Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

[88Mariner]

A Mississauga businesswoman whose home was ordered seized to pay an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal award to a former employee can keep her house — for now.
The Superior Court struck down the “fatally flawed” decision as so unfair to defendant Maxcine Telfer — who represented herself in the hearing — that it was “simply not possible to logically follow the pathway taken by the adjudicator.”
That October 2009 decision ordered Telfer to pay $36,000 to a woman who had been her employee for six weeks. Lawyers wanted the sheriff to seize and sell Telfer’s home to collect the money.

read it all:

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/931807--superior-court-rules-ontario-human-rights-tribunal-hearing-was-unfair

[runningman]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

this story makes me sick. Canada needs a lot of things.

[88Mariner]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

this story makes me sick. Canada needs a lot of things.

understatement of the year.


are you going to lead the charge?

[runningman]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

I have been with my friends and family. But I'm just a conspiracy theorist right?

Unfortunately most Canadians (that I live around) say I bring up valid points, but they share the same mind thought as Reso with the "What can I do to change it, I just go with the flow"

[88Mariner]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

I have been with my friends and family. But I'm just a conspiracy theorist right?

Unfortunately most Canadians (that I live around) say I bring up valid points, but they share the same mind thought as Reso with the "What can I do to change it, I just go with the flow"

The issue of free speech is not within the orbit of conspiracy theory. I suppose it 'might' explain why such laws exist, but has very little if anything to do with overturning such laws, regulations, and the machine that perpetuates it.

why are canadians so complacent?

[runningman]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

well that's a tough question. I truly think there is an epidemic of "uselessness" in North America especially in Canada. People have been convinced they can't do anything. They spend their nights watching mind numbing shows like American Idol or Jersey Shore and they just hope and pray that things will get better because someone else will do it for me. What we are seeing out of this crisis is that it is going to take a group effort not acts of individual geniuses. Hopefully this internet overturn will prove to people that they have all the power.

[Localizer]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

^ If it's overturned, it just proves to the people that their government just worked in their favor...

[88Mariner]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

^ If it's overturned, it just proves to the people that their government just worked in their favor...

except that 1) the law is STILL on the books and 2) it was applied in such a incredibly absurd way and 3) there are plenty of other canadiens who have been affected by this nonsense and 4) she was lucky. very very lucky.

[Localizer]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

yes, and stuff like this happens in the US too within the small courts. Then it gets taken up and heard by higher courts. Then it gets thrown out. Then more cases like it get heard. Then they realize they have to change the laws. It's not unusual for prosecutors/attorneys to take on absurd cases with quite of them actually winning their hearings.

[88Mariner]

Re: Canada is overdue for a hardcore free speech movement.

Thank God for the Ontario Superior Court. Or, if you’re a Dawkins man, thank Providence, or Fate, or whatever benign anonymous forces silently preserve the common sense of things. For the Ontario Superior Court, in overruling a recent decision of an Ontario Human Rights tribunal, struck an awesome blow for decency.

The case, according to the tribunal’s overseer, represented discrimination on “the basis of an intersection of … race, ancestry, ethnic origin and place of origin” — which, judging from all the clutter than emerges from it, must be a very busy junction indeed. More prosaically, it involved a newly hired blind, Muslim woman who took her employer — a small, federally-supported business for assisting new immigrants — to court after she had been fired only six weeks into her job.


Arguments over proper office attire were part of the dispute. But by far the most gripping contention centred on how to warm up an entrée: According to the complainant, her employer raised a fuss about the foul-smelling food she cooked in the office microwave. How far we’ve travelled. It’s an interesting moment we’ve reached when the high and noble Enlightenment ideals of human rights and liberty are thrown into fraught juxtaposition with the use and operation of a kitchen appliance.


Until I read the tribunal’s judgment, I never fully appreciated how deeply the commonplace microwave oven could “intersect” with the grand operation of basic human rights. Burke, Wendell Holmes, Solzhenitsyn, America’s founding fathers, even the ancient Greeks: All were silent on the microwave oven. It is the singular gully in the otherwise soaring uplands of Western political speculation. (me: fukin' lmao)



Fortunately, the tribunal sorted it all out. They found, as they almost always do, for the complainant (Seema Saadi), and against her employer (Maxcine Telfer). “Nothing in the evidence suggests that the respondents deliberately targeted the applicant for discriminatory enforcement of the microwave policy,” concluded the tribunal. “However, the applicant argued that she was adversely affected by the enforcement of the policy.”




There were, it must be noted, from the employer’s point of view, some other serious concerns about the employee’s behaviour that had nothing to do with microwave cookers at all: visiting other peoples’ desks and accessing their computers, for instance. These the tribunal declined to ventilate. The tribunal also would not allow the calling of a witness for the employer, and the Superior Court gave them a tap on the head for not so doing.


The court found the tribunal’s judgment “fatally flawed” and, most damming of all, that it was “simply not possible to logically follow the pathway taken by the adjudicator.” That doesn’t sound so much like an overruling as an expression of judicial shock and horror, and a none-too-subtle cry for help.


Yet it was upon this flawed edifice and impossible reasoning that the tribunal moved on to its penalties. It ordered fines and costs totalling $36,000 against the employer, Ms. Tefler. Since the accused had little money, the lawyers working for the complainant decided they would go after the woman’s house — have it auctioned off — to get the microwave money for their client.
Did no one at this “human rights” tribunal look at the penalty of the ill-decided case and see that the consequences flowing from the penalty was itself the real violation of human rights?


How long must it be before provincial and federal political parties come out of their respective caves of cowardice and timidity and pronounce on the degradation of human rights in Canada? The public are so far ahead of the politicians on this issue that it has become a matter of wonder why the politicians continue to hold back.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...#ixzz1D7Hrniqp