Important Day for Canadian Freedom

Today, we will hopefully learn a little more about when or how employees of the Canadian state have gone incognito on white nationalist web sites, and left hateful comments, all the better to build cases for hate crimes against these same sites. In a hearing room in Ottawa, it will be Marc Lemire's chance finally to put questions to agents of the "human rights" nomenklatura who have previously tried to hide from Lemire's (or his lawyer's) questions behind sections of the Canada Evidence Act that are designed to protect high state secrets from public view, not rogue thought police.

For those needing background on the story, the National Post has been one of the few Canadian media outlets doing serious reporting. Here's the recent article by Joseph Brean, and here's some thoughtful commentary by Jonathan Kay.

Blogger Jay Currie warns that the focus of today's hearing is narrow and the "human rights" apparatchiks will surely try their best to be evasive when it comes to remembering any of their more nefarious deeds.

But Ezra Levant thinks that whatever unfolds in the hearing room, this is already a turning point; for the first time there will be at least some serious coverage of the "human rights" scandal by the MSM:

Tomorrow may mark the hundredth day that bloggers like me -- or the indispensable HRC-watch site, Free Mark Steyn -- has weighed in. Mark Steyn, who has been fighting these commissions like hell, will be there, as you would expect. But for many mainstream reporters, like Maclean's Charlie Gillis, it's the beginning of their HRC beat. The National Post's Joseph Brean is clearly just getting warmed up, too. I wonder who else will be there; I suspect CanWest will have a reporter there, if they don't pick up Brean's work. I wouldn't be surprised if the Globe's Peggy Wente attends, or someone from that paper's Ottawa bureau, simply to stay competitive with the Post on the subject. I think Debbie Gyapong is attending -- as usual, she's bound to pick up one some details that others overlook.

And we find at Deb Gyapong's blog some thoughts on where we presently are, trapped between our national past and future, looking for the way to close a chapter and move on:

The fact that Jewish groups have used human rights law, and gay and non-gay gay supporters have followed suit, has rightly given Muslims groups the argument that suddenly clamping down on them when they try to use it is unfair and discriminatory. What's a multicultural society supposed to do?

We stand at a crossroads. Either everyone is going to get shut down and the nanny state will enforce political correctness on everyone and Canada will invite Google and its Silicon Valley North to create a great Internet firewall like China has. Unfortunately, this seems to be the approach that the Canadian Jewish Congress is taking. Or we could see a move to protect even the more odious speech that has hitherto been illegal in society.

Whatever way you look at this, the system is broken. We need a Royal Commission to investigate this from top to bottom. The law needs a thorough examination, so do the practices of human rights commissions.

So does Canada's approach to multiculturalism. Canada needs a revival of her Judeo-Christian roots, because without that, there is no support in a shared belief system for the civil rights we hold dear such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Without that anchoring in a shared narrative, we cannot welcome with generosity the minority religions in our midst.