Another National Post column by Rex Murphy.

Excerpt:

There’s a trial going on in B.C. right now, under the insanely diluted and degraded understanding of the once-noble concept of “human rights,” giving full anguished adjudication – complete with lawyers and a tribunal chairman – over a heckling spat, already three years old, at a Vancouver supper/comedy club called, surely by the gods of irony, Zesty’s.

The good old days, when all a comedian had to worry about was flop-sweat, bad timing and where his or her next joke was coming from, are long gone. Nowadays, thanks to the infinitely expanding reach of bureaucratic commissions, a couple of bad-tempered moments at Zesty’s have summoned up the Mr. McGoos of the B.C. Human Rights Commission. It is currently determining whether a lesbian patron’s human rights were violated by a journeyman comic’s obnoxious heckling of her – brought on, he says, by her equally obnoxious heckling of him. The comic in question is Guy Earle.

It’s a case remarkably similar – in its gutting of common sense, its ability to bring on a puzzled frown from anyone who first hears of it – to that of the owner of a St. Catharines, Ont., fitness club. He recently was taken before the Ontario Human Rights Commission by a prospective member who, while awaiting “gender reassignment surgery,” claimed the right to undress in the club’s women’s locker room. The women objected. The owner denied. The member filed a complaint. That case, after much financial injury and anguish, was summarily dropped. No apology, no redress, no nothing for the owner.

Is Canada a serious country? Do we staff close to a dozen offices, provincial and federal, spend nearly $200-million across the great expanse of the country, to explore the human rights implications of rude heckling in comedy clubs? Or, the human right to undress in the locker room of your choice? For this, did the great armies of the West storm the beaches of Normandy? For this, did Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky endure their endless nights of hell in the gulag?

By some crude osmosis, or just from the luxuriant carelessness of our pampered lives, we have overturned one of the great concepts of all human law. The concept of human rights, as experience and history inform us, is protection from the state’s power, not oversight, interference and punishment by the state’s power.

The core concept of human rights is the protection of the irreducible safety and dignity of the individual from the massive and arbitrary power of the state. Not, the state wandering in, with its apparatus and procedures, its boards and tribunals into the doings, or speech, of the individual.

[…]If we go out into the other world, the world that doesn’t have quite as many comedy clubs, we see what real human rights are.

A man standing alone in front of a tank in Tiannamen Square – there’s a human rights moment. The multitudinous horror of ethnic cleansing, raging warfare in the Congo, the nightmare of North Korea, the acid-tossing at schoolgirls by the Taliban – there are people all over this world trembling at the might of the state, seeing their lives foreshortened or ruined, subject to unspeakable horrors at the hands of warlords and tyrants and revengeful dictatorships — these are the fields of real human-rights violations.

Read the whole thing. It’s really hard to excerpt from a column this fine. It seems as though some Canadians still have some fight left in them.

UPDATE: There is also a follow-up column in the National Post.

Excerpt:

Just as human rights laws were written largely by advocates who profit from finding racism when none exists, employment legislation has been written by left wing advocates with an interest in the perpetration of unions and the emasculation of corporate power. The resultant risk is not merely that of Canadians becoming infantilized; it is the risk of employers becoming too complacent or timorous to resist the increasing encroachments of the nanny state. It is also the risk of an environment wherein the best thinkers and innovators depart to more commodious jurisdictions. Many employers, particularly small businesses, are crippled by legislation that pits employers against the resources of the state. Canadians might never have agreed to this legislation had they realized its implications.

In a current case, because of arcane labour laws applying to the non-residential construction industry, an elevator installation company was unionized without a vote, despite the fact only two of its seven employees had signed union cards. And those two immediately renounced their union memberships. Although the Labour Board was aware the union lacked a single supporter, it certified the company.
Worse still, the employer was bound to a collective agreement in which it had no input. The agreement was negotiated by major players in the industry.

Smaller employers, such as this one, will cease operating if they are forced to pay the same wages and benefits.

It’s not just that the secular leftists take away human rights like the right to free speech. They also attack business and the free market itself. And that means that Canadians are actually losing jobs because of political correctness.