Monday, August 17, 2009

Dear Mr. Prime Minister

Letter to the Prime Minister

Dear Readers:

I have had enough and so today will be sending this letter to the Prime Minister. Although some parts of it are personal, it is one that I hope encapsulates the thoughts and feelings of many Canadians of good will. I support our Prime Minister, as the leader of our country, regardless of my own personal politics. However, this situation with the Canadian HRC is beyond untenable. We can blog about it until the cows come home, and we can also sing Kumbaya at the end of each day. I intend to start communicating with elected leaders, not because I think it will immediately do any good, but because we elected them to do good, and I intend to press them to so do.

Should any of you wish to write to him directly, his email address is as follows. I am sure that a deluge of mail would help guide him in deliberating on the fate of the CHRC and Ms. Lynch.

pm@pm.gc.ca

August 18, 2008

Subject: Canadian Human Rights Commission - Jennifer Lynch

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

In the nearly 6 decades of my life, I have been proud to call Canada my "home and native land." Although my wife and I choose to go south for the winter lately, primarily for health reasons, we have happily returned to what we believe to be the "true north strong and free", or so we have supposed.

I am one of the many millions of Canadians who thought of the words Human Rights and Commission as words that fit well together. I thought that the combination made Canada a better place for us all. I had no idea that they were an oxymoron. Like most of us in Canada, I have been deluded.

About 3 years ago, a close friend of mine, a grade school principal, had a complaint filed against her with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (HRC) in what I figured was a mistake that would go away in due course.

As I saw the Ontario HRC wreak havoc on her health and force her into early retirement with no resolution in sight, I realised that I needed to do more to support her.

Early on, I met Ezra Levant, and Kathy Shaidle and read their books. Though what they wrote about human rights and the commissions and tribunals in Canada seemed plausible, I found it hard to believe. After all, this is Canada, sir. This could not be happening here. They simply had to be exaggerating. As I very sadly discovered later through my own research, they only touched on the nature and scope of the problem. It was far too big to be written about in 2 books.

I set out to understand the history of Human Rights in Canada and how we got to a place where a mistake like what happened to my friend could happen. You see, I still thought that it was part of a few isolated mistakes, not a calculated strategy. That was part of the delusion. In my own digging, I had moments of Canadian pride in our early leadership in human rights, followed by immense shame at our current track record here at home.

I read with pride of our contribution to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, how John Peters Humphries, from McGill University was the first Director of the Human Rights Division in the United Nations Secretariat and was instrumental in its drafting.

I was also proud to read our own enshrined Charter fundamental freedoms, the
freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; freedom of peaceful assembly; and freedom of association. Little did I know that these were just concepts, and as one of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) employees said in testimony, under oath "American concepts", belittled by the CHRC itself in pursuit of its own aims.

I have been following the activities of all the human rights commissions, but particularly the one under your direct jurisdiction, The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) for some time now. To that end I have been studying case transcripts, case decisions and reporting by official media and by bloggers. Although the media and bloggers have been hard on the CHRC, they have been far softer than its antics, and the antics of its leader, Jennifer Lynch deserve. The unequal layering of human rights for people in this country has become a sick joke and one that is way past being tolerable.

The alleged defence of Human Rights by members of the CHRC, while perpetrating breeches of those self same rights of individual defendants, while in pursuit of them is well documented. The attempts by the current leader of the CHRC, Jennifer Lynch to defend such actions, by outright lies and deception of the Canadian public and by calling into question those who have carefully researched this treachery is disgusting behaviour.

This past weekend, she spent considerable of our tax dollars to fly to Dublin to entreat members of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) meeting there to "write letters to correct misinformation", none of which misinformation she has ever mentioned, documented or brought forward. She also confessed to the CBA that: “For the moment the obligation to defend our existence monopolizes our energy.” This so called leader of an important bureaucratic area of your government is wasting her energy and that of her staff defending an existence that has proven to be unsupportable.

I urge you to bring an end to this hypocrisy and put Jennifer Lynch out of our misery, Sir. We, as Canadians of good will, can no longer tolerate having an organisation that has the potential to do useful work for the people of Canada, be run as a personal fiefdom, with limitless powers to hound citizens for invented breaches of invented human rights by improperly trained staff members, who have no proper work standards or ethics.

The people of Canada deserve nothing less than a full judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, after termination of its Chief Commissioner and her deputies. Their activities and those of members of their staff should be investigated criminally for human rights violations, and for fiscal improprieties, and other malfeasance. This, Sir is going on today, on your watch, and as it continues cannot help but reflect badly on you and your government. I urge you to act bravely and boldly to stop the "chill" that the Canadian Human Rights Commission is bringing to our fundamental rights and freedoms in this fair land of ours. Please ensure that we do not have to amend our national anthem and seek a new word to conclude the phrase "true north strong and ?".

Your Sincerely

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

True North Strong And Forcibly Equal Unless You Need Amelioration Of Historical Injustices.

Make sure you cc Rob Nicholson and Rick Dykstra.

Don Sharpe said...

Wow, GREAT letter!

Michael Brandon said...

Thank you Don. I have been reading your Blog to my great enjoyment.

SF, I got a blah blah blah response from the PM's office, including that it was being forwarded to Rob Nicholson. I also sent a copy to my own MP Ed Holder.

As to your amendment to the lyrics of "Oh, Canada?", I suggest that it is not Canadian enough and should be tweaked to "True, north, strong, and forcibly equal, unless you need amelioration of Historical Injustices, Notwithstanding, Eh!!"