UPDATE: E-mail link fixed.
I received the first, 200-page tranche of records from my Freedom of Information request to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, internal documents relating to their investigation and prosecution of me for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
There are a lot of gaps in those documents that my lawyer will try to get them to fill in -- it's obvious they don't want to show me certain things. But even the edited pages they have sent over paint a fascinating picture -- sometimes troubling, sometimes hilarious. I've skimmed through them, and I plan to post some interesting nuggets over the next few days.
One thing that surprised me was just how many government bureaucrats are working on my file. I obviously knew a few -- like Shirlene McGovern, my interrogator and fellow YouTube TV star. But then I started counting: there were fourteen people working on my file, plus a pair of mysterious initials!
In alphabetical order, here are "my guys", as I have affectionately come to call them:
- Gerard Dale
- Nichole Daugherty
- Heidi Draper
- Jennifer Drover
- Pardeep Gundara
- Dave Haynes
- Donna MacKinnon
- Charlach Mackintosh
- Shirlene McGovern
- Michael McQuaid
- Marie Riddle
- Kathleen Samuel
- Tara Tkachuk
- Wendy Wong
- “L.B.”
Friends, until I received this information, I thought the complaint was about me. How selfish I was! Me, me, me -- that was all I could talk about! I couldn't go a day without bitching about my nearly $100,000 legal fees; or complaining about the 800 days I've been under the stigma of this prosecution; or whining about "freedom this" or "due process that".
I see now that this is much bigger than me. It's about putting bread on the table for fifteen hungry families. In the Alberta economy (unemployment rate: 3.3%) if these government bureaucrats couldn't prosecute me for a living, they might actually have to venture out from their 30 hour a week public sector union jobs and do some respectable work. The complaints against me aren't just about the "human rights" of cartoon-a-phobic radical Muslims. It's about the human right of a lot of government employees to continue to suck on the public teat.
What about Shirlene "Muzzle" McGovern's new car? Who will buy Pardeep "Gag Order" Gundara his new cabin at the lake? And doesn't poor Jennifer "Dhimmi" Drover deserve a wild weekend with her girlfriends in Las Vegas?
As they acknowledged in their own annual report, complaints to Alberta’s HRC are down 15% over last year. Any real business that lost 15% of its customers in a single year would either lay off staff or risk going out of business. Neither of those are possibilities here, of course -- so increasingly insane "human rights" complaints are entertained, merely to keep the office looking busy.
I've written a lot about the corrupt Canadian Human Rights Commission. But Alberta's HRC is just as nutty. It answers not to the provincial justice minister, but to the province's "Culture and Community Spirit" ministry. That's funny and sad at the same time.
Why not show your community spirit and send a note to Lindsay Blackett, the freshman MLA elected just two months ago, who is now minister of this portfolio. His biography looks surprisingly normal for a politician -- he coaches sports, and before becoming a politician, he sold electronics. In other words, he doesn't come from the grievance industry. He's also Black, living in a very white neighbourhood of Calgary. Which means he knows Albertans aren't bigoted and in need of a human rights commission to tell them how to behave. Otherwise, how could he have won his riding so handily? And Blackett isn't beholden to any ethno-politics for his victory.
Blackett is only two months on the job, so I doubt he's had a chance to become well-briefed on this file. I think it's time we sent him some correspondence to help bring him up to speed, don't you?
You can e-mail him here.
For 15 Government of Alberta employees, the human rights complaint I'm fighting isn't about me, and it certainly isn't about the law. It's about those 15 unionized grievance hustlers riding an 800-day gravy train, and not wanting the party -- at taxpayers' expense -- to end anytime soon.
" Ezra,
You forgot your usual epilogue, so I will add it for you:
Fire. Them. All."
' Hmm, turn the lights on, and watch the roaches scatter, I always say.
I suspect this posting of yours meets the Alberta HRC's definition of a "hate crime", so they'll be knee-jerking another two or three charges your direction.
Keep after them!
We're watching in the States.
Kirk
Largenfirm | 05.29.08 - 4:14 pm'
There's a lot of little nuggets in the FOIP disclosure that I got from the Alberta HRC. Like a letter sent to the two complainants against me, Calgary imam Syed Soharwardy and Yasmeen Nizam of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities. Did you know that complainants have responsibilities, too? Well, one responsibility:
maintain a current mailing address where you can be contacted.
So let's see. I have to retain my own legal counsel at my own expense, whether I win or lose; I have the stigma of a prosecution for 800 days and counting; I am to be "judged" by a panellist who is not a judge, and likely not even a lawyer, and who has no training in constitutional matters like freedom of speech of freedom of religion; I do not have the benefits that a criminal accused has, such as the "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof against me; I have fifteen government workers beavering away against me.
And the real bigots complaining against me, who have hijacked our secular state to prosecute their medieval fatwa? Why, they must keep a mailing address. Fair's fair!
UPDATE: I discovered another letter telling Yasmeen Nizam, of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities to keep her address up to date. I'm not sure if that responsibilitiy was posing a challenge to Nizam, or if the HRC staff were just really bored. This letter has that instruction WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS so perhaps there was some problem. I'd call that use of capital letters culturally insensitive on the part of the HRC -- it's like shouting at someone. I think that's discriminatory. Perhaps they can open another file and log another couple of hundred of hours on the taxpayers' dime.
But there is another line in this letter that made me chuckle:
you are expected to make every reasonable effort to minimize any losses you may be having as a result of what you are complaining about. Please keep a written record of everything you do to minimize your losses, or in other words, to improve your situation.
I can hardly wait for the hearing. I'd love to see Nizam's little grievance journal about the "losses" she continues to suffer because of some cartoons published two years ago. I can just imagine them now:
February 25th: I was driving down Whyte Avenue today and someone cut me off in traffic, and honked at me. Clearly an Islamophobe. Damn those Danish cartoons!
" I find it shocking that it takes so many government employees to trample on one persons right to free speech and expression."
'Well, it would be really interesting to see what Richard Warman did to "minimize his losses" and still end up with five figure judgments, especially as his complaints were on behalf of groups to which he does not belong like gays and non-whites.'
One of the items disclosed to me by the Alberta HRC is the list of questions that Shirlene McGovern, the human rights "officer" assigned to my case, asked Syed Soharwardy. Soharwardy is the bigoted Calgary imam who filed this hand-scrawled complaint against me (and then abandoned that complaint after a wall of public backlash. The identical Edmonton complaint against me continues to slouch forward.)
Here are McGovern's questions for Soharwardy. There's a lot of crap in there, and I'll try to comment on it all later. But focus on question 10:
She talks about the "most offensive" Danish cartoon -- the one with "mohammed as animal/pig; sex with animal".
But no such cartoons were ever published by a Danish newspaper, nor by our magazine. Here are the original 12 cartoons exactly as published in Denmark: we chose eight of those.
What McGovern is referring to are three cartoons fabricated by Danish imams, designed to be as offensive as possible, in order to whip up ignorant Muslim mobs that might not get sufficiently excited about the actual Danish cartoons.
In other words, McGovern was duped by jihadist propaganda. Soharwardy must have smiled like a cat when he heard her regurgitate those lies as if they were truths.
Now there are two possible explanations for why McGovern asked that false question.
The first possible explanation is that she is ignorant. That's probably the case. One would have to show a degree of intellectual curiosity to see what the real cartoons looked like, rather than accepting jihadist propaganda at face value. That might include such advanced investigative tactics as a quick Google search.
But, really, why should a second-rate bureaucrat at a third-rate government agency be an expert in jihadi tactics? Human rights commissions have expertise in precisely nothing; Alberta's Workers Compensation Board is expert in rehabilitation; Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board is expert in oil and gas development; etc. Human rights commissions are filled with people whose uniting characteristic is their mediocrity. My favourite example at the Alberta HRC is one of their in-house lawyers, Arman Chak. Besides being a Muslim supremacist bigot, he's most famous for placing dead last in the Alberta Law Society elections, where every lawyer in the province gets a vote. That's the kind of talent pool the Alberta HRC recruits from.
Human rights commissions are home to such anti-experts as the Vancouver clown, Judy Parrack of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, who ruled that McDonald's couldn't force its employees to wash their hands, since "there was no evidence about the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing frequency," to quote her exactly.
These are the bureaucrats who propose to tell me what I can or can't write about Danish cartoons -- bureaucrats who don't even know what cartoons were published in Denmark, and lack even a child's curiosity to find out.
Not that any purported "expertise" gives any government agency the right to censor a free press. But the outright buffoonery of the HRC is just insult on top of injury.
I think it's likely that Shirlene McGovern was just lazy and ignorant.
But there's another possibility: that she actually knew her file, that she actually did a moment's research, that she actually tried to give value for dollar to Alberta taxpayers, and that she spent, oh, say, one percent of the amount of time studying the Danish cartoons as I did and our magazine did.
And that she knew about the fake cartoons.
And that she knew they were a radical Islamist hoax.
But that she still went along with the hoax, in her role as the HRC's house dhimmi.
It's the less likely of the two theories, but it's possible. The secular Government of Alberta has put 15 bureaucrats to work prosecuting an Islamic fatwa against me for 800 days. If the Alberta HRC is now part of the soft jihad against radical Islam's critics, why not take another step down that road?
For now, I'll go with the ignornace excuse. But if, at my trial, I see Shirlene McGovern in a burka, I'll know I've got my explanation wrong.
" Just when you thought it was at it's most Orwellian ....
...it's revealled that comrade Shirl has either been duped by her own client base or is an official apologist for Islamofascists."
' Hey Ezra, you seen this yet? I'd love to hear what you make of it:
Medical marijuana user files human rights complaint over smoking laws'
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Hi Ezra, I thought I would share the letter I just sent to the PMO (and also cc'd several relevant MP's and the Department of Justice).
To the Right Honourable Stephen Harper,
By now I would hope that the issue of the CHRC (and its provincial counterparts) has come to your attention. Therefore I will not waste time reciting history that has already been more than ably covered by certain politicians, journalists, and newspaper editorial boards.
Mr. Harper, I have been a supporter of you and your party - in its current and past incarnations - since I have been of voting age. For 15 years I have faithfully supported and advocated ‘conservative’ principles. By ‘conservative’ principles I am of course referring to classical liberalism. Or to be more precise, the sovereign rights of the individual such as the freedom of speech, religion and association; rights that have been, for the most part, staunchly defended by your party. Sadly, after reading the Justice Minister’s release on this issue, this no longer seems to be the case.
This is why I reluctantly but necessarily write today’s missive as I feel I no longer have any other honourable recourse. As you can see, I have sent copies of this letter to the Department of Justice, several members of parliament who have spoken out on this issue (both Liberal and Conservative), as well as my own Liberal MP Sue Barnes (whom I did not vote for).
My vote is not free Mr. Harper. And my fundamental beliefs are not swayed by political loyalty. As long as the official position of the Conservative Party of Canada is at odds with free speech, I will not, in any way, shape or form support the CPC with my votes, money, or advocacy. Whenever the next election occurs, my support will go to the member of any party in my riding who chooses to defend my fundamental right to free speech (regardless of how much I may disagree with the rest of their platform).
Mr. Harper, I believe you to be an honourable man. Because of that belief I have done much on your behalf and have defended many of your decisions, often at odds with my own self interest. But no more. If the Conservative Party of Canada - honourable exceptions aside - has chosen to abandon the principles that underpin liberal democracy, if it has chosen to sacrifice our fundamental human rights on the altar of political correctness, if it no longer believes in defending and honouring the blood, sweat and tears of our soldiers and their families, both past and present; then I have no other choice. I am not abandoning you Mr. Harper, you and your party have abandoned me. And more importantly, you have abandoned your country.
As you should well know, freedom is not free. I truly hope you come to realize this once again, as it will be to your eternal discredit if you do not.
Matt H | 05.28.08 - 9:56 am
What follows started as a regular email thread but spiralled into something we felt should be posted as a roundtable on the site - a discussion of the future of gasoline-powered automobiles in America.
The resolution, which you can 
It's one thing for Shirlene McGovern and her fourteen lazy confreres not to show enough curiosity to do some research into the Danish cartoons themselves.
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