Author Mark Steyn slays yet another dragon of political correctness during Committee hearing
(Queen’s Park) – During today’s Government Agencies Committee review of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (OHRT) MPP Randy Hillier welcomed a breath of fresh air to the usually stodgy proceedings. Author Mark Steyn brought a dose of passion to the proceedings, passion for equality, for justice and freedom of speech seldom heard in the halls of the Legislative Assembly.
Steyn pointed out how he and Maclean’s magazine had been the subject of ‘drive by justice’ from the OHRC’s Barbara Hall. “It’s not possible in a legal sense to mount a defence to the accusation that you’ve offended somebody, which is why the human right to not to be offended should not exist in free societies. That’s the first and most basic thing that this system fails in.”
Steyn further commented that “the accuser should not be allowed unlimited funds to frivolously torment people for no reason, beggaring them for something that serves no public purpose.”
Hillier found Steyn’s perspective a refreshing change to the political correctness that dominates proceedings past. “There is a fundamental failing with our system when we provide legal services to one side of the equation but not the other side of the equation. The public tax dollars are paying for the adjudicator, paying for the Human Rights Tribunal, paying for legal support for the plaintiff, but there’s no assistance to the defendant.”
With respect to the two-tier system of justice, where the accused are guilty until they prove their innocence, Hillier noted during Committee that he was “not seeing much evidence of how the tribunal, once an application is received, determines if it ought to proceed at all or if it ought to be discarded, if it’s trivial or frivolous.”
I think it is important that human rights, this whole bundle of human rights that we’re talking about: the support, the commission, the tribunal, it is a jungle of human rights out there. “I see a failing there, and a failing that is creating injustice,” Hillier concluded.
Randy Hillier, MPP Lanark Frontenac Lennox, is a co-founder of the Lanark Landowners Association, which was brought to life to address government imposition on the rights of private property owners, and to address the regressive regulatory impositions that government was bringing down upon farmers and business owners in rural Ontario.
In 2006, Randy resigned as President of the OLA in order to run as a candidate for the Progressive Conservatives. Randy was elected in the 2007 provincial election.
Randy a long-time resident of Lanark County, an electrician by trade and member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), continues to co-publish and edit rural Ontario’s successful magazine “The Landowner.”
