As for Mr. Baergen's "pride" in being on the Alberta Human Rights Commission for a decade, chacun à son goût. Personally, I'd be ashamed. Here's why: the Danish cartoons crisis precipitated a lot of predictably craven remarks by European commissioners, U.S. State Department officials, the British foreign secretary, etc., all giving aid and comfort to the thugs and bullies threatening to "behead the enemies of Islam." Yet, for all the Anglo-Euro-American squishiness and generalized anguish about the need for the media to be more "sensitive," only one government agency in the Western world actually hauled a publisher into court for the "crime" of publishing those cartoons — and it was the Alberta Human Rights Commission, which dragged Ezra Levant of the Western Standard into an interrogation room to explain himself before one of Mr. Baergen's colleagues. So, yes, the Alberta HRC is a racket, and a disgraceful one, and that's why the system has so few defenders other than its apparatchiks.

I can't claim to be privy to the thoughts of the HRC inner circle, but I would imagine if they could turn back the clock they'd gladly drop the Western Standard and Maclean's prosecutions, and go back to their nice little earner of sticking it to neo-Nazis, homophobic Christians, and other underfunded losers in basements whom they could chastise with impunity, far from the prying eyes of press and public. Instead, on Tuesday morning, dawn broke in Ottawa, not just in the hey-Steyn-what's-with-the-purple-prose-scene-setting-stuff, but in the sense that a rare shaft of sunlight penetrated the 11th floor at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on Elgin Street.

We were there to hear how Canadian Human Rights Commission "investigators" go about their work. The last time anyone tried asking that, the commission's lawyers invoked Section 37 — the James Bond clause: we can't answer your questions because of national security. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, the CHRC prefers to operate under conditions of total eclipse. It's a measure of how far the "human rights" racket has departed from the norms of Canadian justice that the CHRC saw nothing wrong in attempting to exclude even the defendant, Marc Lemire, from his own trial.

Who is Marc Lemire? Ah, well, he's not the poster boy one would pick for a campaign to restore Canadian liberties, particularly if the poster shows him in the quasi-Nazi getup he's wearing in that picture of him standing behind Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Mr. Lemire is the former leader of Canada's supposed neo-Nazi group, "Heritage Front," and, when Richard Warman, the CHRC's former employee turned serial human rights "victim," decided to sic his old buddies at the commission on him, he presumably assumed Lemire was just the latest no-name "white supremacist" basement-loser he could hound into submission and penury.

Unfortunately for the CHRC, Marc Lemire has been inconsiderate enough to defend himself, and their determination to obstruct him has wound up making the issue not him but them, and some of their dodgier practices. Let's start with the easy stuff first. If Bill Baergen doesn't like my scare quotes round "human rights," let's move 'em: The "Canadian" Human Rights Commission does not treat all Canadians equally. The lead investigator testifying on Tuesday, Dean Steacy, is blind, but the justice his commission administers certainly isn't: if you're one of their allies, they'll start lurking on websites before you've made a formal complaint. But, if you're not simpatico, they'll reject your complaint on the grounds that it was on double-sided paper. Which was what happened to Mr. Lemire, when he tried to file his own Section 13 complaint against the police. Apparently, Mr. Lemire's complaint was double-sided — which came as news to Mr. Lemire, since he faxed it in. But by the time it uncoiled itself at the other end it had become the first double-sided fax on the planet. "I don't know what happened to the fax," said Mr. Steacy non-committally. Hey, it's a federal bureaucracy: things happen. Evidently one reason why Richard Warman has been the complainant on every Section 13 case since 2002 is that he's the only one who remembers the critical single-sided rule.

Marc Lemire then wrote a post on the Stormfront website explaining that his complaint had been rejected by Dean Steacy. Up popped "jadewarr" with a follow-up post. Who, you're wondering, is "jadewarr"?

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