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"Human Rights" madness
Liberal media edits opinion

By TED BYFIELD, ALBERTA REPORT

The list is growing of things we are not allowed to say in Canada, lest we be denounced - if not by some human rights commission, then certainly by the liberal media. In the last month or so, for instance, we have discovered:

• That if we say abortion is wrong, certainly if we suggest it amounts to taking the life of a human being, then we are inciters to murder because talk like this inevitably leads people to take gunshots at abortionists. Therefore, say the pro-choicers, criticism of abortion must be prohibited by law.

• And, by the way, if we call people who do abortions abortionists, we are inciting hatred by using a derogatory term. They must be known as "abortion providers." While there's nothing reprehensible in abortion, there is apparently everything reprehensible in being an abortionist.

• That if you criticize the existence of Indian reserves in Canada, or suggest the Reform party would do away with them, this will be considered "race hatred" in Saskatchewan. Tim Houk, a dry cleaner, was fined $400 by the provincial human rights commission for saying to a native woman, "If you ask me there shouldn't even be reserves," and "if the Reform party had got in they would fix those Indians." Plainly hate-mongering, said the commission.

• Bill Bercheld of Okanagan Lake, B.C. who put up signs on his property criticizing the Westbank Indian Band was hauled before the B.C. commission. His lawyer Doug Christie took the case to the B.C. Supreme Court, arguing that the B.C. human rights code denied free speech which is guaranteed by the Charter. That may be so, argued law professor Kathleen Mahoney, but Canada has signed the International Declaration of Human Rights which supersedes our Charter and makes criticism of minority groups illegal. Case continues.

• Meanwhile we also discovered that even though financial calculations by Indian band councillors is now running into the millions of dollars, to suggest that this merits a judicial inquiry will be viewed as an act of racism. That, at any rate, is how one civil servant was quoted in the Southam newspapers last week in explaining why the government doesn't dare call an inquiry.

• But the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission has ruled it's OK to publish biblical denunciations of homosexual activities, provided you don't elaborate on them.

• In Fredericton in mid-October Mayor Brad Woodside, who had been ordered by the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission to proclaim Gay Pride Week, turned off his microphone when he did it, so the proclamation was inaudible. The town's sodomy set is now threatening further action.

• Finally, the magazine I run, Alberta Report, is being dragged before our human rights commission for having reported that sexual abuse did not occur in the majority of native residential schools. Phil Fontaine, grand chief of all the chiefs, says this is the same thing as "holocaust denial" and people should be prohibited by law from saying such a thing. However, the Reform party has still not been charged with "racism" over its "shameful" ads (that's the favoured word in describing them) in the last election campaign. They suggested that since Canada has had Quebec prime ministers for 29 of the last 31 years, maybe it was time some other province provided the PM.

  Apparently it's still legal to say that. It was stated only last month right here in Alberta and nobody said anything. But maybe that's because this was uttered by a BQ MP who saw the Quebec dominance of Canadian politics as evidence the country isn't working. So it's only shameful if Anglos say it.

Something else on the rights front. You may remember in this column two weeks ago I described how Alberta won't approve the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child because of its categorical limitations on the rights of parents to interfere with what their kids read, watch on TV, hide in their cupboards or whom they associate with. Alberta wants these clauses exempted from Canada's approval. Ottawa said no because that would weaken the treaty.

Well, I wasn't altogether right. Ottawa has since changed its mind and attached one condition. It has said the treaty must not restrict the rights of native parents. The rights of other parents, of course, it didn't mention.

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