I didn’t post it here. Why?

Because the story included a sentence that began:
The OHRC’s Jewish adjudicator, Michael Gottheil…

I immediately rebuked Catholic Insight via email…

Frankly, it would do the cause we all embrace more harm than good for me to expose that strange sentence to a wider audience. five feet of fury

The tone deafness of some people is astonishing and it is critical that they be taken to task, politely but firmly, by people who really do believe in free speech.

In paragraph 33, you state that my republication of Rev. Boissoin’s words were “more likely” to generate a debate, than to promote “hatred”. Again, that’s a fabrication: Rev. Boissoin’s column generated an enormous debate, both in the pages of the Red Deer Advocate and elsewhere. The debate is still going on, six years later.

But putting aside this factual falsehood, you falsely imply that hate speech jurisprudence grants an exemption for publications that create a debate. You just made that up, as a fig leaf to cover up your double-standard against Rev. Boissoin. ezra levant

I nearly spat out my beer…Watching Ezra make fun of the CHRC is a blood sport. The create debate exception, nowhere found in the CHRA, is lovely. Whenever accused of hate speech one simply has to click the heels of one’s emerald shoes together three times and murmur “debate”. The Commission will back right off.

Cool. Who knew?

At the very bottom there is Order for Costs in the amount of $100.00 payable to Richard Warman by the Northern Alliance and Jason Ouwendyk.

Ouwendyk filed a consumer proposal under the Bankruptcy Act and with that filing all actions against him were stayed. Ouwendyk’s creditors lined up and their claims were listed. Richard Warman claimed $12,550.00.

I am wondering if anyone reading this can explain how a matter which has not gone to trial can give rise to an alleged debt of over $12,000.00 without an actual Order of a Court. I may be missing something.

Warman provides a “Proof of Claim” form along with details of his claim including “Damages for Defamation” in the amount of $10,000.00. Which is odd as, generally, damages are awarded by a court at the end of a trial. Until the Court makes its decision and its order all that the “damages” are is an unproven claim.

It is difficult to imagine how the Trustee in this matter would have accepted such a proof of claim but, apparently, it was accepted and Warman is being given the same rights as the other creditors. He is certainly entitled to claim the $100.00 per the Order for Costs and that entitles him to be treated as a creditor. But how can he claim “damages” when no damages have been awarded by a Court?

All of which is more than a little curious.

Update: Interestingly, by s. 135 of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act the trustee in this instance is entitled to accept the “Proof of claim” not withstanding the absence of an actual trial of the action. In effect the Warman claim can be seen as a contingent claim on Ouwendyk and accepted as such. Apparently that is exactly what has happened here.

I suspect the other creditors were a bit pissed but if the trustee accepts the claim they would have to challenge that acceptance and they, apparently, have not.

Smelly, why yes. Illegal, apparently not.

Update #2

The lawyer must discharge this duty by fair and honourable means, without illegality and in a manner that is consistent with the lawyer’s duty to treat the tribunal with candour, fairness, courtesy and respect and in a way that promotes the parties’ right to a fair hearing where justice can be done. Maintaining dignity, decorum, and courtesy in the courtroom is not an empty formality because, unless order is maintained, rights cannot be protected.

This rule applies to the lawyer as advocate, and therefore extends not only to court proceedings but also to appearances and proceedings before boards, administrative tribunals, arbitrators, mediators, and others who resolve disputes, regardless of their function or the informality of their procedures…..Canons, Law Society of Upper Canada

Weirdly, the CHRC, having pushed the matter to a hearing decided at the last minute to pull out of the proceedings. Normally that would be the end of the proceedings. But when Richard Warman is involved “normally” is inoperative. Warman is the complainant in the Hamilton matter and, for reasons which are at present obscure, the hearing chair Edward Peter Lustig has allowed Warman to conduct the hearing apparently in place of the Commission.

Whether this is, well, legal, is an interesting question. Even more interesting, early reports have it that Warman first denied having signed up for the forum at the center of the complaint but, when confronted with the fact that many of the screen shots entered as evidence of the alleged hate had been made by someone logged in as “Saxon”, Warman apparently fessed up and admitted that he had indeed signed up for the forum. We need to wait for official transcripts to confirm all this but it sure looks like Warman, once again, has been just the tiniest bit economical with the truth. Under oath. There is a legal term for that….

Now my lefty, human rights commission friends are likely to jump up and down saying, “See, the Commissions work.” Which means they have entirely missed the point.

Ezra had, or should have had, a perfect right to publish the Mohammad cartoons without the least fear that the State would intervene even to the extent of entertaining a human rights complaint for 900 days. (Or an hour and a half which is how long it should have taken to say, “Hey, this is news, bugger off you twits.”)

Of course this means that yet another case which could have made it to the SCC for a clarification of Taylor bites the dust. But, keeping hope alive, the BCHRT is known for its willingness to go into the deepest depths of whacky to render “just us” to the crazed, the addicted and the just plain weird…why not exceed its jurisdiction and give the Sockpuppets a victory and Mark Steyn a chance to arrive in the Supreme Court. Sure it would be suicidal….but, hey, we’re in BC.

Here’s what I wrote, we’ll see if it is posted:

This was absolutely the right thing for B’nai Brith to have done.

The CHRC’s hate crimes investigation group was and is a disgrace. The lack of competent management, the total absence of rules and procedures, the behavior of very junior people (with the apparent approval of management) means that we now know many of the hate messages posted on the internet were posted by our own government.

Free Speech is the bedrock of democracy - not limited speech, not inoffensive speech - Free Speech. The greatest threat to Canada, and the greatest and most express threat to Jewish Canadians, are not the little neo-Nazi creeps in their basements. Rather it is extremist Islam with its imams openly inciting hatred of a Friday in Canadian mosques.

We have to be able to write about those extremist imams and their followers without worrying about the long arm of the censors at the CHRC.

S. 13 must, in its entirety, be repealed.

I was relieved to see B’nai Brith finally recognizing that the wannabe secret police at the CHRC are doing far more harm than good. Ezra Levant is rather more direct than Mr. Matas, “Fire. Them. All”

That would be a start, the full judicial investigation of the excesses of the Commission would go some distance to correcting the gross abuses the Commission has fostered over the years.

Kathy mentions my wondering who is paying for Warman’s lawsuit. Now filing the not terribly well drafted thing was not very expensive; but taking this to trial, especially now that Ezra has called Warman’s reputation into question is not going to be cheap. Warman works for the Department of National Defence. How much he makes is, no doubt, a state secret; but it is unlikely to be enough to fund a six week trial. So, who is paying or will be paying for this?

Basically Ezra is calling into question the CHRC’s hate speech unit’s entire investigative practice, he is stating that Richard Warman was a member of assorted neo-Nazi sites and that he posted there on a regular basis, and Ezra goes chapter and verse on the strange saga of the “Anne Cools” post the origin of which Warman first sought to suppress and then, when he failed, dropped the entire complaint.

It is an interesting strategy because the stakes are asymmetrical: if Ezra loses (and I don’t think he will) he will be out some money but his reputation will, if anything, be enhanced. If Warman loses, or even if he wins narrowly, the Court will have to pronounce on his reputation and his activities. Ezra will lead evidence of the essentially corrupt nature of the CHRC’s hate investigation process and the skanky role Warman played in that process. Done well, Ezra’s strategy will leave Warman with no reputation at all and will convict the CHRC of, minimally, reckless mismanagement.

Pleadings are drafted to open avenues of attack. But going after Warman on a broad variety of grounds and by raising his previous conduct and the conduct of the CHRC, Ezra has transformed a crappy little defamation case into a full scale political trial of Richard Warman and the people who employed him. (And Ezra raises the question: Why did Warman leave the CHRC??)

As well, based on the scope of these pleadings, it is difficult to imagine a Court denying a preliminary motion to move this away from the summary procedure Warman hopes will shield him from Discovery otherwise cross-examination could go on for weeks.

The silly man is threatening to sue Ezra for commenting on his PI/process server badgering Ezra’s parents. And the man is whining that his pathetic antics in front of the CHRT, where he claimed inserenity as a basis not to proceed on a portion of the Lemire matter which was a horror show for the CHRT, have been mentioned all over the internet….And it is all Ezra’s fault. (Hey, come on, I helped a little. And so did Mark Steyn with his with his suggestion of a musical.)

And then, just to add another layer of costs, the pathetic little man decides to conduct his case including routine legal correspondence entirely in French. (As he had threatened to do in his earlier correspondence.)

Well, bonne chance, M. Vigna. It takes great courage to beclown yourself in one official language, to do it bilingually is the stuff of legend.

Unfortunately for the Missing Sockpuppet, he does not actually understand the origin of his blog title. he states,

And finally, it is an example of a derogatory epithet created by neoconservative bloggers to ridicule the efforts of select minority communities in their quest for social justice. missing sockpuppet

In fact, and I may well have been the coiner or close to the coiner of the term as it applies to the 3 Islamic losers who are 0/2 before the HRC, “sockpuppet” in the blogging world, was most famously used to deride Glenn Greenwald’s habit of using fake names under which to post comments defending and praising Glen Greenwald.

I, and several other bloggers have also used it to attack the CHRC’s hate crimes investigators’ habit of using pseudonyms for their membership and participation in various hate sites.

Now, when the 3 Islamic losers (And what did they do with Denny?) claimed they were filing hate speech complaints against Mcleans and it turned out in fact that it was the CIC under the direction of Dr. Mohamed Elmasry - noted advocate of killing Jewish civilians in Israel - which was the complainant it was apparent that the 3 Islamic losers were, indeed, sockpuppets. That is, they were speaking lines dictated by someone else.

So, welcome to the blogosphere Missing. Have fun, try not to get sued and try not to sue anybody.