Keep Talking

I had an interesting chat with a buddy of mine tonight. We batted around the hockey playoffs for a while, I asked him how business was going, he asked me the same. Then he told me that he'd checked out my blog and he was curious about this "human rights stuff."

My friend stays up to date on things, so I asked him if he'd heard anything about the Mark Steyn/Maclean's deal. He told me he hadn't, but that he'd seen something in the Globe about the human rights issue sometime after reading my blog.

He said, "So give this stuff to me in a nutshell. Sounds like Communist Russia or something."

I found that interesting. My friend and I are fairly opposite on the political side of things. I lean more right, he leans more left. I was wondering how he was going to view the Canadian human rights issue. Then it occurred to me that this stuff isn't about right or left. For people that are immersed in the internet, the world is all right and left. For people like my friend, life is just life, and it becomes left or right on election day.

See, my buddy's just some guy. He doesn't scour the news for political conspiracies. Like most Canadians, before tonight he had no idea that there's a human rights commission in every province, or even what they're for. So when I told him about the stuff going on now, he was a bit incredulous.

I explained things further, and the further I went, the more he said, "Jesus. What?"

We talked about the bar owner in Burlington that got screwed for not letting a guy smoke dope on his porch, and we talked about the free speech stuff, and we talked about the dude in Vancouver that wants BDSM to be called a "sexual orientation," so much so that he's using it in a discrimination complaint against the cops.

The more we talked, the more my buddy didn't quite believe me. He said, "So...it's like civil suits or something? Like, they can award punitive damages."

And I said, "No, as far as I can tell, they award all kinds of damages, but they're careful not to call them 'punitive.' They're called 'remedies.'"

To which my friend replied, "Huh." Then he asked who Mark Steyn is and what all that was about. Again, he laughed and said he wanted it in a nutshell.

"Well," I said, "it's like this. Mark Steyn wrote a book and said the Muslim population is growing faster than the rest of the population, and by such-and-such a time, they'll be a big political force in whatever European country. Maybe Sharia law and whatever. He also quoted some imam guy that says Muslims will "breed like mosquitoes." Maclean's ran an excerpt of the book. So this guy filed a human rights complaint against him and Maclean's in Ontario, BC, and with the Feds. He wants the commissions to force Maclean's to print an essay written by a writer of their choosing, and they want it to be a cover story."

My buddy said, "What?"

But the 'what' wasn't for anything Steyn had written, but for the fact that someone was trying to tell Maclean's what to print.

And again, it hit me: my buddy's just some guy. He might be left, he might be right, but he's still Canadian, and these complaints struck him as incredibly un-Canadian. Before calling me, he probably thought he had nothing to fear by writing or saying any damn thing he wanted. Now I was telling him the opposite. That's a tough thing to hear when you're not ready for it. In a way, it's life changing.

I told him that I knew these commissions were a bad thing because last week I sat down to write something...and I paused.

That is the first time in my life as a Canadian citizen that I have ever thought twice about saying what's on my mind for fear of getting in trouble for it. First time ever. The words of the commissions were going through my head: "likely to expose someone to hatred or contempt."

Okay. So tell me what "likely" means. Or "contempt."

I think the blog was about gay marriage. I'm not against it, but I'm not for it. I think it needs time to sink in, and that it shouldn't be rushed. The reason I paused is I suddenly thought, "Could someone spin this as me "likely to expose someone to contempt?'"

Couldn't they do that to anything you or I write?

That's what I don't get about the weirdos that say, "But no one's been convicted of a speech complaint yet, not unless they're a neo-Nazi." That isn't the point. Fact is, the more you learn about these commissions, the more you learn how easy it is to drag someone through the mud for saying something, even if the complainant doesn't see it through to the end. The fear of accusation is enough to frighten and silence people. But then, I guess that's their whole point, too.

I told my buddy about this. I told him that I didn't want to write political blogs all the time, because I don't want to be seen as some political crank. That's why I mix it up, so my friends don't get bored. But once in a while, politics is fun to write about. Yet now I was nervous. Could I write about these commissions, or should I just ease off in case someone decided to screw me over?

My buddy's just some guy. He had one thing to say:

"Keep talking about it."