The Ministry of Love

Among the more disturbing revelations to be found in this piece about Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, are these:

"I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," the activist lawyer and former mayor of Toronto said. In the long term she would like to see human rights complaints decrease, but in the interim they "may have to spike."

...

"We're not strangers to controversy," Ms. Hall said. "I think I have a thick skin. My life has been about working with a range of social justice issues and I've from time to time done that in a fairly public way, and I've been subject to criticism. I'd love it if everybody was positive about the work we're doing. That's not always the case, but I believe in the code, and I believe in the progress that's been made in the 40-plus years it's been in Ontario," she said.

"Ultimately, I believe that none of us are free unless all of us are free, and this is part of pursuing that."

Now, Barbara Hall is a notoriously stupid woman, but that doesn't make the explicit import of her words any less disturbing: that she intends for the OHRC to manufacture, in-house, human rights complaints in order to prevent the abuse which she admits, in the same breath, doesn't exist; that it is, apparently, the extraordinary thinness of her skin that makes it so "thick"; that (most disturbingly of all) until a patently impossible goal is reached, Barbara Hall does not believe that you or I have any freedoms. Consider it: if there is no freedom until "all of us are free" then Barbara Hall risks committing no injustice by taking ours away. It wasn't there in the first place, see?

Of all the revelations to have come out of the MacLean's/Steyn/ Levant business, I find this to be the most horrifying by far.

UPDATE (8:35 PM): Greetings Steynians! Glad to have you back. You'll have noticed that this is the second time in the last 48 hours that I have been plugged by our friend, and I hope that you're very impressed ... I certainly am.

If you're looking for more discussion of HRC madness, there's the last thing, and also this. And the libel suit is definitely worth your attention.

UPDATE (April 20th AM): ... And Furious Five Footers!

UPDATE (April 21st AM): ... And SDAers and Pennies! If you have not already done so, please read my pofaced proposal that Mark Steyn file a Human Rights complaint against ... Mark Steyn! The man himself thought it "ingenious"!