Jay Currie

The CHRC is, apparently, taking its political advice from the pages of “Yes, Minister”. If you are feeling a bit of political heat appoint an expert to investigate and write a report. This give you a convenient out in that the report will take some time to write during which you can defer queries until “we have the Report”.

The Sir Humphrey touch is in picking an “expert” whose opinions are well known in advance. Professor Richard Moon teaches law at Windsor and has published a book The Constitutional Protection of Freedom of Expression. He is not, on a superficial read of his work, a fire breathing censor. He is, however, prepared to consider such questions as a “right of access” to public and privately owned property for freedom of expression purposes and that right might extend to questions of a right of reply in a newspaper or magazine.

His overall approach assumes that the state is properly engaged in the regulation of expression and his discussion turns on how best to achieve that regulation.

Which will bring us back to the CJC/Lying Jackal view that it is possible that s. 13 of the CHRA may need to be “tweaked”.

Professor Moon is being asked to look at “Growing public interest and continued advances in technology all point to a need to examine issues surrounding hate on the Internet.” This is both broad and narrow at the same time – hate on the internet is wildly unspecific. But the Professor is not being asked to examine the CHRC’s response to such “hate” because the CHRC does not want its own propagation of hate speech, its disregard for proper procedure, its complete absence of rules to be scrutinized.

This report is simply the CHRC’s attempt to change the subject.