I'll quickly go through the most horrifying.
It involves a man named Stephen Boissoin, who lived in Red Deer, Alberta. Mr. Boissoin was not impressed with some of the political activities of homosexuals. He took out an ad in the local paper, the Red Deer Advocate, to express his views. The ad showed a cartoon of two stick men holding hands, and over top of this was imposed a not-permitted sign, a circle with a diagonal through the circle. In addition to that graphic, he expressed his opinions about certain aspects of homosexual activist politics in Alberta and Canada.
Interestingly enough, a teacher named Darren Lund, who according to his own testimony was not homosexual, complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. By the time the complaint was resolved, Mr. Lund had ceased to be a school teacher and had became a professor at the University of Calgary. Even though Mr. Lund did not belong to the group to whom the alleged discriminatory statements were said to have been directed, the complaint was upheld. Mr. Boissoin was ordered to pay compensation to Mr. Lund and to all his witnesses and to apologize publicly to Mr. Lund. He was ordered by the commission never again, throughout his entire life, to make critical or derogatory remarks about homosexuals or homosexual politics. The question that arose in my mind as I read that decision was why did the Human Rights Commission of Alberta stop short of ordering that Mr. Boissoin be burned at the stake?
It increasingly seems to me that the best way to understand this country is as a theocracy. Canada is a country utterly in the grip of a secular state religion of equality. As befits the theocracy, we have our very own holy inquisition. Since this is a federal theocracy, the holy inquisition is divided into sub-units. Each of these sub-units of the Canadian holy inquisition is called a human rights commission. These sub-units of the holy inquisition have a mandate to identify and extirpate heresy and blasphemy—a mandate that they pursue with great energy.
Let me say a little bit about the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which is actually nearby. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been involved in recent years with an utterly odious human being called Richard Warman. It seems that one of Mr. Warman's main forms of recreation is to prowl the Internet looking for what he regards as questionable websites. When he finds a questionable website, using a pseudonym, he will log onto the website and then post hateful commentary on the website. After he has done that, he has a habit of complaining to the Canadian Human Rights Commission about his own posts. Most of his complaints have been upheld, and he has received vast sums of money in compensation for complaining about his odious remarks, many of which are despicable.
Let me give a particular example that is uniquely odious, even for Mr. Warman. Someone in this city who is a dear friend, and for whom I have profound respect, is Senator Anne Cools. After I leave here to meet my son on Wellington Street, he will drive me to the Centre Block, where I'm going to meet with Anne Cools.
Senator Cools is very agitated because of a recent posting that Mr. Warman made on a website called Free Dominion. If you know Anne Cools, you may know that she was born in Barbados, in the Caribbean, came to this country, and has a distinguished record of service to her adopted land. In his post on Free Dominion, Mr. Warman described Senator Cools using the N-word. As if that weren't enough, he added to it what is, in my view, the most despicable and loathsome word that one can use to describe a woman, and he used these two words to describe Senator Cools. And she is exceedingly upset about this.
I was talking to her on the phone yesterday and with great agitation she said, “Do you know what he called me?” I'm not going to repeat what he called her, but it is revolting.
Mr. Warman continues to make complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. To its credit, in a decision it reached earlier this year, a case called, oddly enough, Richard Warman v. Northern Alliance and Jason Ouwendyk, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal acknowledged Mr. Warman's vile activities and cautioned him to desist, which, to the best of my knowledge, he has not done.
I may have gone too far in my remarks, but let me note that Mr. Warman has not hesitated to sue people for defamation when people have publicly criticized him.