Ann Coulter is thinking of filing a hate speech complaint against Francois Houle, [Email him] provost of the University of Ottawa, based on Houle's letter attempting prior restraint on her speech at the University of Ottawa.
Coulter:"I'm sure the Human Rights Commission will get to the bottom of it. I think I'm the victim of a hate crime here. Either what (Mr. Houle) did was a hate crime, or the whole commission is BS."
Last night at the podium, Coulter said she wasn't sure what "identifiable group" she fell under. Which is understandable since they pretty much make all that stuff up as they go anyway. But I'm pretty sure that, since she's white Christian conservative, the bureaucrat's answer will, "none, you stupid bitch."
I think — seriously — she should claim as her "identifiable group"… "American." It would be a fantastic way to get Canadians to face up to their chronic, rabid anti-Americanism in a public forum.
Coulter actually has a case that people are hating her not because she's beautiful, but because she's a American. Anti-Americanism is respectable among Canada's elites, and widespread, but in fact, under Canada's human rights laws, which include "national or ethnic origin," it's just as illegal as hating Somalians.
In 2001, I wrote:
"In America, desecration of the U.S. flag is treated as a constitutional right (many constitutional rights are capable of exercised in a despicable fashion), protected by the ACLU, but recently a woman in England was fined 200 pounds for stepping on the US flag.
The reason? It was a "hate crime." You see, Americans are a racial minority in England."
The same thing has happened in Canada, as long ago as 1975, when Toronto hosted a Shriners Convention, and police didn't want anti-Americans, (draft-dodgers, original hippies, supporters of the Viet Cong, et cetera) harassing the convention goers.
A refugee from Canada, pointed this out to me, and it's not easy tracking something like that from the Before Computer age down on the web, but I found one reference.
This quote wins a prize of some kind for obscurity–it's Philip A. Sullivan quoting The New Anti-Liberals by Canadian civil libertarian Alan Borovoy, in a book on post-modernism and science edited by Noretta Koertge.
"One, particularly egregious, was the charging of young protesters at a Shriners parade in Toronto because they distributed literature containing the phrase "Yankees go home." The crown attorney [Prosecutor] had the good sense to withdraw the charge but, as Borovoy (1999) notes. "In the meantime, those young people suffered the suppression of their perfectly legitimate political protest and they spent a couple of days in jail." '["Are Postmodernist Universities and Scholarship Undermining Modern Democracy?" in Scientific values and civic virtues, By Noretta Koertge, P 186]
This, by the way, would not be a Human Rights Code action, but an actual arrest by the Toronto Police Force under Canada's Criminal Code provisions, as well as a classic example of L. Neil Smith's dictum that "[T]he police are like parents. They don't care about justice, all they want is quiet."
A member of the same force warned Daniel Pipes about "hate speech" in the context of a talk he was giving in Canada. While a hundred police officers, including ten on horseback, were required to protect him from (partly regular leftist, partly Muslim-Canadian) demonstrators, and the venue had been locked down for 24 hours to protect from the possibility of a bomb being planted (not by the IRA), and after everyone entering had been frisked, a policeman inside the hall took him aside and warned him about the legal consequences of "promoting hatred of a specific group" under Canadian law.[The Rot in Our [Canadian] Universities, by Daniel Pipes, National Post January 30, 2003]
But the point is that it is possible, under Canadian law, to be charged with discrimination against Americans. And the tone of Houle's letter, ("tone" is very important to anti-discrimination commissars) on the subject of American is reminiscent of someone writing to a visiting Chinese dignitary warning him that he's not allowed to eat dogs in a dog-loving country:
"I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or "free speech") in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here."
Right. It's true that there should probably be signs on the US and Mexican borders saying "You are now leaving a free country," although such signs would probably cause an international incident. (As would signs facing the Mexican Border saying "Estás entrando en un país civilizado.")
But for a Canadian to say all this is stereotyping Americans as much as the warnings I mentioned to a hypothetical Chinese dignitary, or warning a visiting Mexican not to have sex with teenage girls, just because the age of consent in Mexico is 12. So she certainly has a discrimination case.
Of course, Coulter's ability to sue in this case comes only from the fact that she's crossed an international border into Canada. If she were, as Kathy Shaidle pointed out, to claim discrimination as "white Christian conservative", she wouldn't have a hope.
In Canadian Hate Crimes law, just as in the Hate Crimes laws contemplated by Attorney General Holder, being white is not a protected category.
With the passage of the health care bill, Canadians will eventually be unable to flee socialized medicine. If Hate Crimes legislation passes in Canada, Canada will be no worse than America, and Americans won't need to be warned when they cross the border not to exercise their freedom of speech—they'll have to be warned when they leave the house. Jared Taylor wrote, after the American Renaissance conference was chased out of four hotels by death threats, that
"The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice says it will not investigate because people who attend AR conferences are not a "protected class."
Tonight Ann Coulter's speech at the University of Ottawa has been shut down by similar "anti-racist" thugs—and if Holder and Obama have their way, Coulter won't be safe on either side of the border.
