Human Rights Bits And Bites

Re. yesterday's legislative hearing on the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

A friend who is a Legislative assistant sat in on the Hearings in the afternoon. Apparently Richard Moon testified via telephone and took huge chunks out of Ezra Levant and his fellow travellers. Called him (and you [BCF] by extension) a liar...

An assessment confirmed by today's National Post article by Joseph Brean:

Richard Moon, the University of Windsor law professor who last fall became a darling of right-wing free speech advocates when he recommended scrapping the federal human rights hate speech law, yesterday lashed out at his admirers.

[...]

Prof. Moon targeted Ezra Levant in particular, whose blog is a clearinghouse for skepticism of human rights law, and who claimed the day before Prof. Moon's report was released that it had been "redacted by Jennifer Lynch," the chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

"The claim was false," Prof. Moon told the all-party panel. "I was given complete independence, and when my report was released the following day and recommended the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the falsity of Levant's claim was obvious. He had just made it up. He thought he knew what I would say and he sought to discredit the report in advance by attacking me and the commission rather than the arguments I might make."

He accused them of launching a "smear campaign" against human rights commissions and "baseless personal attacks" against their staff.

Meanwhile, at the same hearing Mark "The Steynosaur" wanked it both handed. Read the transcript if you need a fleet enema.

Meanwhile, I am a bit unclear as to what happened at the Justice and Human Rights Committee, where a "review" of section 13 was supposedly up for discussion. From Kady's description:

Real Menard puts forward his brilliant notion of combining the review of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act with his motion to look at including social condition as a protected form of discrimination, and Storseth … … Drum roll … … … says that he’s actually not ready to bring *his* motion forward at this point, so he’ll be happy to discuss this with Menard in future.

Brian Storseth is the Tory MP who wanted to ask the committee to review section 13, and he is "not ready" to make this request--to discuss the possibility of discussing section 13, as it were. Given this, we can probably assume that nothing relevant happened at the committee. As Kady notes: Wow, that was anticlimactic.

Update: Buckets has more, and WK has partial transcripts of Moon's testimony.