Chilling vision of the future for free speech in Canada, from Mark Steyn in Maclean's magazine

Here's a few paragraphs from a recent piece by Mark Steyn in Maclean's magazine regarding the human rights versus free speech debacle in Canada. To read the full column, go here.

"As for "freedom of the press," in her now celebrated decision to dismiss the Canadian Islamic Congress complaint against Maclean's, Barbara Hall of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission acknowledged that she did not have jurisdiction over magazines. So she ruled that, while she didn't have the power to toss us in the clink, she'd certainly like to and we certainly deserve it. Commissar Hall suggested that if my words had appeared on a sign rather than in a magazine article, she would be free to haul my hatemongerin' ass into the dock. Makes sense to me. So I've now put the offending excerpt from my book on a placard and I'll be in Toronto in the first week of May to drop it off at her office. I look forward to the prosecution. Given that we've already been found guilty, I don't think I've got much to fear from the trial.

Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario's "human rights" reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions against all and sundry. Under the new proposals, " 'hate incident' means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members." "Act or omission"? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental. I quote from "Concepts Of Race And Racism And Implications For OHRC Policy" as published on the OHRC website:
"The denial of racism used by so many whites in positions of authority ranging from the supervisor in a work place to the chief of Police and ministers of government must be understood for what it is: an example of White hegemonic power over those considered 'other.' "

Got that? Your denial of racism merely confirms your racism — because simply by being a "White hegemon" (like Barbara Hall or Jennifer Lynch) you wield racist power. The author, Frances Henry, cites the thinking of "modern neo-Marxist theorists" as if these are serious views that persons of influence in Canada's "human rights" establishment ought to be taking into account, rather than just the latest variant of an ideology that's led to the deaths of millions in Russia, China and everywhere else it's been put into practice. Yet, underneath the blather about "omissions" and "denial" of racism is the bleak acknowledgement that, alas, Canadians just aren't hateful enough to justify the cozy sinecure of taxpayer-funded hate police. "I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," Commissar Hall said. C'mon, you Ontario deadbeats, can't you hate a little more? Or complain a little more? To modify Brecht, we need to elect a new people, if only to file more "human rights" complaints...

I don't have as low an opinion of Canadians as Barbara Hall and Jennifer Lynch do. I don't believe your liberty is the conditional discretionary gift of hack bureaucrats advised by Marxist theorists. You defeat bad ideas — whether Nazism, Marxism, jihadism, Steynism or Trudeaupian pseudo-"human rights" mumbo-jumbo — in the bracing air and light of day, in vigorous open debate, not in the fetid corridors of power policed by ahistorical nitwits."