could have a copy and he sent me a CD.
2 MR. CHRISTIE: And you didn’t have a
3 search warrant for that?
4 MR. STEACY: No, I didn’t.
5 MR. CHRISTIE: So, I take it that
6 your position is that the police department who obtain
7 a search warrant for criminal purposes can simply take
8 that information acquired under a search warrant for
9 that purpose and give it to you on request; correct?
10 MR. STEACY: Yes.
11 MR. CHRISTIE: Mm-hmm. Did you ask
12 Mr. Wilson if he informed the Justice of the Peace when
13 he got the warrant that he was going to distribute
14 copies of the hard drive to people who asked for it?
15 MR. STEACY: No, I didn’t.
16 MR. CHRISTIE: Have you ever been
17 allowed to receive a search warrant in which you said,
18 I’d like to get these things and I’m just going to
19 distribute them to whoever asks for them? (cite p 5936-5937)

One has to wonder what Detective Constable Wilson will be doing with the fruits of his search and seizure of the odious Arthur’s property? Will he extend the courtesy he extended to Steacy of the CHRC to the two individuals whom the odious Arthur is not allowed to communicate with?

For the moment we do not know. But our new friend has certainly shown form.

Detective Wilson aka The Evidence Fairy

Our new friend Det. Constable Terry Wilson is a very generous man. Having obtained a warrant to search an apartment in order to investigate “uttering threats against property and persons, and counselling the indictable offences of murder and of property damage” (see below) when CHRC hate sniffer Dean Steacy “went to him (Wilson)” he was kind enough to turn over the fruits of his search:

MR. CHRISTIE: Right. Now, what
18 information did the Human Rights Commission obtain from
19 the London City Police Service?
20 MR. STEACY: I obtained the police
21 report from Detective Wilson and I obtained a CD from
22 Detective Wilson for Mr. Scott Richardson’s hard drive.
23 MR. CHRISTIE: And it wouldn’t have
24 been possible for you to get that hard drive by any
25 other means; would it? (cite page 5933, lines 17-25

It is, to say the least, an interesting use of evidence obtained by way of a criminal search warrant.

Perhaps Det. Constable Wilson will be similarly generous with the CHRC in the matter of the odious Arthur Topham should the CHRT ever hear the case – which it won’t, which may be why odious Arthur was arrested, had his computer seized and was banned from the internet as a condition of his release. And I wonder who might have suggested that?

Hello, BC Civil Liberties Union?

Private Police

Our new friend Det. Constable Terry Wilson seems blessed with a nose for Nazis (real and imagined). Just a few years ago he sniffed some out in London Ontario.

Went into undercover mode (much favoured by super-dooper whooper Human Rights secret agents) “Mr. Wilson adopted a pseudonym and began participating in some of the chat lines he was monitoring.” cite para 75

Wilson cleverly infiltrated the basement Nazi organization and signed up for their, no doubt disgusting, newsletter. “When Mr. Wilson viewed the September 14, 2001, issue of the newsletter, (which I have already determined contains some of the Hate Messages in this case), he opened a separate criminal investigation on what he perceived as death threats found therein.” cite para 77

The evil basement Nazi was charged “Mr. Richardson was found in the apartment when the police entered and was arrested. He was charged with uttering threats against property and persons, and counselling the indictable offences of murder and of property damage. cite para 77

Did the vile SOB go to the slammer? Well no. In fact, the charges the excitable Mr. Wilson brought were later dropped. “[105] In the end, the Crown prosecutor apparently decided to withdraw the criminal charges against Mr. Richardson and Mr. Kulbashian before going to trial. According to Mr. Wilson, the Crown concluded that there was no reasonable expectation of conviction on the charges laid against them. cite para 105

But the raid was not in vain…stay tuned for the next episode in which Terry Wilson demonstrates his evidence handling skills.

A year without blogging

For a little over a year I have not blogged. Have not even commented very often.

For the first three or four months it was a relief simply because I had, repeatedly, said much the same thing on much the same topics to much the same people for the proceeding year. Nothing wrong with that but not terrifically interesting for me or, I fear, my readers.

So off I went and spent a year building a business (which hit a wall recently and is being rebuilt on stronger foundations), threw the football around with my kids, sailed little tiny Flying Juniors and watched the great and the good lose more and more of the thread.

To some extent I kept up checking in at Kathy’s, Arnie’s and Kate’s. Reading Instapundit and Watts Up with That; but mainly I left the assorted blog battles to others.

In large part because I was coming to believe that in the rush to score points (and avoid litigation) a good deal of the fun and the promise had been lost to blogging. I don’t think this was, by and large, deliberate – although Richard Warman’s apparent unwillingness to proceed expeditiously with any of his lawsuits suggests a degree of contentment with the mere silence of the bloggers involved, but then Lucy never was a blogger in any serious sense. Rather I think it arises because tribalism overwhelms the very real possibilities of the medium.

At the same time, the wholesale adoption of Twitter by the blogosphere and MSM journalists has mean that snark has found its perfect venue. 144 characters pretty much defines one liner and defeats argument. Twitter and IPO darling Facebook are certainly distracting; but they suck a good deal of air out of the blogging enterprise.

The proliferation of MSM blogs was entirely foreseeable – it is a publishing platform first and foremost – but the sheer number of those blogs limits the capacity of anyone but the retired and the unemployed to really stay current.

There is a lot of noise out there.

So why come back?

Certainly not to add to the noise. While I am delighted to have the link from Blazing Catfur to kick this off  (and I hope to have many more) what I realized over my sabatical is that I enjoy the writing for itself. And I enjoy my readers’ comments.

My own sense is that blogging in Canada has been incredibly successful in a few quite narrow  areas: s.13 really is dead and the credit for making its destruction a matter of principle goes, in part, to bloggers. On a much larger scale, the political defeat of the CAGW hysterics and the underscoring of the very real uncertainty – not to mention out and out fraud – which characterizes some of the more incendiary “science” upon which their claims have been based – has been driven by bloggers. (Of course it has not hurt that windmills don’t work and temperature has ceased to rise significantly for the last 17 years; but those facts have needed to be brought to public attention.)

Where blogging has been less successful is on the broader questions. We still have so-called conservative governments unwilling to reduce the size of government. We still have governments which believe they have a positive right to tell their citizens how to live and what to think.

So there is lots to write about and lots to do.