Conservative writer Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine have ticked off the Canadian Islamic Congress.  Maclean's published a screed taken from Steyn's book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. The excerpt, published in October 2006, was entitled The Future Belongs To Islam.

The group has filed three separate human rights complaints for what they see as an Islamophobic rant -- an injury compounded by Maclean's' refusal to publish a multi-page, unedited rebuttal, according to a Canadian Press article.

B.C. writer Terry Glavin asks if such disputes are really what human rights tribunals should be adjudicating.

From the Dec. 13 Tyee article:

The Canadian Islamic Congress has instigated three separate proceedings under three separate human rights codes against a 102-year-old national magazine over the publication of an excerpt from a book, thereby inviting the tribunals to trespass upon free-press rights well beyond their competence. British Columbia's human rights tribunal has already scheduled hearings for next June.

This entire escapade is not just a threat to Maclean's and Steyn specifically but to journalists generally, and also to pamphleteers, bloggers and just about anyone who might occasionally express a public opinion on a subject of public interest. It also threatens to invite the wrath of the Supreme Court of Canada, which should be expected if Maclean's and Steyn find themselves forced to fight this all the way up. The result could cause great harm to the credibility and the legal clout of human rights tribunals across the country.

From Zundel to here

Alan Borovoy, the widely-respected general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and a key architect of Canada's first human rights commission, saw this coming seven years ago. Back then, he warned of the very real free-speech threat we're now staring in the face.

It's one thing to go before a human rights tribunal with a hate-speech complaint against a dangerous crank like Ernst Zundel, Borovoy said back then. Zundel is a fascist, and he was successfully prosecuted under Canada's Human Rights Act for inciting hatred against Jews. He fled to the United States, got deported back to Canada, was confined for a while under a security certificate, and was then sent back to his fatherland where he was tried, convicted and jailed earlier this year.

"But a wise concern for human rights must address not only current cases but also longer-term implications," Borovoy told a 2000 gathering of the Canadian Association of Statutory Human Rights Agencies. "In short, who else could be targeted under these statutes?"

Well, now we know.

The question isn't whether we like Maclean's, which has taken a decidedly pugnacious turn since editor Kenneth Whyte took over as editor in March 2005. Neither is it about whether suppressing hate propaganda is a good idea. It is a good idea.

The question is whether human rights tribunals can sort through the necessary cacophony of utterances and statements in a free and open society in order to police vigorous public debates for commentary that is "likely to expose" religious, ethnic or other minority groups to hatred, contempt or discrimination. And the answer is they can't, and they shouldn't. That's not what they're for.

Besides, human rights tribunals aren't competent to assess intent to foment hatred or contempt, much less define what these terms mean, and they aren't obliged to guarantee the defence of truth. The Canadian Human Rights Act, for instance, fails to allow for either the truth or reasonable belief as a defence.

But in the realm of public discourse, truth matters, no matter how old-fashioned this sounds, and no matter how many post-structuralism discussion parlours will banish you for saying so. The truth that matters isn't some metaphysical notion of truth, or the kind of magical truth that is said to be culturally-dependent, but the commonplace kind that is revealed by objective facts.

The free expression of opinion also matters, and sorting out the intelligent opinions from the rubbish ones requires a robust and free "marketplace of ideas" in which opinions flourish or wither according to the good sense of the people.

The 'likely to expose' clause

Certainly the marketplace is no utopia, and in Canada, it may well be that the news media is providing an especially dystopian ideas marketplace, as author and journalism professor Marc Edge has forcefully argued, most recently here in The Tyee. But that doesn't get us away from the peril of giving human rights tribunals the job of telling us which ideas are permissible, and which ideas aren't.

Last year, in the middle of the "Mohammed cartoons" controversies, Borovoy again warned about the perils that lie on the road the Canadian Islamic Congress is now so boldly marching down.

In a multicultural country like Canada, journalistic analysis, commentary and even pedestrian news reportage, on any number of global conflicts and controversies, will inevitably result in the publication and broadcast of things that are "likely to expose" some people, sooner or later, to somebody's hatred or contempt, on the basis of their religious beliefs, ancestry or place of origin. To take all that in, human rights tribunals would have to apply "a more general restriction against the transmission of certain news or opinion," Borovoy said. "Hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions."