Worse By the Minute

I just took a peek at Andrew Coyne's live-blog from the Maclean's/British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal hearing. It's in its fourth day, and the news gets more bizarre by the minute.

For a Canadian, it makes for pretty depressing stuff. I don't know if I should keep reading it in order to stay up-to-date on what's going on, or if I should try to ignore it until the weekend so I don't get too bummed out.

Turns out, there's no stenographer in the hearing room, and they've been having trouble with their microphones. In other words, there might be no official record of what's going on in there. That leaves us with reporter Andrew Coyne, trying his best to record what he sees and hears.

Right now, the complainant (Naiyer Habib) is reading blog posts that he got from the internet. The posts reference Steyn's article, and they go on to make all kinds of bigoted slurs against Muslims. This, the complainant argues, shows that Steyn's article incites bigotry in British Columbia. Trouble is, the two blogs are from outside the country. One's in the US, the other's in Belgium.

The tribunal, though it doesn't have any jurisdiction over the internet and doesn't know who wrote the blogs, has declared that the blogs are valid as evidence (though - and there's a lot of the word "though" when discussing this stuff - the tribunal has no rules of evidence to weigh the evidence against).

These internet posts could have been written by anybody. Could have been the guy sitting next to you on the bus, or some guy killing time in the South Pole. Nobody knows. But they're deemed valid to show that Steyn's work is against the human rights code of British Columbia, and that his work incites hatred in the province. What they're saying is, Steyn and Maclean's must pay because someone, somewhere, is a bigot.

In passing, Andrew Coyne makes a brief comment in the middle of his live-blog. It won't make any headlines, and barely anybody will notice it. He makes the comment while reporting on the racist posts that the complainant is reading aloud. For me, Coyne's aside is the most important statement to come out of the hearing:

It occurs to me: I hope the BC Human Rights code makes exception for reports of their own proceedings. Otherwise I’m in trouble, since the code makes no allowance for reporting on a matter of public interest…

Read that comment again. This is a Canadian journalist, who has written hundreds of articles and columns over his career. And today, he is nervous that quotation marks around bigoted slurs will not protect him from litigation. I will bet you anything that he never thought he'd make that comment in his lifetime. He should never have had to. To use his words, it should never have occurred to him.

That's what I mean when I say, "The accusation is the conviction. The process is the punishment." A conviction isn't necessary, because the fear of accusation is enough to get people to censor themselves. Never mind shutting up the bloggers. From the look of Coyne's comment, this hearing has already placed the germ of fear and silence into the heads of the mainstream press.