Here, courtesy of Mississauga Matt, are the videos of Mark Steyn
and Ezra Levant testifying in front of the Standing Committee on
Justice & Human Rights, in Ottawa, on 2009-10-05. Thanks, Matt.

Update: Quotes from parts of the testimony of Mr. Steyn:

• I whole heartedly support laws against the incitement
  of violence, but what the human rights regime is doing
  is now criminalizing differences of opinion.
• […] not just bad in theory, but wholly corrupt in practice.
• Truth should be the ultimate defense.

This YouTube footage is good news, folks. Tell others about it.

“I fail to understand how secular powers and government agencies should think they are in a position to tell the church that she is wrong in her internal rules and regulations, even though these have directed and shaped the life of the church during the last 2,000 years. However, this is what we face today. If the Human Rights Tribunal should choose to interfere with the church’s governance, this will be most shocking. The tribunal has no authority to place itself as an arbiter of canonical precepts.”

Unless they decide they do.

Heh.

News to me. Quick, Dawg, grab your gun and join me in fighting them today. You and I will fight the Nazi menace the only way that works: through physical force. In 48 hours, I can get a dozen people with guns, who each know another dozen people with guns, who will happily do an Inglorious Basterds on their asses.
I’m (deadly) serious.
Are you…?
Oh wait: you don’t believe in private gun ownership, which leaves you pretty dickless in this fight.
Unless there’s no need to have such a fight.
Because you and I both know you’re just talking smack about “Nazis all over Canada.”
You can’t have it both ways. If they’re real, let’s get ‘em. They’ve got to be destroyed. I’m ready. Call me. I’m in the phone book.
But they aren’t real. This fake Nazi menace is as real as those “mass graves” you keep looking for, and “fire doesn’t melt steel”, and Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a communist, and that “DDT kills babies” shit and all the other self-aggrandizing BS you people have been foisting on us for the last century.
You’re just a moral exhibitionist with way too much time on his hands.
All that said: the minute you get in HRC shit, I, like Jay, will be there to help you out too.
Gee, we seem to be doing all the heavy lifting on our side, huh?

The Legal Conference on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion has now been confirmed for October 27 and 28 in the Congressional Auditorium in Washington DC – click here for detailed registration procedures.

Score one for Marc Lemire;

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ruled that Section 13, Canada’s much maligned human rights hate speech law, is an unconstitutional violation of the Charter right to free expression because of its penalty provisions.
The decision released this morning by Tribunal chair Athanasios Hadjis appears to strip the Canadian Human Rights Commission of its controversial legal mandate to pursue hate on the Internet, which it has strenuously defended against complaints of censorship.
It also marks the first major failure of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, an anti-hate law that was conceived in the 1960s to target racist telephone hotlines, then expanded in 2001 to the include the entire Internet, and for the last decade used almost exclusively by one complainant, activist Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman.
[…]
Mr. Hadjis’ decision to reject the law as unconstitutional, in light of its penalty provisions, leaves a central area Canada’s human rights in limbo, and kicks a political hot potato over to the government and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which can appeal the ruling to Federal Court.
Mr. Warman’s case was supported by the CHRC, and various advocacy groups joined the case as intervenors in support of Section 13.
Mr. Hadjis rejected Mr. Warman’s complaints in all but one instance, an article called AIDS Secrets. He found that this posting contravened Section 13(1). But he also found the law itself — with its threat of penalties such as an order to cease the discrimatory messages, or pay fines up to $10,000 — violates Mr. Lemire’s Charter right to freedom of expression, and therefore refused to make any order against him.
“Since a formal declaration of invalidity [of Section 13(1)] is not a remedy available to the Tribunal, I will simply refuse to apply these provisions for the purposes of the complaint against Mr. Lemire and I will not issue any remedial order against him,” Mr. Hadjis wrote.

Looks like Kinsella picked a bad to day to quit apoplexy…
Ruling here.

In a move certain to receive widespread support from Canadian Liberals…

The legislation, aimed at providing judges with clear direction on the 1937 Constitution’s blasphemy prohibition, imposes a fine of up to 25,000 euros — about $39,000 — for anyone who “publishes or utters matter that is [intentionally meant to be] grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”
Police with a search warrant will be able to enter private premises and use “reasonable force” to obtain incriminating evidence.

Fatwa #18195 from Yale University

Publishing

Permission To Publish

If we publish the Danish cartoons (not saying we want to, the question being purely hypothetical) in a book titled “The Cartoons That Shook the World”, will you promise not to firebomb our university press office?

h/t Uncle Meat

And all she got was this lousy t shirt.

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”*

The new law would punish the owners of radio stations, television channels and newspapers that have attempted to “cause panic” and “disturb social peace,” Attorney General Luisa Ortega said.
It also would punish media owners who “manipulate the news with the purpose of transmitting a false perception of the facts.”
“Freedom of expression must be limited,” Ortega said.

He won’t lose the next vote to proclaim him dictator for life.

If an individual must surrender their religious freedom when acting on “behalf of government”…

The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission agrees with that decision saying the commissioners are appointed to perform civil marriages and when they are acting on behalf of the government have an obligation to carry out that duty.

Why aren’t they paying his legal costs?

Ezra Levant;

They’ve drawn up a blacklist, just like the medieval index of banned books. Right now it’s a voluntary pilot project to which Internet service providers can submit. But if the trial run is deemed a success and made law, anyone who links to a blacklisted site can be fined $11,000 a day. That means it will be a crime not just to provide the contents of a web site, but to merely reproduce its address.
That’s not just like banning books. It’s like banning books, and banning saying the banned book’s title. It’s a lot of banning.
But here’s the tricky part: the government won’t even say what those 1,370 banned web sites are. It’s secret. So there are 1,370 web sites out there that could result in your criminal prosecution in Australia. But you won’t find out what they are — until you link to one of them. That’s right out of Alice in Wonderland. The pretzelian logic goes like this: if the Australian government were to list those 1,370 banned web sites, then not only would they be breaking the rules themselves, but that list would serve as an advertisement. Out of the billions of web pages on the Internet, 1,370 would be given special attention, inviting anyone curious to check them out.
Of course, people who compile the secret blacklist know what’s on it. But apparently they can be trusted not to succumb to the temptation to look at the sites. And the list was sent to selected Australian Internet companies for a trial run. That didn’t work out quite as well. The list was leaked to Wikileaks, the web site that specializes in publishing confidential documents, especially embarrassing internal government memoranda.
And that’s when things got even weirder. Wikileaks published the entire blacklist on one of its pages. So now that Wikileaks page, too, has been added to the blacklist. It’s number 1,371.

Queen For A Day.
(h/t)

Tim Hudak, the new PC leader in Ontario;

“For too long, individual rights have been trampled and ignored by an increasingly dysfunctional Human Rights bureaucracy. The McGuinty government’s system has advanced nuisance claims and denied justice and legitimate complaints, costing individuals and businesses thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs and clogging the system.”

Stephen Taylor has a line up of Youtube interviews from the convention.

Voting begins!

All on the taxpayers dime;

“I have a file. I’m sure I have 1,200, certainly several hundred of these things”.

Let’s make better use of their time. BCF offers instructions on how to file an access to information request.
More.

Lo be it for me to criticize another blogger…cough…but Kinsella takes the cake on this doozy.

“Raphael” then goes on to play some parsing games about what’s on his birth certificate, what’s real, what isn’t, etc. But he confirms that at least part of his Post handle is bullshit.

So, does the Post willingly publish untruths, or has it simply been hoodwinked? Good question.

To answer him, no. No the Post hasn’t been “hoodwinked” and no, you don’t have a good question.
Warren, I don’t expect you to drop your partisan wont, but one expects you to be smarter than this. The Nat. Post is only upholding some few hundred years worth of history in the publishing, suffrage and freedom of speech battles of the past.

Course, given your views on freedom of speech, I should expect nothing less than your desire to cast question on freedom of the press…at least the more conservative press. “We just caunght have that deary, now caun we.”

Cheers,
lance

“This was a statement that was legally spoken (from all indications) by protesters holding signs and shown as a banner behind a plane circling over Queen’s Park in Toronto today. The result? An investigation into a possible hate crime.”

If I weren’t so busy with work, I’d turn that subject line into a photoshop contest, just so I could send the winning entries to the OHRC.
Related – Good question.

Ezra Levant, on how he was saved by the internet.

Had I been charged with hate speech 10 years ago, I could not have fought back as effectively. If all this had happened in 1996 instead of 2006, few would have known anything about my battle. YouTube, which brought my story alive for 600,000 people by the time the traffic died down, debuted only in 2005. Before that, there was no universally surfed repository of current event–themed videos, and bloggers were much less prevalent. And without the credit card donations made possible by PayPal (which was started in 2000), it’s unlikely that I could have raised the money to cover my legal expenses.
In short, the Internet saved me. In that sense, my story isn’t just about free speech. It’s also about the way new technology has leveled the playing field between big government and private citizens.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”
[…]
The bill is a telling example of how the American Left has turned against free speech and civil liberties. The bill’s sponsor, Linda Sanchez (D-CA), and nearly all of her 14 co-sponsors are liberals. All of them backed the federal hate-crimes bill passed by the House yesterday, which is designed to allow people who have been found innocent in state court to be reprosecuted in federal court..

Could mean big trouble for Andrew Sullivan…
h/t