In my last post, I took the Conservatives to task for criticizing someone for allegedly being a "Liberal".

Fortunately,on a different issue, the Conservatives are acting with cooler heads and consistent with the conservative tenet that the individual trumps the group.

Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism, is standing up for the rights of Canadians to speak freely:

A Conservative cabinet minister says the Canadian Islamic Congress is attempting to undermine basic Charter freedoms by filing complaints against a journalist who wrote a book on the Muslim world.

Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism, weighed in Wednesday on the controversy surrounding columnist Mark Steyn's bestseller America Alone. The Canadian Islamic Congress has filed complaints with federal and provincial human rights commissions based on an excerpt of Steyn's book that appeared in Maclean's Magazine in October.

"To be attacking opinions expressed by a columnist in a major magazine is a pretty bold attack on the basic Canadian value of freedom of the press and freedom of expression," Kenney said in an interview. "I think all Canadians would reject that kind of effort to undermine one of our basic freedoms."

The Congress has argued that the article in Maclean's "subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt," and is "flagrantly Islamophobic." Maclean's has refused the Congress' request to publish an unedited, multi-paged rebuttal to Steyn's commentary.

See, the problem for the CIC, as I see it, is that they're impatient. Mark Steyn took the trouble to write a book. As a rebuttal, the CIC could arrange to write a book too, but that would take time. How much easier would it be to hijack Maclean's and use that magazine's printing equipment and distribution channels instead?

Did I say "hijack"? How unfortunate. Hopefully no one on the HRC reads my blog.

I congratulate Jason Kenney on taking an official stand on this. Unfortunately, Jason Kenney can't do much in this situation. The CIC and Maclean's will have to duke it to provide entertainment for the Human Rights Commission.

The HRC itself, though, is a problem that the government can deal with:

Human Rights Commissions were established throughout the 1960s and 1970s as Canada’s answer to the American Civil Rights Movement. While the U.S. government was involved in the latter, the primary driver of the movement was the widespread conviction that segregation and discrimination were harmful and un-American, and must be made obsolete. The great civil rights activists insisted that people of all races be treated as individuals, and not barred from any privilege because they belonged to a given group. The approach of Canada’s HRCs was, and remains, precisely the opposite, since the commissions exist explicitly to reframe conflict between individuals into a matter of group politics. That one party to a private conflict can — through these commissions — gain access to the resources of the state, adds a huge power imbalance between the parties that would not exist if the complaint were pursued through litigation.

In the words of the federal Human Rights Commission, the institution is committed to “vindicating [the] human rights [of victims] and…trying to prevent future acts of discrimination.” The presumption that a complainant is a victim, made at the start of any complaint by the commission, is problematic for those who expect a degree of impartiality from the state when it involves itself in private disputes. Equally troublesome are the expansion of a government agency into the business of providing vindication, and the undertaking of social engineering without the legitimacy of elected legislatures or the judiciary. The diffidence displayed by the Canadian public when these commissions were first established is being eroded in light of complaints that are at best frivolous, and at worst dangerous to genuine freedom — but getting rid of Human Rights Commissions, and reversing the damage they have done, will not be easy.

I wouldn't recommend dissolving the federal HRC while in a minority situation. Wait until the Conservatives have a majority government.