The Canadian "Human Rights" Commission Blinks

Ezra Levant writes, “The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival”:

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they’re already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn’t pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean’s and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean’s go. That’s the first smart thing they’ve done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can’t afford Canada’s best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country’s literati.

While this is a victory of a sorts, as David Warren wrote last December, the process itself is a form of punishment:

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover,