Macleans Retracts, Will Steyn Apologize?

Something Dawg and others have already picked up, and
...something Maclean's would have realized months ago if they had only been paying attention. Of course, the first article Mark Steyn wrote on the topic, in which he accused CHRC Investigator Dean Steacy of criminal wrong-doing, is still up. So I will be sending Mr. Steyn yet another email suggesting that he apologize to Mr. Steacy and have Macleans put the article down. We shall see what kind of man he is.

Dean Steacy Gets Another Opportunity To Sue People

Russ Hiebert, Conservative nobody for South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale, repeats charges to the effect that Mr. Steacy committed a criminal act:

Further, uncontradicted expert evidence presented before the hearing demonstrated that investigator Steacy illegitimately used an unsuspecting private citizen's wireless Internet service to post his offensive comments.

...charges that the RCMP and Privacy Commission dismissed several months back.

And the fact that Hiebert's piece seems as though it was ghost-written by Ezra (note the "uncontradicted...evidence" silliness that appears several times on Levant's blog) doesn't help Mr. Hiebert's claim that he is building his case from tribunal documents.

And, finally, a note to Mr. Steacy: sue these pricks. Sue as many of them as you want. I'll put up a donation button and slip you $5 myself.

Buckets gives Mr. Hiebert a thorough deconstructing here.

Mistakes Made, Apologies Owed

Since Steyn wants to go another round on this, let me just mention this more time. In his Macleans blog post "That poor woman down the street", from March of 2008, Mr. Steyn accused CHRC investigator Dean Steacy by name of engaging in criminal acts. These allegations were never credible to start with, and already pretty thoroughly refuted even before the RCMP and Privacy Commission finally dismissed them.

Yet there they remain on the Maclean's website.

So let me say it one more time: Mark, you made a mistake. You laundered a boatload of crap passed off as "research" by white supremacists and reproduced it in Canada's national news-magazine.

Admit it and have Kenneth Whyte take down that post.

Macleans Should Pull Steyn's Column On The "Hacked Wifi" Conspiracy

In it, Steyn accuses CHRC employee Dean Steacy by name of criminal wrong-doing. Accusations which have since been proven false.

Kenneth Whyte, Paul, Kady et al. It isn't about where you stand on Canada's various speech codes. Its about showing a little bit of class when one of your writers screws up and, indeed, in this case Steyn was suckered by the owner of Stormfront, America's premier Neo-Nazi website.
The post in question should be disappeared and, frankly, apologized for.

Meanwhile, 12 hours later and still no sign of class from the Steynosaur himself.

Free Dominion And The CHRC: Another Section 13 Complaint Coming Down The Pipe

A few bits of "inside baseball" stuff re Free Dominion and their ongoing troubles with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

1) Heavily redacted documents supplied to Connie and Ed by the CHRC prove rather conclusively that investigator Dean Steacy was not randomly investigating the forum in advance of specific complaints raised against it. The timing of his actions have been a bugaboo for ages now, as it was felt that Mr. Steacy had it in for FreeD merely because of the board's politics. From January of this year:

According to the documents Connie and I were served from the Canadian Human Rights Commission last summer, Marie-Line Gentes did not bring Free Dominion to the commission's attention with her bogus complaint against us until September 29th, 2006, over five months after Dean Steacy began his 'investigation' by registering as jadewarr.

However, as Connie now notes:

I posted a thread the day we got them saying that it appeared that Dean Steacy lied under oath when he said that he signed up on FD as jadewarr because the Intake document of the first complaint was dates several weeks after he signed up. As I was scanning the pages today, however, I found an email buried amongst a bunch of 2007 pages that were stapled together, and it looks like a message to Dean Steacy about Free Dominion from three or four days before he decided to "jadewarr" us. You can see that (page 12), and the rest of the FD Files here.

2) There is in fact a 2nd complaint against Free Dominion in the works. No further details have been provided thus far.

Lemire Retreats! Speechies Get Stiffed!

Somewhere out there, Marc Lemire is putting the final touches on a 500 page "book" outlining his constitutional challenge to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. However, Ezra has already posted the CHRC response and, not surprisingly, he has ignored the most important bits.

Firstly, Lemire has long claimed that CHRC staff in general, and CHRC investigator Dean Steacy in particular, posted racist material in the course of their investigations of various White Supremacist websites. Well, no more! From the CHRC document:

The respondent has conceded at page 400, line 4 that Dean Steacy posted no racist material in the course of his duties as a Commission investigator.

Naturally, Ezra, Kate, Mark Steyn, and etc., were happy enough to regurgitate Marc's nonsense. I imagine now, in light of all the lawsuits his pronouncements have generated, that Mr. Lemire will not be on their Xmas card list.

However, my favorite bit concerns Lemire's whole ridiculous "hacked wifi" conspiracy, in which CHRC employees, whose laptops were not wifi enabled at the time, were apparently able to hack an encrypted network from about 350 meters away, or three times the effective diameter of your typical wifi hotspot. This charge was bone-headed to begin with, and the MSM (esp. The National Post) touched a new bottom in journalistic credibility by reporting it with a straight face, even after Buckets and I publicly refuted it (well, Buckets did most of the work, but he is shy and retiring and doesn't like to make a fuss). In any case, it appears that Lemire has dropped these accusations from his brief as well:

There is no allegation in the respondent’s written submissions corresponding with previous allegations in motion materials pertaining, inter alia, to disclosure, that the Commission breached the privacy of the individual whose name was publicly disclosed as a result of a subpoena granted to the respondent by Bell Canada, or that the Commission gained surreptitious access to her wireless internet service. The evidence did not establish any such surreptitious access and this was denied vehemently by the Commission. The Commission considers this unsubstantiated allegation to now be withdrawn.

Of course, Ezra, Mark, Shaidle and the rest of the "Canuck Six" were quick to broadcast this drivel to the world as well, with Mr. Steyn going so far as to accuse Dean Steacy of criminal acts by name. Presumably, they will all apologize immediately.

You Daily Nazi: The Shorter Buckets

Buckets begins to make his case. The For Dummies Version:

1) StormFront Moderator PatrickOdin claims that CHRC investigator Dean Steacy posted to StormFront on Sept. 15th, 2006 from IP address 70.48.181.203.

2) In March 2007, Freedomsite owner Marc Lemire, who has brought a criminal complaint against the CHRC for hacking Nelly Hechme's wifi, asked Stormfront founder, Don Black, for IPs related to the activities on Stormfront of one Jadewarr, Dean Steacy's Stormfront Pseudonym. Black provided Lemire with the IP address 70.48.181.203. Lemire then subpoenaed Bell Canada for information about this address.

3) However, because Bell uses dynamic IP addressing, by December 2006 the address 70.48.181.203 had been assigned to Ottawa resident Nelly Hechme, who lived about a quarter a mile away from the CHRC HQ. And when Bell technicians revealed this fact, Lemire hatched the "CRHC employees hacked her wifi" conspiracy theory.

4) Except: what are the odds that Dean Steacy hacked a wifi account that, by sheer coincidence, bore the same IP in December as the IP borne by his own account about three months earlier? I would suggest they are rather low--"infinitesimal", as Buckets says.

Where does the story go from here? Read more in the upcoming few days, but here's a couple of hints.

Hint One: Most likely nobody visited Stormfront from 70.48.181.203 on December 8, 2006. Not Steacy, not Hechme--nobody. Lemire's criminal complaint, which refs that IP number, will therefore come to nought.

Hint Two: Given the search tools employed by Stormfront, a thorough search of IPs related to Jadewarr should have returned more than a single address. And the address used by CHRC staff in December, 2006 is almost certainly sitting undiscovered in Stormfront records.

Update: Buckets unspools more of the mystery here.