Newsletter

April 2008

PEN Canada Calls For Changes To Human Rights Commission Legislation

PEN
Canada calls on the federal and provincial governments to change human rights
commission legislation to ensure commissions can no longer be used to attempt to
restrict freedom of expression in Canada.

Recent complaints in Alberta against journalist Ezra Levant and in Ontario
against Maclean’s magazine and its writer Mark Steyn raise disturbing
questions about the degree to which human rights commissions have taken it upon
themselves to become arbiters of what constitutes free speech.

PEN
Canada believes this is not the role of human rights commissions and that
governments across the country need to make that clear both to their commissions
and to Canadians.

Neither Mr. Levant nor Maclean’s magazine and Mr. Steyn published
anything that incited violence against the Muslim community although both have
been subject of complaints to commissions. Nor did their comments violate
anyone’s human rights.

As
the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has suggested, human rights legislation
was designed to prevent discrimination in workplaces, in accommodation and in
providing goods and services to individuals. Commissions were created to
adjudicate complaints about such issues when they arose. They were never
designed to restrict the free expression of opinions.

“Whether you agree with Mr. Levant’s decision that the Western Standard
should publish the Danish cartoons about the prophet Mohammed or not, no one in
a free and democratic country such as Canada can seriously argue the magazine
should not have the right to publish them,” said PEN Canada’s national affairs
chair Christopher Waddell.

“That is equally true for Maclean’s magazine and the excerpt it published
from Mark Steyn’s book that led to the complaint against that publication.”

Neither complaints should ever have been accepted by a human rights commission
and both should be immediately dismissed.

To
ensure there is no repetition of such attempts to constrain freedom of
expression through the guise of human rights legislation, PEN supports calls for
removal of subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act which states that
it is discriminatory when individual or groups say or write anything that is
“likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

Similar wording in provincial human rights statutes should likewise be removed.

Issued February 4, 2008.