Posted on 03/25/2008 6:21:04 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
OTTAWA -- Investigators at the Canadian Human Rights Commission share control of an online identity called Jadewarr, which they have used to anonymously monitor and contribute to controversial far-right and white supremacist Web sites, in a strategy that a prominent defendant calls entrapment.
The admission came in testimony Tuesday at the final day of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's hearing in the case of Marc Lemire, who is charged with violating the Human Rights Act's controversial hate speech section because of comments posted on his FreedomSite.
Legally, the admission by CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, and the subsequent cross-examination by Mr. Lemire's lawyers, was the most significant part of the day, in that it bolstered Mr. Lemire's case that he should not be held accountable for what others post on his site, especially if those others are government employees.
But as a microcosm of Canada's beleagured human rights bureacracy, there was much more to take note of, and no shortage of dark humour.
In the gallery, for instance, seated just in front of the thick-necked Lemire supporter who kept violently cracking his neck, was the conservative Maclean's columnist Mark Steyn, dapper with a red pocket puff, who at the breaks held court for his many fans and signed autographs. Based largely on a Steyn book excerpt it reprinted, Maclean's is also accused of a section 13.1 violation, brought by Mohamed Elmasry, the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and others.
Ezra Levant, the other high-profile section 13.1 defendant (he published the Danish Muhammad cartoons in his now-defunct Western Standard magazine) was not there, but he had the luxury of reading live Internet coverage of the hearing by Mr. Steyn's colleague Kady O'Malley and Mr. Lemire himself, who blogged from his chair closest to the witness stand.
There were moments of drama, such as when Mr. Steacy bluntly and repeatedly refused to answer a question (he was asked for the identity of an anonymous complainant, who never filed a formal complaint), to the evident shock of Athanasios Hadjis, the one-man tribunal hearing the case.
"You refuse to answer?" he said twice.
There were raised voices, most notably that of Doug Christie -- best known as Ernst Zundel's lawyer and now an intervenor on behalf of Mr. Lemire -- yelled at Mr. Hadjis that he had flown all the way from Victoria, B.C., on his own tab, and he was not going to let the Commission lawyer continue her "obstruction" of his cross-examination.
There were revelations about the informal relationships between Commission investigators and police forces and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Mr. Steacy, among the commission's main Section 13.1 investigators, said he has asked for and received information from law enforcement "maybe a dozen times," and twice provided information to them.
Mr. Steacy himself raised the strange hypothetical scenario of an investigator being charged for online writing that, in the words of section 13.1, is "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
"My understanding of the legislation is there's not an exemption for anybody, so that would have to apply to investigators. If an investigator posted hate, then a complaint could be brought against them," he said.
But, for skeptics of human rights commissions, the coup de grace came when the Tribunal wrongly outed an innocent person as a Commission operative, thus exposing her to the unwanted attention of the vast army of bloggers who support Mr. Lemire, or at least do not support the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
For a government agency that has fought for months to protect the personal security of their own staff, even going so far as to (unsuccessfully) invoke national security to keep them off the witness stand, their handling of the "Nellie Hechme" question was shocking.
The mystery arose first thing in the morning, when Alain Monfette, director of the law enforcement support team for Bell Canada, took the witness stand.
He had been subpoenaed to explain who logged on to the Web site freedominion.ca as Jadewarr in December, 2006, just as bloggers were using technical data to reveal it as Mr. Steacy's online identity.
Later in the day, Mr. Steacy testified that the name Jadewarr "is actually a short for for Jade Warrior, which is a character from a novel I read as a teenager." He said access to the account was shared by at least five people, including investigators, their superiors and Mr. Steacy's personal assistants (he has been blind since 2004).
He said there was no managerial oversight of what investigators did under this identity, although he said "the manager would be aware of what was going on."
Once Mr. Hadjis explicitly ordered him to do so, Mr. Monfette reported that Bell's technical staff learned that whoever logged on as Jadewarr that day in 2006 had accessed the Internet through a Bell account controlled by Nellie Hechme. He gave the phone number and the street address of the apartment where the account was registered.
By the morning coffee break, associates of Mr. Lemire had already tracked down the value of Ms. Hechme's apartment, but not her identity. By the end of the day, the Commission's lawyer Margot Blight said that Ms. Hechme is a mystery to everyone involved, including Mr. Lemire's team.
Reached by phone last night, Ms. Hechme, 26, told the National Post she has no connection to the tribunal, has never known any of the investigators, and has never accessed a Web site as Jadewarr. She said that in the relevant period in 2006 she did have a Bell Sympatico account with a wireless connection that was not password controlled, meaning anyone within range of her apartment could have accessed the internet with it.
She does, however, have a link to Bell Canada. She has been employed there, though not in the internet division, since before 2006. She had never heard of this Jadewarr issue before, and was disturbed that her name had been publicly disclosed, by her employer no less, without so much as a heads-up.
Even before the lunchbreak Tuesday, her identity was the subject of feverish speculation on Web sites supportive of Mr. Lemire, which also posted her address. By the late afternoon, someone had dug up her old MySpace page, in a mass online investigation that no doubt continued into the wee hours of this morning.
It was just the most prominent of awkward moments for a tribunal hearing whose ending, to judge by the tone of the discussion in the late afternoon, has come as a blessed relief to all involved.
Notably, however, we all await the decision.
I tell you, this just chills me to the bone reading this. This is why we have to fight this speech code crap with every fiber.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
....
Canada Free Speech Ping.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
The problem with special interest commissions is that they have to justify their existance, and I have hardly every found a special interest organization that didn’t at points go to the extreme to support their cause.
Human Rights Commissions have to find evidence of evil doing or their commission is pointless. Government players can play fast and loose with the rules while your average citizen is a sitting duck waiting to be picked off if they react to the enticement improperly.
I am not a supporter of hate sites, but I have seen how the government pounces, considering everyone in sight to be an evil perp. There are times when folks aren’t evil, they have simply done stupid things that make them look so.
If there are hate sites out there, and there certainly are, why does the government have to play along to get convictions? If the hate sight qualifies as a hate sight, then prosecute. If it doesn’t qualify, then move along and quite trying to catch somebody in something.
It is baffling to me with so many sights out there with obvious problems, that federal agencies seem to have some need to enhance things to make a clear cut case.
I’m sure there’s more than enough problematic sights in Canada for this Human Rights Commission to keep busy with them and leave the borderline folks alone. Either that or there isn’t as many problematic sights out there as they would like us to believe.
My FRiend, you folks to the North need the equivalent of both our first ans second amendments.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
In the Ernst Zundel case, a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission ruled that “truth is not a defense” when testimony was presented that what had been said was actually true...
Good... because Freedominion.ca is the Canadian version of FreeRepublic... or at least it was modeled after FR. In Canada, Jim Robinson would be hauled up before a Canadian Human Rights Commission tribunal for some of the things we write about democrats and muslim Jihadists...
Hmmm, is there a ‘reader’s digest’ version of what is going on here? This article is hard to follow.
Hey Jadewarr, come and get me you hate mongering, evil loving communists. I live in Colorado, USA.
I belong to an association where the past chairman is automatically the chair of the ethics committee. I remember hearing one report gleefully of no business. I was concerned then. I don’t expect my association’s ethics committee would ever have gone overboard but the Canadian example seems to illustrate a politically motivated policing of ethics. Our chair wasn’t paid; these clowns need to justify their paycheck.
"truth is not a defense".
Let that be their epitaph.
Hate by whose definition? The gubmint can measure me going 10 miles over the speed limit. The gubmint can determine that I withheld $10 that I should have paid in taxes. The gubmint can sift the evidence and find me guilty of shooting someone. How in God's name can they ascertain the level of dislike I might have for one or more of my neighbors? Much less determine a level of punishment if I cross that arbitrary, undefinable line.
even with all these revelations there is approaching a 0% chance that Mr. Lemire will be “acquitted” by the Human Rights Commission.
No one has EVER been acquitted by the Human Rights Commission.
Free Dominion, which was accessed by "Jadewarr", would not fit either of these descriptions.
Are the guilty sent to gulags? Just asking.
Damn it Canada, you used to be somebody! Canadians used to be the good guys. Canadians fought Kaiser Bill, Hitler, even the North Koreans.
Now they could be headed the way of all fascist states.
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