Seems like restricting their power is up for a vote. (Here's the parliamentary background info). Seems about time for changes to happen to an institution that seems to have strange standards of justice.
Here, for example, are their standards for determining guilt, excerpted from one of their rulings:
- The prohibited ground or grounds of discrimination need not be the sole or the major factor leading to the discriminatory conduct; it is sufficient if they are a factor;
- There is no need to establish an intention or motivation to discriminate; the focus of the enquiry is on the effect of the respondent's actions on the complainant;
- The prohibited ground or grounds need not be the cause of the respondent's discriminatory conduct; it is sufficient if they are a factor or operative element;
- There need be no direct evidence of discrimination; discrimination will more often be proven by circumstantial evidence and inference; and
- Racial stereotyping will usually be the result of subtle unconscious beliefs, biases and prejudices."
So a short summary of this is that if the commission finds that there a unintentional, subconscious action may have played a minor role in an offense, then that's good enough to convict. Interestingly, the commission seems to have ruled that the discrimination they find need not be consistent with that alleged by the original complaintant and that there may be rational reasons for the behaviour does not exclude it:
There is no requirement that the respondents' conduct, to be found discriminatory, must be consistent with the allegation of discrimination and inconsistent with any other rational explanation.
They've also got some strange indications of bias in their rulings. e.g., to quote Mark Steyn on a couple of other human rights commissions verdicts
... I'm puzzled by the decision of Commissar Lynch's enforcers: If it's okay for Imam al-Hayiti to say homosexuals and lesbians should be "exterminated", why is the Reverend Stephen Boissoin under a lifetime speech ban merely for objecting to gay marriage? Why are bald statements of Islamic supremacism cool when an imam makes them but the subject of a week-long trial in Vancouver for an infidel magazine that quotes such an imam?
(That last comment, BTW, refers to a complaint launched against Macleans magazine following an article Steyn wrote).
Both right and more left-leaning papers have expressed opposition to it.
I could go on an on with other objection to the Human Right's Commission's show trials, but for now I'll simply say that I'm hoping that this change comes into play.
