Barrel Strength

British police and prosecutors have been forced to apologize and pay damages and legal costs to documentary makers over their factual reporting of statements made by extremist imams in their mosques:

West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion.

The apology and the promise of £100,000 were made at the High Court on Thursday.

It follows comments made about a Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, which tackled claims of Islamic extremism in the West Midlands.

[...]

But in November, Ofcom rejected the police and CPS claims, and Channel 4 said it was going to sue the CPS and police for libel.

The statement, released to the media after the High Court hearing by West Midlands Police, said they accepted there had been no evidence that Channel 4 or the documentary makers had “misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity”.

It added that the Ofcom report showed the documentary had “accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context”.

The police statement concluded: “We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release.”

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So the Mister Snuffalluffagus of the human rights fast-set, whingeing Senator Romeo Dallaire is in a right tizzy about our moral standing over the case of al-Qaeda youth squad star Omar Khadr.

Dallaire serves up his favourite shibboleth, the “child soldier” argument. Well, that has been smacked down solidly by your correspondent, among many others. The apple of his father’s evil eye was a willing and fervent brigand, not a coerced innocent child.

Save your tears for real victims, General, and keep a better eye on your own credibility.

That rarity, a prize moment in a new Simpsons episode. Even Christians have to laugh at this one:

Click video to play.

First, Jason Kenney and Gary Lunn indicate that government members of a certain visibility understand the issue. Then, the Justice department releases a legal brief that appears to back the status quo. So where are we? Even? Somewhere behind? I think the legal brief will be very positive. If it represents the very peak of current thinking within the bureaucracy, all to the good. Let good ideas drive out bad. With one hand, the government has signaled sympathy, and with the other, it is steadying a target to be aimed at. As Mr. Levant suggests, let the exegesis begin.

Indulge me as I walk through this from the point of view of a communications person. The CHRT announced a decision that it would no longer transcribe and release tribunal testimony, beginning with the March 25 Lemire hearing. All right, fine, a little research revealed that this had been in contemplation for some months but only wanted some good reason to take effect. (The needle on the Sinister meter is only flickering a little.) The hearings were to be available in audio format. However, when I called to obtain a CD (with the purpose of organizing an online transcription bee) I learned that it could only be obtained by an Access to Information request.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

At that point, I desisted and sat back to await events, because John Pacheco was doing a great job slicing the testimony to ribbons and it was clear that exceptionally stupid people were in charge at the commission.

From the perspective of a communications professional, this is a carnival of ineptitude. First of all, does anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy believe there would not be an official written transcript for internal use? And there would not be half a dozen ways for the outside world to discover that? And that not releasing it – like all the others – would make you look petty and fearful and bitter and hateful and obstructive and small?

In the transcript, the fellow who has presided over the travesty said, “Have you had the opportunity to use the audio system; Mr. Fromm, that we have in place now, because it’s quite user friendly? I’m relying on it quite extensively.” Why? Why would he ‘rely on it’? He already had written transcripts for all previous hearings. Which brings us to the sudden banning of written transcripts just in time for the one that promised to continue to bring CHRC wrongdoing to the surface. I do not think it is a coincidence, I think it is a calculated measure to drive up defendants’ costs at a critical time.

Then, apparently, someone at the Commission leaked the official transcript – which should not but does exist – to a presumably ‘friendly’ journalist. To vindicate the commission. In 60’s advertising jargon, “Fuzzy thinking.” To reporters, the call for ‘balance’ means walking all the evidence in hand around to every possible adversary, in search of a good, balancing quote. That part is working great so far, for the reporter and Ezra and the cause of free speech. I wonder how it’s working at the Commission?

the lovely and intelligent Great Canadian™, Jennifer Lynch, QC. After all, if one is seeking out political hacks without the skills to make it in truly merit-based jobs, we’ve hit the motherlode with this one.

This is the former chief of staff to Joe Clark, in his last fling at failing as PC Party Leader, who in a matter of months:

• chided staffers for not keeping up a “professional” profile since the Clark PCs were, in her words, “the government-in-waiting”
• purchased a $1000 Royal Doulton coffee service with the office funds of the smallest parliamentary caucus, because a “former Prime Minister needs to entertain guests in an appropriate fashion.”
• appropriated a high-speed network laser printer as her personal desktop printer, leaving a whole research unit without ready access to their written output.
• demonstrated her self-proclaimed skills as “a respected Alternative Dispute Resolution practitioner, with particular expertise in mediation and the facilitation of complex group processes” by allowing her office to deteriorate into outright mutiny, seeing six senior staffers resign within six weeks.

Update

The typical ethical slip is to pad a resume but it looks like Lynch’s is markedly economical with the truth:

Ms. Lynch has served as chief executive officer in both the private and public sectors: leading the international consultancy PDG People Development Global Inc. from 1998 until her appointment as Chief Commissioner;

But what of her half-year as ringmaster to the Clark circus? I guess she was sort of a CEO from December 1998 to July 1999… in an Enron kind of way.

Read this. I mean it. It is too long, yes. It uses the word “folks” too often. But swallow your conservative bile and read it. If you cannot stand to read it, skim it. But understand the message Mrs. Obama and her husband are putting out. This is what conservatives are up against in the United States this year. John McCain must come up with a compelling alternative vision or else the Democrats will carry the day. Mrs. Obama expresses in the clearest possible terms the emotional bargain the Obama campaign seeks to make with the American people. The point is to understand what the deal is, between the governed and the future government. Mrs. Michelle Obama points the way.

So Denis Coderre — the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen of the Liberal Caucus — flails away at the Harper government, alleging that someone may not have undergone a proper security vetting.

I have but two words for him:

Alfonso Gagliano.

The poster child of dubious vetting for high office in Canada.

That’s all.

Two interesting points came up in today’s edition of PrimeTime Politics on CPAC:

1. Pollster Nik Nanos reports that Canadians rate Stephen Harper as the most competent leader over Stéphane Dion by a factor of more than three to one.
2. In an interview with Environment Minister John Baird, Peter van Dusen notes that his previous guest, Elmer Fudd sound-alike John McCallum, warned that his party’s carbon tax proposal was not a tax on gasoline.

Now, let’s see: a leader who is not perceived by most voters as a competent manager entertains an election plank that would vastly increase oil and coal-based energy prices for Canadians, all while Ontario’s economy is reeling from high energy costs for its industries. So his greatest concern is that his minions do not suggest a hike in gas taxes is coming. Instead, he sticks with his master plan of swinging the death blow to the economy of the most vote-rich province in Canada.

Wow.

A postmodernist academic at Dartmouth College is threatening to sue her students on grounds that their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Such loopy resorts to legalism by the unreasonable are, of course, nothing new to us in Canada. But finding students who resist these PoMo clowns rather than acquiescing to them for the sake of grades is astounding. Hope remains in the quest to reclaim sanity in academia.

NEXT GEN HUMAN RIGHTS
The Future of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions
Crowne Plaza Hotel
Ottawa, Ontario
June 3, 2008
A Public Policy Forum Symposium

The agenda.

11:30 am Pundit’s Pit
This session will feature intellectual debate about the role of HRCs in
particular, and the state in general in addressing discrimination, hate
speech, and human rights violations in Canadian society.
Participants:
Warren Kinsella (confirmed)
Dr. Keith Martin, MP (invited)

I took a course in communications law at the University of Ottawa last year. As is usual in such courses, we had to deliver a class on a topic of our choice. One young man in the class gave his lecture on “freedom of speech”, contrasting Canada and the United States. He dismissed it as “an American concept”, alien to the concept of controlled speech which we have in Canada. He cited leftist, feminist professors of law; he repeated their views in the communications law class. I questioned him. When it got down to it, he frankly admitted that he did not trust the people of Canada to defend the right values, he had more trust in the Supreme Court and the specialized institutions of human rights commissions and state-subsidized Court Challenges program than in the electoral process and in Parliament. I told him a brilliant future awaited him in the Liberal Party. I thought him a scoundrel, another fatuous leftist whose only virtue was fthe frankness with which he disdained elected governments. He considered himself a “progressive”.

So when Mark Steyn went on Steve Paikin’s show last night, I considered the nature of the three young Canadians who are arguing with him about their rights. They are all lawyers. They are all Muslims. They seemed, from how they argued and what they said, to have learned their law from the same sources as my classmate.

Steve Paikin had to maintain peace between Steyn and his young Muslim contenders, and at times the show descended into everyone shouting at once. What was clear to me, was that the kids – I am at the age I will call them that – were unpreprared to discuss the fundamentals. One of their arguments was that, since the Human Rights Commissions are not criminal in nature, Steyn mischaracterized them when he said he had been subject to “criminal” prosecution. As if going to jail, being forced to pay a fine, and enduring years of state subsidized prosecution is somehow made better because it is not “criminal”? Well, can we agree it is prosecution for heresy?

The basis of their objection to Steyn was that they had been offended, and wanted MacLean’s to give them a mutually agreeable amount and type of rejoinder. Steyn pointed out that they had had exposure in seven Canadian major newspapers to make their point.

Paikin finally asked the question of them: do you have a right not to be offended? And apparently all the young Muslim lawyers can think about is how offended they have a right to be. They have been educated in Supreme Court rulings that have sustained the Human Rights Commission’s prosecutions of neo-Nazis. For them, there is no cultural experience of the Human Rights Commissions and hate-speech prosecutions as an exceptional novelty. This is the Canada they grew up in. They have no recollection of the Canada that existed before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. When Steyn talks of Trudeaupia, he is referring to a reality that I perceived last night in the attitudes of these young Muslim lawyers. I found it deeply disturbing that they were incapable of discussing the real issues – objective facts about demographics – which lead to the apprehensions we all have about the future of western societies.

Does it matter whether the take-over is peaceful or violent, in the great scheme of things? Would it be better if it were peaceful? Would it make a difference? From what perspective? From whose? The debate was not engaged.

I saw three young Canadian lawyers, accidentally Muslims, and essentially people whose sense of entitlement is so vast they would crush free speech in this country and not even know what they were doing. I have seen too many young lawyers, white, brown, you-name-it, who have no idea whatever of our pre-Trudeau British constitutional freedoms and responsibilities, and no concern that they are so ignorant. All they want is a Supreme Court and Liberal government appointing the judges. Then they and their kind can rule us forever without interference from Parliamentary institutions. Our law schools are failing us. The Sock Puppets are altogether typical of what modern Canadian legal education is producing. Thank God for Steyn for bringing them up short.

Because it would the equally tasteless gesture in response to the “get-well” brickbat tossed by the lovely and intelligent Elizabeth Thompson of the Montreal Gazette at the ailing Sandra Buckler, hospitalized for thyroid cancer surgery.

Kudos to Right From Alberta for catching this Great Canadian™ in flagrante redacto, sloppily covering her tracks.

Update:

And full laurels to Dr. Roy Eappen for taking the Gazette to task with both fervour and expert knowledge of the situation. Well done, Dr. Roy!

A fine article in the Daily Telegraph “Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths” reminds us how disconcerting it is to the Left Establishment that we are not plunging into Venusian levels of man-created global warming.

The article covers several sources of data whose cumulative testimony is highly equivocal, with some places heating and many cooling. None of this would be the least concern save for the fact that global warming is a politically charged TRUTH whose existence may not be denied on pain of accusations of heresy, abdication of the scientific method, and evil intentions.

“The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

“Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century – warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 – and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.”

And so forth. Windmills, anyone?

… when Jason Kenney stands in front of a hostile audience and says, “I think it’s very important for those of us engaged in anti-racism efforts to ensure the tactics we use, the approaches that we take, are consistent with respect for the liberal values of the Charter of Rights, of the Canadian constitutional framework, of our democratic parliamentary institutions.”

Does anyone think he scratched the following sentiment on the back of an envelope on the flight west, and that it came as a surprise and shock to the Prime Minister’s Office? “I would also hope that we think long and hard about the central role, the foundational role, of such values as freedom of expression in our constitutional framework, and that we do not lightly undermine those constitutional values in our efforts to combat racism or hatred.”

That is not a maverick MP breaking ranks, that is the Conservative party reaching out to its supporters. It is time to have a little faith and patience, and continue working for a majority government.