Canada’s human rights commission goes after Jim Pankiw
After more than four years, former MP Jim Pankiw now faces a human rights hearing over material he sent to his Saskatchewan constituents about Aboriginal justice issues. Western Standard columnist Terry O’Neill reports on this important freedom of expression case that could be a dangerous precedent to silence elected officials who hold politically incorrect views.
Terry ONeill - November 3, 2008
In the spring of 2004, Derek Smith, a Harvard-educated sociology and anthropology professor from Carleton University, handed in a report to a Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator that provided exactly the sort of ammunition needed by the commission to launch an unprecedented attack on the speech rights of a sitting member of Parliament.
Last week, after four-and-a-half excruciating years’ worth of legal wrangling, a commission tribunal finally began hearing the case against now-former MP Jim Pankiw of Saskatchewan, whose bombastic mailings to constituents in 2002 and 2003 generated several public complaints that he had discriminated against aboriginals.
The case is important because it once again raises the sort of free-speech issues that have been enunciated so often this past year in relation to the myriad (and, so-far, unsuccessful) prosecutions of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. But it goes one worse because, for the first time, the commission’s prosecution of the case means it is intent on imposing a speech code not merely on a journalist’s scribblings, but on an MP’s communications with his constituents.
Moreover, if successful, such a restrictive code could, at least as suggested by Professor Smith’s remarkable report, go so far as to limit the colours an MP is permitted to use in his circulars. Red and black are most definitely out, according to Smith, especially when printed against a stark white background. Unfortunately for those among us who look to oppressive government bureaucracies for guidance, Smith did not stipulate which less-harsh colours—sage green? Tangerine orange? Sea-breeze blue?—he would find acceptable.
Elected as a Reformer in 1997, Pankiw ended his parliamentary career sitting as an independent MP and then lost his seat in the 2003 general election. Pankiw’s prickly personality, unrefined opinions, blunt rhetoric and undistinguished parliamentary record have not won him many supporters as he faces down the country’s human-rights machinery, but it is clear the principles at stake in his case are of the highest order.
At issue are leaflets he mailed to constituents in November 2002 and May 2003. The earlier one’s opening page featured a graphic of a red stop sign atop the words “Indian Crime” printed in red capital letters. Inside, Pankiw made note of the aboriginal community’s high crime rate, and criticized the Criminal Code provision that allows judges to impose lighter sentences on aboriginal criminals. The second leaflet greets readers with the words, “It’s clear who the racists are,” and argues that government policies favouring aboriginals are racist themselves.
The RCMP decided the missives did not constitute hate speech, as defined by the Criminal Code of Canada. Whether the communiqués breached the more-easily offended Canadian Human Rights Act was, however, another matter. Upon receiving nine complaints, the CHRC handed the case to investigator Richard Warman who, in turn, asked for a professional opinion from Smith, whose on-line biography notes an expertise in “cultural analysis of public policy and colonial relations,” but not of human rights or hate-speech laws.
Nevertheless, the professor did not disappoint. In a 19-page report, Smith opined that, not only were Pankiw’s words discriminatory and, thereby, in breach of Section 12 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, but the very colours Pankiw used to print his leaflets had the effect of adding fuel to the discriminatory fire.
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