Ezra Levant: Moral inversion

Ilion

In healthy democracies, the media is a watchdog over the government. In the soft tyranny of Canada's human rights commissions, the government is the watchdog over the media[^].

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is calling for Parliament to force all Canadian magazines, newspapers and "media services" Web sites to join a national press council with the power to adjudicate breaches of professional standards and complaints of discrimination. The council would have the power to order the publication of its decisions and "would help bring about more consistency across all jurisdictions in Canada," reads an OHRC report to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Human rights commissions are obsolete; the battles for equality of the sexes and races were won decades ago; the number of HRC complaints in Ontario has actually fallen year over year, despite that province's population growth. Think about that: the most ethnically diverse province in Canada has a declining number of human rights complainers, according to their own annual reports. That's good news to normal people -- but to those who need to stimulate and manufacture grievances in order to maintain and grow their bureaucratic empires, that's very bad news indeed. By putting the entire media -- including blogs! -- under HRC jurisdictions, there will be an endless source of bitching and complaining, all of which will need very lengthy and detailed investigations by the government -- punctuated by 5-star junkets.

Ilion

Mark Steyn: Stages[^]