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A kangaroo court is exposed * 15 Dec 2009 If you want to see all the things wrong with human rights commissions, they are on display in Mr. Justice Earl Wilson’s recent ruling in the case of Boissoin v Lund. Stephen Boissoin is a former youth pastor from Red Deer who wrote a letter to the Red Deer Advocate in June 2002 expressing harsh, unpleasant, even contemptible views about the gay rights movement. Darren Lund, now a University of Calgary professor, was, at the time, a Red Deer high school teacher who filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission charging that Boissoin’s words promoted prejudice against gays. In 2007, the commission sided with Lund and ordered Boissoin to pay a f ine of $5,000, write a letter of apology to be printed in the Advocate and never again publicly criticize what Boissoin had called “the homosexual machine.” Justice Wilson’s decision overturning the ruling has been heralded as a victory for free speech, which it is. More correctly, though, it is a win for due process, something human rights commissions have routinely abused in recent years in their witch hunts on behalf of political correctness. Justice Wilson did not strike down those sections of the Alberta Human Rights Act that permit the commission to investigate and prosecute words and ideas. So in that sense, his decision was not a robust defence of free expression. But that is not his job, either. If Albertans want provincial law changed, if they want our laws to protect all views — even hard, objectionable ones such as Boissoin’s — they should pressure the provincial legislature to strip the commission of its power to sit in judgment over which political, ideological and theological views are permissible and which are not. Judges should be rightly wary of overturning laws duly passed by the people’s elected representatives. What the judge did, in fact, was tell the commission that if it is going to wield the power to judge speech, it must set a much higher bar for itself than it used against Pastor Boissoin, and it must respect rights such as the accused’s presumption of innocence. Justice Wilson was scathing about the twisted logic, slipshod evidence and biased approach used by the commission’s one-woman inquiry. In effect, the judge found that Lori Andreachuk, the Lethbridge lawyer who heard the case on behalf of the commission, had stacked the deck against Boissoin from the start. She made at least three “fatal” errors in deciding that the commission had jurisdiction to hear Lund’s complaint, got her reasoning “ somewhat backward,” “misread the letter” Boissoin had published in the paper and had taken several passages out of context in her effort to side with Lund. Her “erroneous” reasoning “ stripped” Boissoin of “ any credible contextual basis” by which to defend his right to free speech. But worst of all for Andreachuk and the commission were Justice Wilson’s comments on the news story at the heart of Lund’s complaint and of the commission’s ruling against Boissoin. Two weeks after publishing Boissoin’s letter calling on readers to “ take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the wickedness” of the gay rights movement, which he contended was “ just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities,” the Advo cate carried a news story in which a gay teenager claimed to have been assaulted because of his orientation. In the story, the alleged victim told the reporter that he was sure the pastor’s letter had contributed to his attack. “ Unfortunately,” Justice Wilson wrote, “ no one seemed to appreciate that there was no evidence of an assault at all, nor any evidence as to the accuracy of the news report of the alleged assault nor of the quotation attributed to the alleged victim.” In short, while Lund said he was prompted to file his complaint based on the reports of an attack on a gay teen, there was not only no evidence that the teen’s attacker had been encouraged by the letter, there was no evidence — period — that the alleged attack took place. So eager were Lund and the commission to excoriate Boissoin, they based nearly the whole of their case on “ hearsay.” Evidence!? Ha! When a favoured cause is at stake, the commission needs no stinkin’ evidence. Fundamentally, this is what is wrong with the commissions. They are bound by none of the customary protections against wrongful conviction. Citizens hauled before an inquiry, as Stephen Boissoin was, have no right to face their accusers. There are no safeguards against bad evidence — or no evidence — being used to convict them. They must pay their own legal costs while taxpayers foot the bill for their accusers. The commissions are nothing more than jumped-up little kangaroo courts
in the service of politically correct groups. |