039 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 039

Air Date: January 31, 2008

Host: Bob Metz

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation S03E14):

Based on Tanya’s deposition, we have recreated the incident in Commander Riker’s quarters, as Dr. Apgar described it to her.

Computer,

Inspector, this is hearsay. She wasn’t a witness to this incident.

but Dr. Apgar is dead.

Her statement is admissible according to Tanugan law, and I insist you consider it.

Well, we’ll watch this evidence and we’ll weigh it accordingly.

Bob Metz:

Good morning London. It is Thursday January 31st 2008. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now until noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

And welcome to the show on this final Thursday of January 2008. Hard to believe the month’s already gone by. And time to get those mortgage and rent payments into the account for tomorrow, that short month of February, that you always get ripped off for as far as your rent’s concerned.

It’s always short a few days. Today on the show, 20 years of no abortion laws. It was 20 years ago, I guess Monday, that the Morgentaler decision plus others helped to bring down all of Canada’s abortion laws. We’ll talk about that later in the second half of the show. First half of the show, we’re going to be talking about human rights commissions and their impact on our society.

Are they a good thing or are they a bad thing? 519-661-3600 is the number you can call to voice your opinion. Or email us at justrightchrw.gmail .com.

Of course, you can also listen to the show on the web at chrwradio.com and where it’s archived for a week following the original broadcast as well, just in case you’re not aware of that. First subject for today, and I know I got two really controversial, emotional, very emotionally charged types of issues that I’m holding by the tail here. And of course, the first one I’ll be dealing with now is the whole issue of human rights commissions and why I think human rights commissions are just wrong. And I guess I could put this under the heading, question authority before authority questions you. It’s an old famous saying, and it’s amazing that if you just go and do that, you watch how many people in authority suddenly don’t know why they have that authority or on what it operates.

But let’s set the background on this. Ezra Levant has been the subject of much controversy of late. The former publisher of the Western Standard has found himself, before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, as a consequence of a complaint being filed against him for publishing those controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad some two years ago.

At a time when no other papers allowed us to see them, despite their reporting about the controversy and telling us how offensive they were, the other papers that were reporting on this would not print the cartoons themselves. Mark Steyn, author and writer for Maclean’s magazine and the magazine itself, have also been the subject of much controversy of late. They found themselves appearing before the Canadian, Ontario and BC Human Rights Commission as a consequence of a complaint filed against them for publishing demographic facts about Muslims high birth rate.

I haven’t even seen the original article in question, so I’m not even sure what that issue is about. But in both cases, the complaints were filed by identified Muslim sources. The Canadian Islamic Congress, CIC, and headed by Mohamed Elmasry in the case of Maclean’s and Steyn, and Syed Soharwardy in the case of Ezra Levant.

In both cases, the complainants essentially argue that what Steyn and Levant have written and published essentially subjects Muslims to hatred. Now, maybe a lot of you aren’t aware of my own notoriety in this city in this regard. I made the news myself a little bit a while ago, about 10, 15 years ago, when I got involved with the Human Rights Commission case here in London myself.

And I’ll be talking about that a little later in the show. But if there’s anything I’ve seen that’s caused any sort of negativity to be generated against Muslims in general, it’s the filing of these two complaints before the quasi-judicial and unjust Human Rights Commission. The media reaction has been very consistent and absolutely outraged in terms of these human rights cases. And I don’t think that speaks good for the Muslim community in the sense of what they’re using the Human Rights Commission for. But that’s part of, I think, one of the problems.

I think there’s an Achilles heel in the arguments that people are using against the human rights. But let’s take a look at just a couple. By the way, I was clipping articles and essays and editorials on this subject over the past couple of weeks. And I thought I’d probably devote the whole show to this one subject, and then I realized I had so much information on this, I could do 10 shows. So what I’m doing instead on the whole Human Rights Commission issue case, and some of the things that are happening with it, because I think there’s a lot here you need to know, I’m going to look at it piecemeal, call today like Part 1, and we’ll get into Part 2, 3, and 4, however long it takes to get all the cards on the table. So you really know what is going on here. I’ve been through a complete Human Rights case, I’ll be talking about that.

And so I know what the whole procedure is, and I know a lot about how the people behind the Human Rights Commission think. But let’s see what some of the people in our media have been saying. What rights asks Herman Gooden in the January 16 London Free Press under the subheading defendants are being trampled by the tactics of our Human Rights Commissions? And this is Herman talking, quote, So the stifling menace that has been unleashed on Canadian civic life over the past couple decades by those federal and provincial tribunals known as Human Rights Commissions is finally being dragged into the full glare of public scrutiny with the highest profile cases of their kind yet to be heard. Because these are only hearings and not full trials, here say evidence is permitted. The accused does not get an opportunity to cross-examine his accusers, and the lack of intent to offend someone is not considered a defense.

Cases over the last dozen years have seen private individuals, politicians, clergy, and publishers censured and prosecuted for exercising their own supposedly protected rights of freedom of speech and religion, end quote. And with what I just read, I agree with everything Herman just said. But I’m not going to leave it there.

We’ll continue and I’ll get back to what I think is the missing piece in a lot of these. By the way, I recall, and I’m told, I think it was 10 years ago today when this issue came up. I recall when voters in this very city of London returned an incumbent Mayor Diane Haskett to office who didn’t even campaign during that campaign. I think she hid out in St. Thomas or Port Staley or someplace in protest against a human rights tribunal’s conviction of her refusal to proclaim a gay pride day in the city that year, or maybe the year before, I forget. But she wasn’t the only Mayor that this happened to. It happened to one or two others. And, you know, the offense that Londoners felt at watching our Mayor, whether one agreed with her position or not, but watching her being denied her right to exercise her judgment on the basis of her beliefs and convictions, I think was all that it took for Londoners to return her to office.

It was, I think, almost one of those protests that let you know how the public really feels a lot about these kinds of prosecutions. Oh, and one more point on from Herman. He asks an interesting question. Why should three different commissions be enlisted for the Steyn-Maclean hearing? You might wonder. He says, so far only the feds in BC have accepted the case on Terrio, claiming a backlog is still considering it.

Well, he says, if one of them should uphold the right for Steyn and Maclean’s to utter such opinions, there would still be one or two others who probably won’t. As the complainants’ legal costs are all covered by the Canadian taxpayer, money is clearly no object. And that, too, is accurate. Terrio Neal in the January 23rd National Post fire the censors, he says, and he writes, quote, no actual discrimination or hatred has to occur for an offense to occur. And as pointed out on these pages over the past few weeks, truth is not a defense.

Think about that for a minute, folks. He then quotes another speaker, thusly, human rights commissions as they are evolving are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society. It is, in fact, totalitarianism.

I find this very scary stuff, end quote. That person was the president of the National Citizens Coalition, a politically astute fellow by the name of Stephen Harper, a man who, of course, has now gone on to much bigger and better things, says Terrio Neal. Now, let’s turn to Ezra Levant himself, and this is from an excerpt from his transcript before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and the point that he is trying to make. And I think here’s where we get more to the heart of the matter.

What I think is maybe missing in this equation. My first point says, Ezra, quote, the commissions have leapt out of the small cage they were confined to and are now attacking our fundamental freedoms. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment, and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason that they were being discriminated against.

The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not with words or ideas. By the way, he’s sadly mistaken in that point. It’s exactly the opposite, but I’ll explain that later. It would be best, therefore, to change the provisions of the Human Rights Act to remove any such ambiguities of interpretation, says Levant. And that pretty well sums up his position. I read the whole thing, and basically his first point was his only point. And yes, of course, he goes on and he correctly identifies the inherent injustice of the principles on which Human Rights Commissions operate. But, you know, he says, and he doesn’t seem to worry about how they’re applied in other ways as long as they don’t appear with the right to free speech, which of course he sees as his right. He doesn’t want his right to free speech interfered with. He actually says, this commission is deeply procedurally one-sided and unjust. Even if we win, we lose.

The process has become the punishment. That’s very true. But, here’s the problem. You know, if you’re going to fight for freedom of speech and tell people the Human Rights Commissions are wrong, well, then you can’t make the following argument, you know, because then you’re saying, well, yeah, my rights are important, but I don’t care about the landlords and the service providers. They can remain subject to these totally unjust legal principles as long as they, quote, don’t leap out of the small cage they’re confined to, end quote. Now, I have to ask, what kind of freedom is that?

Why does he think he’s entitled to his freedom of speech under the Charter while remaining perfectly willing to accept what he himself defines as an unjust system being kept imposed on others as long as it’s just little, you know, keep it in the corner. Yeah, go ahead. Here’s say it’s okay between landlords and tenants.

No recording of evidence. All those things. Yeah, that’s okay. All these unjust principles that we tried to throw out of our legal system are perfectly okay as long as they don’t get into the freedom of speech issue. And he writes, you don’t need to be a lawyer to know that a magazine article is not what the founders of Human Rights Commissions had in mind. As Alan Borovoy, the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and one of the architects of modern Canadian human rights law, wrote last year, quote, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech, end quote.

And I just sitting here scratching my head and I’m going, are they kidding? I mean, how devoid of understanding of the nature of Human Rights Commissions can they be and even of those laws? Look, it’s all about freedom of speech and it’s about nothing else. All these laws you hear about discrimination and landlords and tenants, it’s all about freedom of speech and nothing else. And I’m going to demonstrate that. Now think about this for a minute.

You have to know this. Any landlord or service provider or store owner for that matter has a right to refuse you service for any reason whatsoever. He can just say, no, you can’t come in here and he doesn’t have to tell you why and he has that right. But he cannot tell you that the reason is one of the prohibited grounds that are in the Human Rights Code. That’s what he’s prohibited from doing. He’s prohibited from telling you the truth if the truth is one of those reasons in the Human Rights Code.

So the effect of the Human Rights Code rules is that if a landlord wants to exclude you from his premises, say, for any of the reasons he’s not allowed to tell you, maybe he doesn’t like the color of your skin, all wrong, all irrational, a separate issue. But what he’ll do is he’ll just make another reason up or he won’t give you a reason or say, well, sorry, the apartment’s taken or the car is sold or whatever, you know. And everything will be hunky-dory. No problem. There’s no legal hassle. So the only issue is that the service provider is not allowed to tell his customers the truth if the reason he’s denying them the service is for race, creed, color, disability, etc., etc., and all the other reasons that are in the Code. So, see, it’s about freedom of speech and it’s about nothing else. To be surprised that Human Rights Commissions would then apply the same principles to other forms of expression, I think, is a little bit outrageous and quite ignorant of the application of principle to reality, because that’s the way it always works.

The theory becomes the practice, and I speak from personal experience, which I’ll talk about very shortly. But in the meantime, I think a lot of people are barking up the wrong tree. Even my favorite columnist, Salim Mansour, he writes, quote, the HRC’s function urgently needs confinement by statute to its original purpose.

He says in the free press on January 19th. And, you know, I’ve seen other writers focus on the problems of Muslim extremism, unjust processes, unjust laws, violations of fundamental freedoms, attack on free speech, and on and on, all of which are perfectly valid considerations and do our attention. Don’t take me wrong, but utterly irrelevant to Human Rights Commissions. And so far, I haven’t found any exceptions. I’m assuming I will find some, but no one’s gone so far as to suggest that all Human Rights Commissions should be abolished and the laws on which their base should be scrapped, the kind of laws they have.

I don’t think either has a place in a free society. Now, after the break, I’ll tell you a little bit about my own personal involvement and how I got involved with Human Rights Commissions. But first, I’ve got a clip here for you, and on this clip is none other than Belville lawyer Karen Selick, who was a guest on our show a couple weeks ago, talking about Mark Emery and the whole situation with the extradition hearings. She’s also been widely known as an opponent to Human Rights Commission legislation, and she spoke here at the university in July of 2000. And that’s what you’ll be hearing next with this clip, and following that immediately will be Dr. Walter Williams. You’ll hear him on a slight American take on the idea of freedom of speech. So here they are, Karen Selick and Walter Williams.

Karen Selick:

We all survive by exercising our faculty of reason, and we all need to be free of coercion to do this. It also follows that rights belonging to individuals can’t conflict. If person A has the right to violate person B’s rights, then what B had must not have been a genuine right after all, because the very concept of right contains the built-in characteristic of inviolability. If B did have a genuine right, then by definition, A is precluded from violating it. Therefore, what A had could not have been a genuine right. This is the reason why I’ve taken to calling the anti-discrimination provisions of Canada’s Human Rights Laws, phony rights, or pseudo-rights. Whenever they’re exercised, they invariably violate another person’s genuine rights. Okay, that’s the end of the abstract philosophy part, and I don’t see anyone nodding off yet. So let me give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.

I’m going to start with one that occurred right here in beautiful London, Ontario. It involves a disabled woman confined to a wheelchair. In 1988, she decided that she wanted to retain the services of a chiropractor. She made an appointment with a doctor here in London. He worked at a clinic owned by a second chiropractor, who was also the owner of the building where the clinic was located. When she arrived for her appointment, she found that the building wasn’t wheelchair accessible.

There were steps leading up from the front entrance room to the examining rooms. There was no ramp or elevator. She couldn’t get in. She went home. She spoke to the chiropractor on the phone.

He suggested three alternatives. First, he said she could come back to the clinic, and he and the other chiropractor who owned the building would carry her up the stairs. Or if she preferred, he would come to her home and treat her there. The third alternative would be that he would arrange to borrow facilities from another chiropractor who had a wheelchair accessible building, and he would treat her there.

The disabled woman wasn’t happy with any of these suggestions. She complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and they agreed with her. This was discrimination, they said. This was a violation of the disabled woman’s rights.

This was illegal. Nothing less would do but that the building be made wheelchair accessible. Now, the chiropractor who owned the building quite understandably resisted the notion that he should have to make alterations to his property for the sake of this one prospective patient.

His building complied with all the existing zoning bylaws and building codes for the City of London. This patient might well decide after her first visit that she didn’t like that chiropractor and would prefer to look for another one. Or that she was cured of the problem that had sent her there in the first place and didn’t need any more treatments.

Or that she was moving away to another city or any of a dozen other things that would have meant that her first visit would also be her last. After years of negotiations with the Human Rights Commission, which accomplished precisely nothing, a board of inquiry was convened. The hearing finally took place in 1995, almost seven years after the original complaint. In the end, the board ordered the chiropractor to install a wheelchair ramp leading from the parking lot to the first floor of the building. This would mean the loss of one parking space on the premises, the loss of one examining room which would become too narrow to be used, and an expense of approximately $20,000.

Furthermore, it would violate an existing zoning bylaw and permission would have to be obtained from the City of London to make the alteration. But the board held that none of these factors constituted undue hardship and that it was the chiropractor’s duty to accommodate the complainant. As well, the chiropractor was ordered to pay the disabled woman $500 for damages for infringement of her rights. So what we have here needless to say is an example of one person’s so-called human rights trumping another person’s property rights. The effect of this decision is tantamount to the Human Rights Commission simply expropriating $20,000 worth of the chiropractor’s money and damaging his building into the bargain.

There’s no evidence at all that the spending of this $20,000 and the disfiguring of this building will ever benefit anyone, not even the complainant. If she needed chiropractic treatment back in 1988, there’s a good chance she didn’t wait seven years for this decision to be rendered before going to another chiropractor. She’s probably had her treatment long since and she may never set foot, or should we say never set wheel, in this particular building for the rest of her life. In fact, if I had done to someone what that woman did to the chiropractor, I’d want to stay out of my victim’s sight for a good many years and I certainly wouldn’t want to have him treat me. And it may turn out that this clinic will never get another patient in a wheelchair ever again, so this whole exercise may be for naught.

Walter Williams:

And you see the brilliance of the founders, they did not trust the Congress. If you read the Constitution of the United States, you will find terminology, negative terminology in there, like shell, not disparage, prohibit, and all those negative terminology, you will find them at least 50 times.

They did not trust. If you read the bill rights, what’s the first sentence? Does it say that Congress shall monitor free speech in the public interest? No it doesn’t.

What does it say? Congress shall make no law regarding free speech. In fact, my good colleague and friend Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago, he says that we would have a better nation if the framers had just left the bill of rights with that first sentence. Congress shall make no law, period, and that was the better one.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. I’m Bob Metz, and 519-661-3600 is a number to call. Now, back in about 1993 and 92-93, I got actually directly involved in an Ontario Human Rights Commission Board of Inquiry, which was investigating an alleged racist comment made by a London landlord here in the city. His name was Elijah Elieff in reference to Asian tenants who occupied his buildings on what was then called Cheyenne Ave. The city was so embarrassed by this whole situation, I think they’ve changed the name of the street, but I forget what that’s changed to. However, an official complaint against the landlord was filed with the Human Rights Commission by one of his tenants, one of his Asian tenants, who was actually recruited for the task. And she was represented by Geraldine Sanson, who was appointed by the Human Rights Commission, a lawyer appointed by them, at taxpayer expense to do so.

And since the respondent, Mr. Elieff, was not accorded the same privilege, I volunteered to represent the landlord after the fourth day of hearings before the board. I mean, the hearings had already gotten underway, I wasn’t even aware of them. And my interest in the case began as a secondary byproduct of my interest in the Human Rights Commission itself. Back in April 1992, I had the opportunity to address the Ontario Human Rights Code Review Task Force, which was at that time known as the Cornish Commission. The task force was investigating the enforceability of systemic discrimination. Now, remember, they want to enforce systemic discrimination, which is the concept of bypassing an investigation of any specific events that might lead to a human rights complaint in favour of being able to legislate and order remedies, as they call it, which means penalize, on the basis of racial and ethnic statistics, as they might apply to employers, to landlords and service providers. Bear in mind that whenever you’re talking about Human Rights Commissions in general, the target is always those three groups, employers, landlords and service providers.

Now, I was most disturbed with the recommendations that came out of that task force. Among them were the establishment of tribunals with the power, quote, to make rules and procedures that will not be bound to follow strict legal precedent, end quote, that would have, quote, the power to compel evidence and would have, quote, exclusive jurisdiction to determine all questions of fact or law, end quote, and would be allowed to accept evidence, quote, whether it is allowed as evidence in a court or not, end quote. These tribunals, it was recommended, should, where a business is sold, quote, have the discretion to add successor businesses as necessary parties and to make any necessary order against them. The tribunals should have the, quote, the power to amend claims, eliminate a full appeal right, and have, quote, get this, get this, no requirement to record evidence, end quote. Worst of all, it was recommended that apart from its own power to reconsider, quote, the tribunals decision should be final and protected from review by, from the courts, end quote.

Now these recommendations were only a few of the 88 specific recommendations that were made by the task force, and at the time they were arguing, yeah, we want to have these implemented by September 30th, 1993. But I’ll tell you those things, you know, I was, I was talking to them at that time, and I can tell you that all of those very arbitrary and utterly unjustifiable powers were already fully entrenched in the proceedings that I was witness to and participated in. And that the landlord, in my case, the case I got there, was a victim of a process he couldn’t possibly have understood or prepared himself for.

He just went into it blind, thinking that he was in some kind of court of justice and kept thinking that people would treat him fairly unjustly when it just simply wasn’t the case. Now I know this now, but I didn’t know that when I first attended the third day’s hearings. I mean, the hearings were already underway for two days here in London, and so I was invited to go as a spectator. And so I went with a couple other people because we had been at the other hearings.

Let’s see what a Human Rights Commission is like in practice. And sure enough, I’m sitting there in the court, and the next thing I know, which is, which is open, the public can come in. But I found myself being asked to identify myself and the group that I represented for the record before the board, just for walking in and being a spectator. And I was thinking, well, that’s weird. A lot of other spectators here weren’t asked to identify themselves.

And while this might not be unusual, I was a little surprised, so I identified myself. So no less was I surprised when I woke the next morning to read in the pages of the London Free Press a headline reading, quote, London landlord finds fans in freedom party, in which reported that I and Freedom Party, the political party I represent, had, quote, plans to turn London landlord Elijah Elieff into a symbol of their campaign to promote the right to discriminate, end quote. I tell you folks, you know, you can wake up and read the paper some days and you just go, who the heck are they writing about? What was that all about? So since we had no such plans and no such campaign, and my subsequent letter to the editor, which was published in the London Free Press the next day, made that point very clear, I could only conclude that the London Free Press in some way felt kind of threatened by the fact that we might find out more about the case than we’d otherwise learned from reading the London Free Press. And boy, was that true. So it was that nearing the end of day four of the hearings, when I was still attending as a spectator, I happened to pass Hank Danczowski to London Free Press reporter who wrote the article in the hall and I asked him, I said, how is it possible in the view of the fact that virtually every witness called by Mr. Elieff the previous day had recounted the involvement and tactics of none other than Susan Eagle in the United Church, you know, who were causing all the problems for him, and that his December 29th, 92 coverage of that day’s hearings didn’t even mention it once.

And I could tell by a look on his face and the way he avoided me that he didn’t want me to know and there was something really fishy going on. So at that point I first began entertaining the possibility of representing Mr. Elieff. And I remember while I was there as a spectator, and this might have been the thing that tipped it over, I remember the complainant at the end of the hearings one day rushing to Mr. Elieff in imperfectly understandable English, began screaming at him and telling him how she didn’t like what he did and didn’t like what he did in his apartment, etc. But here is this person who couldn’t speak English all day long during the hearings and was being represented by an interpreter, could speak perfectly fluently, whereas Mr. Elieff, who spoke in broken English, had difficulty with the language, and because of that very thing, I think that’s the key thing that got him in trouble because of the way he spoke his English.

And so everybody said, you know, because he spoke broken short phrases to convey his ideas and, you know, they attach all kinds of meanings to them, and I’ll get into the details of this later. But here he is, you know, he’s just an average guy. He used to work at Ford’s starting as a landlord, and his attention is focused on dealing with the particulars of a single complaint filed against him, thinking that, well, hey, all I got to do is prove my innocence, I’ll be okay, we’ll just walk away from this. While the real nature of a collective action that was being taken against him and his vulnerability to it just went unnoticed by all. And basically what we discovered after we did some research, I took on the case, thanks to some volunteers and helpers who did a lot of research and hard work for us, went to the London Public Library of All Places, dug up piles of London Free Press news clippings going back years before the event, and sure enough, anything to do with the Cheyenne Ave apartments or Susan Eagle, and it read like a storybook.

And in their own words, they were literally telling us what they were doing. So basically you had, you know, the United Church and Susan Eagle, who was one of the Commission’s three witnesses against Mr. Elieff, and she testified that she hired, you know, that she is a hired rather and a paid employee of the United Churches who designated several buildings, these are in her own words, in the Cheyenne Ave area, and even as early as 1984, the churches she worked for were asking city council to take action, before any Cambodian or Vietnamese people moved into the building. It was an attractive building for them for some reason, and they wanted it.

So she began this lobby campaign to try to replace Mr. Elieff’s apartment buildings with co-op housing, because there’s government money being given out for co-op housing, and this campaign included an appeal for funds to the provincial government, and all these activities and plans were well documented and editorially supported in the pages of the London Free Press. So, you know, Mr. Elieff had everything going against him. He was literally harassed. It went to the point of having pickets placed outside his downtown submarine shop, which is another business he ran, and where, as, believe it or not, Eagle herself testified before the board, it was her intention to quote, put pressure on Mr. Elieff as a businessman, and quote, not as a landlord, but as a businessman, you know, not in his apartment buildings, but at his submarine shop for heaven’s sakes. And her harassment was just continuous, relentless, determined, seizing every opportunity she filed, every kind of complaint possible about Mr. Elieff’s buildings.

She organized tenants meetings, seized his rents, had them directed to a trust fund. I mean, this is what human rights commissions are being used for. Lobby groups get behind them, and they see a weapon that can be used outside the realm of law, leaving the victim completely at the mercy of a kangaroo court, which is all it really is.

Now, I can go on. My time’s running out on this subject, because we do have to visit the other subject, but basically, how it all ended up, we won before the Human Rights Commission. And, you know, everyone was real upset that we won our case.

I’ll talk about the details of that in part two of this whole situation. But, of course, later on, I’m not a lawyer, by the way. Even I was allowed to represent Mr. Elieff as a, just a private citizen. And that was one of the reasons we won, because had I been a lawyer, I would have been disbarred for what I did in front of that Human Rights Commission. And the judge told me so. And because I called the integrity of the commission itself into question. And you can’t do that if you’re a lawyer. And so, not to be giving legal advice, I’m almost going to suggest that if you’re in front of a Human Rights Commission, represent yourself or get somebody else who’s not a lawyer.

Then they can at least tack the root of the problem, otherwise they can’t even, you know, get at it in any particular way. We will revisit the issue of Human Rights Commission and carry on with that whole situation on the next show. But because of this week being that 20th anniversary of the whole abortion situation and abortion laws being struck down, it’s not something that you just want to leave behind. Because it’s a subject I haven’t really gotten to either, and it’s something I should get at least placed on the record. So after this break, we’ll be back with 20 years of Canada without abortion laws.

Clip (Unknown stand-up comedian):

Well, because you know, we live in politically correct times now. We’ve got to be very careful what you say, you know. Oh yeah, everything is a quota too, that’s the other thing, eh? Not here, but man, you go to a show, sometimes you’ll see like a female comedian. There’s an ethnic comedian, maybe a gay comedian, a funny comedian. You know, actually I brought something to show you.

My Canada includes every bitching, whining, province, Aboriginal, feminist, minority, and special interest group. Hey, be very careful now. Oh, you would not believe the nonsense with this. I tried to get this sold in stores, I went to a sex shop.

Do you think you could sell this? Oh no, that’s offensive. You have two-headed dildos with spikes on them here.

You have underwear you can lick out of someone else’s but. The CBC, our great Canadian network, did not want to show this on TV, and I said, why not? And they said, well, it has offensive words, oh, words are running for your life. Look out, Canadians, words are coming through the screen. Never mind the economy, words might come and get the Canadians. The fear of words in this country, I sat down with these people and I said, all right, what is the worst thing that will happen if we show these words? Oh, we’ll get letters. Oh my God, more words in paragraphs with punctuation run for your life. Isn’t that the most Canadian thing you’ve ever heard?

Clip (Dennis Miller):

Abortion. Now listen, I’m pro-choice on abortion, but as Roe V. Wade enters, it’s a 121st trimester. I think we’ve gotten a little abortion crazy in this country, and I’m just finding the word abortion so grim.

Everybody leads their abortion, not abortion, abortion, abortion. I think we need a change in terminology, and I’ve been doing some thinking. Once again, I have an idea. Not saying it’s a great one, but I see you think. I don’t say we call an abortion anymore. I think we should call it an ovarian mulligan.

It just sounds happier, does it? Where are you going, baby? I’m taking a mulli. All right, we’ll settle up at the turn.

Bob Metz:

Of course, not everyone else considers the abortion issue something to be laughed about or funny. And of course, it isn’t. It’s a very serious issue. Welcome back to the show.

You’re listening to Just Right with Bob Metz here on CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can call 519-661-3600. Pro life or pro-choice? Are you a pro in the abortion debate? Notice how nobody’s anti or against when you see how this whole thing is set up. Of course, this past Monday was apparently the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision, which essentially struck down Canada’s abortion laws.

They’re one of the few countries in the world, perhaps the only one that has no abortion law at all. And it’s been 20 years with that situation as such. There again was a lot of various differing points of view by the media. I certainly like to bounce off that before I get into my take on this.

And believe it or not, I’m going to try and offer a reconciliation between both sides if you think that is even possible. But January 28th, of course, marked the 20th year. Canada’s had no abortion laws. It’s very clear that the debate is still alive and it always will be, given the arguments and assumptions that you always hear made by both sides of the debate. But here’s some of the talk that I see in the papers. David Frum, National Post, January 22nd.

The day humanity became cheap, he says. The result of two decisions, the Queen versus Morgentaler and Tremblay versus Daigle, was to give Canada the Western world’s most radical abortion regime. The mother’s ownership of the pregnancy is absolute and final, and she may end it at any moment for any reason. Neither the father of the child to be, nor the government, nor the child itself has any rights in the matter at all. Frum then cites the laws of other countries with their various differing prohibitions on certain aspects of abortion. And then he writes, quote, Late term abortions remain legal in Canada. When it was reported that no Canadian doctor would perform them, the Quebec government acted to create a new clinic in Montreal specifically for this purpose. And all this is the legacy of the Morgentaler case, even if Morgentaler himself condemns late term abortion as ethically offensive end, quote. Now, I guess I can agree that it made it possible for the Montreal, or for the Quebec government to do that, but consider who’s doing it. It’s not the private market, it’s not the doctors, it’s the government. Do we need to have a prohibition law on everyone to stop the government from getting into a business?

It shouldn’t be in the first place. I think, you know, there, I think you’re missing your target. If that’s the enemy, let’s go after him. You know, then Frum takes an interesting turn in his argument, one I’ve never seen applied to the abortion debate directly, but one that interestingly enough relates to a subject I’ve spoken at length on this show, and believe it or not, that subject is robotics. And, you know, he says, at the heart of the abortion dilemma is the question of what it means to be human. In this new century, that problem will challenge us again and again and again, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from human intelligence, we will have to wonder, can a machine become a person?

As a new generation of environmentalists, stake bolder claims for animals, we’ll have to consider our human rights only for human beings. And as those questions intensify, the answer offered by the Morgentaler case will look more and more inadequate, shallow, short-sighted, and obsolete, says Frum, although I don’t know how he can possibly tie those things together, you know, into that issue. And, you know, I was admittedly surprised to learn from another article from Lauren Gunter’s January 24th editorial, shutting down the campus debate, he says. And I discovered apparently there have actually been incidents of violence against pro-lifers. I think Ira has given me a signal there. We have a caller there, Ira?

We had a caller. He was too shy to go in the air, but he did want to ask that the opening statement you made of some people laugh about it. He wants to know why this is a serious issue. Why it’s a serious issue?

Well, because it’s about understanding the nature of human rights and where our rights fundamentally start, when they start, what governments can do about it, and it’s life and death. I think that’s how the people who regard it as being serious. I mean, how much more serious can you get? It is about that.

I’ll be getting into the details of that certainly after I get over, you know, go through some, just a couple more articles here, and then I will answer that question a little more clearly. But I was surprised to learn that there’s actually violence against pro-lifers, and according to Lauren Gunter, he says, quote, pro-lifers freedoms are under attack, particularly on our college and university campuses. Their freedom of speech is threatened by campus speech codes, and many of their clubs have been denied official status. Perhaps the worst incidents of violence against pro-lifers came in late 1999, when three officers of the University of British Columbia’s Alma Mater Society, the UBC equivalent of a student’s union, were caught on video ripping up posters at students for life display, overturning the tables and stomping pamphlets into the ground.

So I guess those pamphlets really got beat up. Despite the evidence against the trio, a majority on the AMS council refused to send the 3-2 student court, a decision later upheld by a majority of students at the AMS’s annual general meeting. I was reminded of this justice by show of hands farce last week, says Gunter, when the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal dismissed a complaint brought against the UBC Okinawan Students Association for refusing club status to another branch of students for life because a majority of students voted no to allowing such a club. Gunter then goes on to support freedom of speech, even if something offends some, when he says a principle with which I agree, but then most interestingly ends his editorial with this following footnote, quote. And this is Gunter talking, I have some advice for the pro-life side. I’ve read scores of anti-abortion pamphlets of the kind given out by campus pro-lifers, and while I passionately defend their right to distribute them, I’ve got a friendly word of advice, get new tactics. Your efforts to use graphic photos of mutilated fetuses and claims of genocide aren’t winning you any mainstream supporters, end quote. And I think that’s true, you know, trying to turn what is a moral and intellectual debate into a totally emotional one will not lead anyone to the correct answers.

And sometimes our emotions might be in conflict with what the correct thing to do is. Long live Morgentaler, shouts writer Colby Kosh in his January 25th National Post editorial. And blah blah, he gets into the background of it, but his key point, and I have to agree with his observation here, he asked the question, it should be one of the first to ask, he says, why haven’t pro-lifers won their argument? If, as they claim, 68% of Canadians really favor some legal limits on abortion, so what can the political problem possibly be? The answer, of course, is that most Canadians are perfectly comfortable without an abortion law.

If they weren’t, there would have been one long ago. For the past 20 years, abortion at the will of the mother is just what we have had. This is where we are, this is what we wanted, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.

And this is as it should be, he says, with the final decision in the hands of the one who must chance the hazards and agony of birth. Long live Morgentaler, long live Anarchy, says Colby Kosh, although I don’t understand why he’s saying long live Anarchy, because what is he saying, that women no longer have the protection of law, or I would say the opposite, I say, hey, finally they’ve got the protection of law, and that’s certainly not Anarchy. Interestingly enough, finally Karen Selick, who you just heard a little while ago on Human Rights Commissions, our guest on the show also two weeks ago, in her January 25th National Post column, the Transoption Solution, she bypasses the political debate on the abortion issue almost entirely by both redefining the sides in the issue and by offering one possible solution that you might think would mitigate the differences between pro-life and pro-choice factions. And she basically argues, quote, there are women who find themselves pregnant when they don’t want to be. There are other women who are trying to get pregnant desperately but can’t.

What we need to do is match the two groups up and transport the unwanted fetuses of the former into the wombs of the latter in the form of a pre-birth adoption. How realistic is this medically? Well, we’ve been doing something similar with cows since 1971, she says. Selick then makes a case for the viability of this option using the term transoption to describe the procedure, which was borrowed apparently from the 1990 science fiction novel by Victor Coleman called Solomon’s Knife. She admits that given an estimate of about 100,000 abortions performed annually in Canada, that supply may exceed demand but it certainly would be a step in the right direction. But most interestingly, again, Selick recategorizes the sides in the abortion debate as follows, and she says this, quote, as science fiction writer Coleman points out, the abortion debate has not just two sides but four. One, pro-lifers who merely wish to save babies. Two, pro-lifers often motivated by religious ideology who also wish to control women and their wombs. Three, pro-choicers who merely wish to free women from unwanted pregnancy. And four, pro-choicers who also want to control, and she says, redestroy the products of unwanted pregnancies. And she says she really sees groups two and four as the two groups most of us have to be on our guard against. Now after this break, I’ll come back and I’ll give you my own spin on what this issue is about, and we’ll be back right after this.

Clip (Unknown stand-up comedian):

And my family, I’m the youngest of three, my parents are both older. I was raised by my father, my mother left before I was born, and you know…

Clip (Unknown stand-up comedian):

When my sister got pregnant, my first sister to get pregnant, best day of my life, because when I dated my husband, everyone was always, when are you going to get married? When are you going to get married? When are you going to get married?

Right? Then you get married and you’re like, ah, no more questions. No, the question just changes. Now it’s, when are you going to have kids? When are you going to have kids?

When are you going to have kids? We never know what to say. We’re always like, we tried five times last night. Yeah, it should be awkward for them as well. And if that’s your answer, nobody’s going to ask you twice. They’re all like, ugh, don’t bring it up, it’s weird.

Bob Metz:

Don’t bring it up, not the kind of subject you bring up at the dinner table normally. Pro life and pro choice, can there be some kind of reconciliation? You know, I’ve often spoken out in the past of my opposition to the practice of abortion, such as it has been at various times.

But I’ve never really been able to bring myself to the point of advocating its prohibition. I suppose that puts me in the pro life category one that was earlier defined by Karen Selick there in that article. But I also consider myself pro choice, but for none of the reasons that would be in the category three and four that were identified in Selick’s article. And I remember in the past, believe it or not, I actually started my political activity with the Right to Life group and now I’m in a political party that believes in choice in abortion, believe it or not.

And I don’t see a conflict between the two. My major issues in the past with abortion had been basically two. One, it was about informed consent, you know, under conditions where, you know, one political lobby tries to shield a woman from all sides in a decision to abort and the other side wants to say, you know, their side’s right. But the woman’s generally kept in the dark quite often and not, wasn’t given two choices. And that was certainly the case back when I was involved in the issue about 20 years ago.

As a matter of fact, that was all preceding the Morgentaler decision. And of course, I’m totally opposed to taxpayer funded abortions, apparently more than a billion dollars in Canada so far according to something that Michael Coran wrote in one of the papers. Now, you know, this is an emotional issue and there are some issues that I think have to be understood. But personally, let’s face it, I’d like to see a world where abortion would no longer be necessary.

I think that’s the ideal. Now, unfortunately, many anti-abortion activists have an absolutist attitude towards all so-called artificial methods of birth control, including the Roman Catholic Church, I suppose, and thus denying many of the alternatives to abortion strangely enough at the same time, which is not what I would really call a pro-life point of view. That’s a political agenda and a moral agenda that you want to push on other people.

It’s a whole other issue. You know, and looking back, I realized that when I was involved with the right to life movement, I actually didn’t have any idea what either word meant. I didn’t know what the word right meant and I didn’t know what the word life meant. And you might think that they’re very self-explanatory and obvious, but they are not.

And when you use them in the wrong context, you get into all kinds of issues. But to position my view against those in the predominant two sides in the debate, I guess the twos and the fours, as Karen Selick warned, I will cite a debate I just heard this past Monday on another radio station, and it was on CJBK, happened to tune in, and it was between Carol and Egan on the pro-choice side and Margarita Andre on the pro-life side. And it wasn’t really a debate. Each one was interviewed separately.

They didn’t talk to each other. But I wrote down what they saw as the major points. And so on the pro-choice side, I counted basically six major points. On the pro-life side, as they argued them, I counted nine.

And here basically were the arguments that came from the pro-choice camp. One, we represent millions. Two, a woman decides with her doctor. Three, life is a theological question, not a biological one. Four, people have differing viewpoints on the definition of life. Five, it’s the safest procedure, surgical procedure done in Canada. And six, it’s not considered birth control.

Not sure what that meant. And now that was on the pro-choice side. Now here’s the pro-life side saying, number one, the majority wants legal protection. That’s interesting because the pro-choice side, number one, said we represent millions.

And of course, the majority’s on their side, really. Number two, that we don’t have any law protecting unborn children, which was the term used. Three, women who have had abortions regret their decisions. Four, science advances are amazing. We can see the humanity of the fetus, which is Latin for young child.

I haven’t been able to find that definition, but I’ve heard a couple people saying it. And five, we must consider the consequences if we abort a potential Nobel Prize laureate. You ever heard that argument? And six, we’re underpopulated. We need future taxpayers to fund our social systems. Well, isn’t that nice? We need future little slaves, so let’s give them birth. And nothing is more precious than life, and babies have value.

It was the seventh point. Number eight, science, not religion, proves that abortion is wrong. Now, that was an amazing statement to make. And all of a sudden, science has become the arbiter of morality and not religion. I mean, between the two of them, religion’s closer.

Let’s face it. And number nine, which really surprised me, and she said she would legally force a victim of rape to carry out a pregnancy. And I think, I don’t know how most of you must feel about that, but I just think that the issue is that most people do not consider the consequence of prohibitions and forces.

And that’s the question I have to ask. And this is the issue that you never hear brought up when you’re talking about the prohibition of abortion. I was once asked to speak at a Catholic high school in Sarnia. And I’ll tell you, all the kids in that class were definitely anti-abortion. And there I was, invited to come into the school, speak to a bunch of kids who were very anti-abortion. And I’ll tell you, in about four minutes, I had them turned around with a very simple question. And I saw that class just fall apart and it works every time. And if you try this argument on anyone, it focuses the issue for them. And of course, you’re going to get some hard-nosed people who will go the full gauntlet with you just to prove their point. But here’s what you have to ask.

You have to ask them. Before you go around passing laws, you must know in advance what are the appropriate penalties for breaking those laws. What would be the appropriate penalty for breaking any law of abortion, dealing with abortion, under prohibition of abortion?

For example, if a woman aborts herself, what’s the appropriate penalty? Is it life? 10 years? Would you give her 5 years? Would you prohibit her from owning coat hangers for 5 years?

What would you do? Would a pregnant woman’s unsuccessful suicide attempt also be considered a murder attempt? You see some of the problems here. Would a successful suicide be registered as a murder if the suicide was of a pregnant person? And three, if others are in the position of making decisions with regard to her pregnancy, well, can she smoke? Will there be someone coming to her home and saying, you can’t smoke? That baby has rights.

You don’t have rights. Can she do drugs, whether illegal or prescription? Can she drink alcohol? Can she eat junk food? Can she participate in athletics that might threaten the child?

Might she be forced to give up her career? You know, and I have found, when I asked these questions to that classroom, the whole classroom started arguing amongst themselves, and suddenly none of them wanted any consequences. They just wanted abortion to go away. And they thought that, well, maybe we can just pass a law and it’ll go away and no one will be the worst for it. Now, I’d like abortion to go away too, if that’s the way you want to look at it, but abortion laws are not the means to do that. You know, the only question with regard to abortion laws, and this is a pragmatic issue, it’s really not about the decision, it’s about who gets to decide. Not what the decision is. And to me, there’s only two choices. One, is it the woman whose mind and body are at issue? Does she get to decide?

Or two, is it someone else? And you tell me why. It doesn’t matter how offensive abortion is, you know. A lot of women believe they’re not view abortion as an act of self-defense, and that brings in a whole other issue. And if it’s someone else who wants to force the woman what to do, are they willing to assume responsibility for any of the actions they force upon her? And bear in mind that in some countries where governments assume jurisdiction over the bodies of their citizens, abortions are forced upon women as a method of cultural and birth control. Often doctors and nurses are not permitted to exercise their moral judgment and refuse to perform abortions too, and I’m against that too.

So, you know, you can see where all this is leading, and of course there’s a whole issue of definitions of what is a right to life. I will be dealing with all that stuff in the future, but I’m getting a hand signal from Ira there on the other side of the glass, and I think that means it’s time for us to go. So we will carry up on all these subjects next time, and we’ll see you next week. So until then, be right, stay right, do right, and act right, take care.

Clip (Brad Williams):

This woman was telling me that she enjoys eating Snickers mini chocolate bars because they’re bite-size.

Everything you eat is bite-size!