Wearing a new suit to his lunchtime speech about freedom of speech, in a conference room at the Ontario Bar Association June 16, former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant noted the crowd was mostly Jewish, mostly lawyers, vaguely familiar: “It’s just like my bar mitzvah.” If so, he might not have been a very popular 13-year-old: soggy sandwich platters, brutal fluorescent lighting and even a half-decent heckler. (More about that later.)
It’s now been over 850 days since Levant’s former magazine was the subject of a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission for publishing those Danish editorial cartoons, a dozen satirical images of the prophet Muhammad.
What might have been perceived as a stunt by a garrulous young media mogul to get banned from the newsstand at Indigo and gain national publicity for a regional magazine has turned into a fight against Canada’s institutional definition of human rights — and the tribunals implemented across the country to enforce it.
The protests and riots that followed the republication of the cartoons in countries across Europe in the early winter of 2006 seemed like a topic of interest to the conservative readership Levant was courting with the Western Standard.
How could a fortnightly magazine not be scooped on this story, though? Whether it be his one-time employer National Post, the ex-Post management at Maclean’s or the Sun Media tabloid chain where he wrote the occasional column, Levant figured someone would beat him to it. Turns out, they didn’t want to risk offending those who consider the images a desecration.
Complaints were filed with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, to which Levant responded politely — hoping that they could work things out. But the complaint by the Edmonton Muslim Council wasn’t going away, even though the Western Standard did, suspending its print edition — and annual boat cruises — last October, after losing around $4 million in four years of operation.
That opened a window of opportunity for Levant to investigate the investigators: for prosecuting the publishing of images of Muhammad, was the Canadian government facilitating the enforcement of sharia law? How could the 15 bureaucrats handling his file be experts in every field, as their jurisdiction required them to be? And why was he expected to take their opinion seriously?
Then came the matter of conservative polemicist Mark Steyn being subject to similar complaints for an excerpt of his book, America Alone, published in the Oct. 20, 2006 edition of Maclean’s under the brooding headline “The Future Belongs to Islam.” The stage was set for Levant to seize the spotlight he’s spent his 36 years rehearsing for.
“Rather than seeing this as unfinished business with the magazine,” says Levant, “I had the time to go through seven or eight years of rulings from the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Not just judgments, full transcripts of 200 cases.
“I wouldn’t call it destiny, but it was a fortunate coincidence that they decided to go after me when I wouldn’t roll over. I’m stubborn — stubborn, and organized.”
The curtain rose in January of this year, when his defiant appearance before a human rights investigator was filmed — and promptly posted online, putting Levant’s daily blog diatribes in context. The debate that sparked the complaint has been eclipsed by a different one, turning Levant into a foe of the Jewish status quo, which has historically availed itself of similar Canadian bureaucratic channels to shut down outlets for anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, he finds himself being supported by left wingers squinting to see beyond Levant’s well-cultivated partisan persona. “My personal temperament is that of a scrappy guy. I won’t say I don’t enjoy fighting back, but there are real costs involved with me doing this — even if I’ve received support on the legal side, there’s also the matter of stress, and time.
“I do have the pointy end of the spear here. But I’m also the one being shot at.”
Censorship of objectionable content seemed to be a recurring theme in Canada when material classified as pornographic would have to be physically imported across the border to be seen, heard or read. First they came for the art movies, then they came for the rap albums, then they came for the lesbian bookstores… and then, over time, dangerous artistic ideas were no longer put on trial.
When it comes to human rights commission tribunals on the editorial content of magazines, however, it seems the wake-up call is coming from inside the house. Like the earlier battles around border bureaucrats, the human rights commission fight, pivotally, is one of justice administered outside the criminal and civil courts. In human rights tribunals, unlike in hate crime or libel proceedings, the accused has no right to be judged by a jury of peers, no right to confront the accuser, no method of recovering legal costs in cases of frivolous prosecution, and none of the traditional defences for speech violations — fair comment and truth, notably — are available to defendants. If a complaint is deemed worthy of investigation, the tribunal becomes simultaneously investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury — a situation, critics point out, hundreds of years of constitutional tradition has removed from Western justice systems.
Levant feels his case deserves to be taken at least as seriously as the proposed amendment to Bill C-10, which threatens to withdraw tax credits from Canadian filmmakers who cross a moral line, resulting in protests from the arts community. Gradually, he’s gained support from organizations like PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and gay rights group EGALE — strange bedfellows for someone mostly recognized as a ranting neo-con stereotype. Yet he shoots down any suggestion that his world-view might be perceived as quirky.
“I pick my battles on ideological grounds,” explains Levant. “I don’t choose teams based on who’s the weaker one in the fight. Margaret Thatcher was one of the politicians I grew up admiring, and she wouldn’t be described as an underdog.”
The love of debate led Levant to law school at the University of Alberta in the early 1990s, where he found affirmative action policies to rail against, back when such scraps tended to make headlines. This coincided with the rise of the Reform Party, for which Levant was an early youth member, then a full-time staffer by 25. A job offer to write editorials for the National Post brought Levant to Toronto for a spell. Then, to Ottawa to help salvage the transformation of Reform to the Canadian Alliance, under Stockwell Day. (“I’m a Stockaholic,” Levant proclaimed.) Returning home to Calgary to practise law, he was due to run in a parliamentary by-election, until the party determined the seat would be better off occupied by Stephen Harper. The demise of Alberta Report magazine led to the conception of the Western Standard, although Levant knew it would likely lose money.
“I approached it as a political missionary,” he says. “There was a conservative stripe, but a strong libertarian contingent, too. And I’ve always been a western chauvinist — why should all the major Canadian magazines come from Toronto?”
Canadian magazines have never made as much news in the United States as Maclean’s did earlier this month for sticking up for Mark Steyn at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal hearings. The hearing’s over; the tribunal has yet to report its judgment.
Members of the Canadian Islamic Congress in that case asked that Maclean’s be forced to publish their response to Steyn’s excerpt. But why is it seen as important for a point of view to be thrust on every doctor’s office waiting room table in the country? Can’t everybody publish openly online?
Omar Ha-Redeye, a 29-year-old University of Western Ontario student who contributes to the blog Law Is Cool — where human rights commissions aren’t being dismissed out of hand — feels Levant has abused his high-profile platform.
“The only distinguishing feature between this case and the previous ones is that the respondent has taken it upon himself to start a campaign against the human-rights commissions, rather than resolve it quietly and efficiently,” says Ha-Redeye. “Had he taken on the issue prior, there’s a possibility they would have summarily dismissed the complaint as a frivolous retaliation for his activities.
“The problem is that Levant has conflated this issue with other HRC issues, and quite deliberately. These commissions have done enormous good in Canada in the past — their informality, which he criticizes, is intended to provide flexibility.”
At the other end of the spectrum sits Denyse O’Leary, a 58-year-old Catholic religion and science journalist from Toronto, who posted a report on Levant’s Bar Association talk on her blog, “Post-Darwinist.” She initially felt the chill of what Levant was dealing with when an American law professor, entering into an online debate with her, said he could get her criminally charged for her comments in Canada.
“The commissioners strike me as middle-class busybodies anxious to meddle in anything they can,” she says. “Failed professionals who will blender into any area, and then assess that. It seems to me that they lack a sense of boundaries, and imagine that they can remake society into whatever they think it should be.
“No society can be free if being upset is seen as a source of harm. Part of being an adult is to deal with what upsets you. I see things that upset me all the time.”
And what Ezra Levant seems most upset with are the people he feels have betrayed him most — the “official Jews” who turned hate monitoring into a career, making celebrities out of people espousing unpopular views in far-flung places, like Hitler-loving First Nations chief David Ahenakew.
Leo Adler, director of national affairs for Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre showed up to heckle Levant, claiming that since the number of anti-Semitic websites based in Canada has gone from one to 8,000 over the course of 13 years, the law is therefore more necessary than ever. The quarter century separating Adler from Levant may well just be a generation gap, however. Does the power to post something online equate to actual power?
“The biggest problem is that people like him want to re-fight World War II,” says Levant. “However, the threat is no longer Hitler’s Holocaust — it’s Ahmadinejad’s.”
Remember, an attempt to make this point by republishing cartoons is what sparked this issue in the first place. The book that Ezra Levant signed a deal last week to write was spawned by his months of research into human rights commissions in Canada, putative experts in everything from public pot smoking, to transsexual labiaplasty, to the editorial content of magazines. Told he could solve his case with a cash settlement, Levant balked, and turned it into an investment in his public profile. But he insists that it’s not all about him. “The story is about human rights used as a sword to hurt people rather than shield them, and how there are massive abuses in this parallel justice system.
“I refuse to be the latest in an assembly line of people ground into powder.”