A Last Word On The Moon Report

Because I think, given the government's reaction to it, we are headed for years of further reports and submissions and committees and, in the end, nothing much will change.

Moon essentially endorses the CHRC's choices in selecting and pursuing section 13 cases. In fact, he suggests tweaking criminal code provisions such that all of the cases successfully prosecuted under section 13 would also be captured under the new regime that he has proposed. So while you can argue that using the CC for such work is inefficient, and you can argue that the odds of provincial police forces actually setting up "hate teams" is Nil, nothing in Moon's proposals would, in theory, let anyone who has already had a run-in with the CHRC off the hook.

What would happen is that complaints dealing with the kind of material now handled by the CHRC under section 13 would go to the various police hate crimes units (whose workload, Moon suggests, would almost certainly increase). So, while nowadays Connie and Mark, or Mr. Boisson, might get a letter from a government bureaucrat, under the new regime they would most likely get a call from a nice policeman, and this would occur just as their websites (via section 320.1 of the CC) disappeared until said policeman could decide whether its contents met the standard. Since Freedominion occasionally hosts calls for Muslim genocide in its forums, it is almost certain that they would be getting such phone-calls, and might wind up looking at jail-time rather than a fine and rebuke.

How that is supposed to be an improvement, I do not know.

Justice Minister: Moon Report A Formula For Inaction

From the Montreal Gazzete:

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told Canwest News Service he has no plans to introduce legislation to strip the human rights commission of its online mandate, but he described the report as a "step in the right direction" for a House of Commons review.

From Deb Gyapong's blog:

[Darren] Eke said the Justice Minister had indicated he wanted to have the justice committee look at Section 13 and was hoping that Conservative MP Rick Dyskstra would again make a motion to that effect.

Perhaps the justice committee could also review the Moon report, he said.

Except, Deb discovers:

Well, I just scrummed Dystra on his way into Question Period. He said he's not even sure he's going to be on the Justice Committee as he is now the Parliamentary Secretary to the Citizenship and Immigration Minister.

By far the best coverage of developments at Ms. Gyapong's site. As the day progressed, it is as though you could actually hear her spirit being crushed.

Will The National Post Do The Right Thing And Join A National Press Council?

Jonathon Kay writes:

Will the government now do the right thing and get the CHRC out of the censorship business?

Richard Moon's report recommends repealing or, if not repealing, amending section 13 of the CHRA. It also recommends , in the case of repeal, revitalized press councils to deal with remarks appearing in the MSM which are "unfair or discriminatory" while not reaching the level of hate-speech. It would grant these press councils special powers:

To advance this end, all major print publications should belong to a provincial or regional press council that has the authority to receive a complaint that the publication has depicted an identifiable group in an unfair or discriminatory manner and, if it decides that the complaint is well-founded, to order the publication to print its decision.89 A decision by the council that its code of conduct has been breached results not in censorship but in "more speech" – the publication of a statement that the newspaper breached the code and, more particularly in this context, that it published material that unfairly represented the members of an identifiable group.

If the major publications in the country are not all willing to join a press council, then the establishment of a national press council with statutory authority and compulsory membership should once again be given serious consideration. A newspaper is not simply a private participant in public discourse; it is an important part of the public sphere where discussion about the affairs of the community takes place. As such, it carries a responsibility not to defame or stereotype identifiable groups within the Canadian community.90

Note that in, for example, the Macleans case, had Dr. Moon's recommendations been law Macleans may well have been ordered to print a decision finding Mark Steyn's article to be discriminatory. But this is exactly the point--editorial control-- over which Maclean's claims to have fought the HRC complaint against them. In other words, where they "won" their HRT case, they might well have "lost" a press council case and been forced to forgo editorial control anyway.

So the report does not just call for the repeal of section 13. As far as I can tell, it calls for a redistribution of some of the penalties the CHRC is allowed to impose in section 13 cases to other bodies, which would then be able to dole out punishment in situations where, were a complaint brought under section 13, that case would have been dismissed.

Once the Speechies get passed the news release, some of their enthusiasm will wane.

More on this later, obviously. Fascinating stuff.

Update: the waning process has already begun.