April 2010
Too
bad Pierre Trudeau wasn’t a little broader in his famous maxim. We could have
used a second line: "The state has no business in the comedy clubs of the
nation."
There’s a trial going on in B.C. right now, under the insanely diluted and
degraded understanding of the once-noble concept of "human rights," giving full
anguished adjudication — complete with lawyers and a tribunal chairman — over
a heckling spat, already three years old, at a Vancouver supper/comedy club
called, surely by the gods of irony, Zesty’s.
The
good old days, when all a comedian had to worry about was flop-sweat, bad timing
and where his or her next joke was coming from, are long gone. Nowadays, thanks
to the infinitely expanding reach of bureaucratic commissions, a couple of
bad-tempered moments at Zesty’s have summoned up the Mr. McGoos of the B.C.
Human Rights Commission. It is currently determining whether a lesbian patron’s
human rights were violated by a journeyman comic’s obnoxious heckling of her —
brought on, he says, by her equally obnoxious heckling of him. The comic in
question is Guy Earle.
It’s a case remarkably similar–in its gutting of common sense, its ability to
bring on a puzzled frown from anyone who first hears of it — to that of the
owner of a St. Catharines, Ont., fitness club. He recently was taken before the
Ontario Human Rights Commission by a prospective member who, while awaiting
"gender reassignment surgery," claimed the right to undress in the club’s
women’s locker room. The women objected. The owner denied. The member filed a
complaint. That case, after much financial injury and anguish, was summarily
dropped. No apology, no redress, no nothing for the owner.
Is
Canada a serious country? Do we staff close to a dozen offices, provincial and
federal, spend nearly $200-million across the great expanse of the country, to
explore the human rights implications of rude heckling in comedy clubs? Or, the
human right to undress in the locker room of your choice? For this, did the
great armies of the West storm the beaches of Normandy? For this, did
Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky endure their endless nights of hell in the gulag?
By
some crude osmosis, or just from the luxuriant carelessness of our pampered
lives, we have overturned one of the great concepts of all human law. The
concept of human rights, as experience and history inform us, is protection from
the state’s power, not oversight, interference and punishment by the state’s
power.
The
core concept of human rights is the protection of the irreducible safety and
dignity of the individual from the massive and arbitrary power of the state.
Not, the state wandering in, with its apparatus and procedures, its boards and
tribunals into the doings, or speech, of the individual. This is what the Guy
Earle case, in its triviality — it’s about heckling, remember — upends. It
perverts the name of "human rights," earned in blood and suffering in
circumstances of utter consequence and unspeakable misery.
In
a just Canada, or a Canada with some regard for its dignity as a nation, there
would be another and real human rights commission — a sort of
meta-human-rights-commission–looking into what we currently know as human
rights commissions.
Are
they, the latter, fair? No. They leverage the complainant and certain favoured
minority group to a status, legal and financial, superior to the person
complained about. They take forever to get on, force the hiring of lawyers,
impose fines, have their own vague rules, allow complainants to step out of the
process when the mood strikes–as in the case of the St. Catharines fitness club
— ripping individual lives or business to smithereens, all under the concept —
mediated by Orwell and Kafka, assisted by Lewis Caroll–of human rights.
Meantime, real cases of human rights violation, individuals
genuinely stranded and deprived of their rights as citizens, such as the couple
in Caledonia, Ont., who’ve lived through a multi-year siege by local First
Nations gangs, unaided by the Ontario government or the police–noiselessly pass
by.
Where was the mighty Ontario Human Rights Commission during all of this?
Adjudicating the locker room rights of a St. Catharines fitness club.
If
we go out into the other world, the world that doesn’t have quite as many comedy
clubs, we see what real human rights are.
A
man standing alone in front of a tank in Tiannamen Square — there’s a human
rights moment. The multitudinous horror of ethnic cleansing, raging warfare in
the Congo, the nightmare of North Korea, the acid-tossing at schoolgirls by the
Taliban — there are people all over this world trembling at the might of the
state, seeing their lives foreshortened or ruined, subject to unspeakable
horrors at the hands of warlords and tyrants and revengeful dictatorships —
these are the fields of real human-rights violations.
As
Canadians, we should be embarrassed that the "right to undress" with "other"
women while waiting for a sex-change operation owns the same vocabulary as
these. We should be embarrassed, too, that what was most likely a bad-tempered,
ill-handled exchange late at night in a place called Zesty’s, mutual heckling,
is under review by the state as a violation of human rights.
None of this is new, unfortunately. It is an issue that has had more than a few
years’ ventilation. Yet from our leadership, Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff in
particular, we hear so little about so fundamental a concept. Public opinion, in
my judgment, has long ago had it with the wilder operations of Canada’s human
rights commissions. But Harper and Ignatieff have so little courage on this. (So
also, let it be noted, do our 10 premiers.)
We
did have this week news of some Senators announcing an inquiry. Political cover,
to walk past the issue for the next election? Perhaps. I genuinely hope not. But
there is no need for an inquiry into matters that have had such extended
demonstration — from Ezra Levant’s purgatory to the Guy Earle fiasco.
Mr.
Harper and Mr. Ignatieff should declare themselves on this issue. So should the
premiers. But, in this demoralized and mediocre period of Canadian political
leadership, do not hold your breath waiting for them to do so. One of the
overlooked reasons why Canadian politics is a matter of disinterest and apathy
for so many is that our leaders, almost all of them, on a real issue like human
rights, give us so much, by tactical omission and the calculations of electoral
cowardice, to be apathetic about.
Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of
CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.
National Post, April 3, 2010.
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