OP-ED: Solving Canada’s Human Rights Commission problem requires shutting them all down

Lynne Cohen writes, "Originally meant to provide all Canadians with a simple way to protect their fundamental rights, Canada’s human right commissions and tribunals have degenerated."

Source: Grok

By Lynne Cohen

Originally meant to provide all Canadians with a simple way to protect their fundamental rights, Canada’s human right commissions and tribunals have degenerated into a dangerous farce. Based on recent evidence, their main job appears to be offering easily-offended people a low-cost way to seek vengeance on anyone who has ever hurt their feelings. When they aren’t doing that, the entire human rights industry is actively undermining our most important fundamental rights, including freedom of speech and religion.

The point of reform has long passed. It’s time to shut them all down.

Recall the case of Birju Dattani, the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s (CHRC) shortest serving Chief Commissioner. In a June 14, 2024 press release federal Justice Minister Arif Virani announced that Dattani had been chosen to head the CHRC through a “rigorous, open, transparent and merit-based selection process.” He would be the first Muslim and first “racialized person” to head the federal organization dedicated to protecting the rights of all Canadians. It felt like the perfect appointment.

Unfortunately, this “rigorous” selection process failed to uncover Dattani’s online persona as Mujahid Dattani. Under this pen name, he’d written and shared numerous controversial opinions about Israel and the Palestinians. He once gave a talk promoted by a poster showing a Jihadist wielding a rocket launcher. After various Jewish organizations revealed this information, Dattani eventually resigned just days after being appointed. How did he get appointed in the first place? Because human rights commissions have become obsessed with identity politics and feelings at the expense of defending Canadians true rights.

Other recent examples reveal the many other ways in which human rights commissions and tribunals have lost all sense of objective truth. Last month, for example, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal awarded $10,000 to a man who was dismissed after a week on the job due to incompetence. After telling him he was fired, his employer then discovered he had not been truthful on his job application and that he’d once been convicted of bank robbery. The mere fact his past conviction was mentioned by his employer after he'd been fired entitled him to a $10,000 cash award.

In Ontario, the provincial human rights commission recently invented the new complaint of “flying while black” to rationalize siding with a woman who claimed she’d been discriminated against when she attempted to cut into another line at a busy Air Canada check-in counter at Toronto’s Peason International Airport and was rudely rebuffed by an attendant, whom she identified as “Asian.” There’s no proof her race or that of the attendant had anything to do with how she was treated. But she was upset.

In Nova Scotia, an article written by St. Mary’s University philosophy professor John MacKinnon in 2020 describing how an Indigenous student in his class was given special treatment by the school led to a four-year long human rights commission investigation. Yet MacKinnon never identified the student; she spotted herself in the article and launched the complaint, arguing that the reference was humiliating. In other words, her feelings were hurt.

Even more worrisome, at other times the human rights industry appears determined to eradicate – rather than protect – the most fundamental rights guaranteed to Canadians. Here we include frequent and alarming attacks against freedom of speech, as well as a bizarre 2023 CHRC discussion paper on religious intolerance that singled out Christianity as an example of “systemic religious discrimination.”

If there is any good news in all this, it’s that the solution is relatively straightforward. According to lawyer Marty Moore of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, who was involved in MacKinnon’s case and ultimately succeeded in getting it dismissed, there is no constitutional requirement that human rights commissions exist.

“Legislatures created them and so they are entirely creatures of statute,” Moore says. “They only exist because the taxpayers’ representatives – the elected MLAs and MPs and MPPs in the provincial and federal governments – have chosen to expend massive amounts of taxpayer dollars on them.” Getting rid of them is as easy as passing laws to eliminate them in each jurisdiction.

This isn’t to say that human rights are unimportant. Quite the opposite. Our democratic society is founded upon the recognition of the individual rights of every citizen. But as we have seen, this task is far too important to be left to the human rights industry in Canada, which has been thoroughly taken over by identity politics activists.

Most human rights law in Canada is already covered by other statutes as well as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including protections against discrimination by government or private businesses on the basis of an individual’s race, religion, sex and other key characteristics. From this perspective, as Moore points out, human rights commissions and tribunals are merely duplicating what the legitimate justice system is already doing.

In their absence, most complaints currently made to commissions and tribunals could be dismissed out of hand. Whatever legitimate cases remain can be handled by various labour relations boards and the court system, which is far better placed to judge the merits of accusations of discrimination.

Getting rid of human rights commissions will actually improve the individual rights of all Canadians by removing frivolous complaints and refocusing the process on legitimate issues. Let’s get started.

Lynne Cohen is an Ottawa-based writer and non-practicing lawyer. She has authored four books, including the ghost-written autobiography The Life of Moshele Der Zinger: How Singing Saved My Life.