From Ezra Levant's Shakedown - 9

From Ezra Levant's Shakedown 9

... the reasons that the Supreme Court cited in giving HRCs ["human rights" commissions] the benefit of the constitutional doubt - that they weren't as punitive as criminal courts, and that they could be expected to confine their investigations to genuinely "evil" hatemongers - have been debunked by events. Section 13 has become the worst of both worlds: a tool to beat political dissidents with police raids, five-year-long trials, arbitrary procedure, and, it if comes to it, jail time - but with none of the protections that we see fit to grant even to murderers and extortionists. (P. 95)

That's interesting, because when I read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago years ago, one thing that struck me was his testimony that, in general, the Soviet regime punished political dissidents much more viciously than it punished street criminals.

That makes sense in a certain kind of regime. Street criminals, after all, threaten only the citizen. Political dissidents threaten the bureaucrat - a much more serious crime. Or - oh, wait, I thought Canada was a ... what kind of a country? A constitutional monarchy?

But then ... well then we have one huge mess to clean up, right?

See also: From Ezra Levant's Shakedown - 8; Shakedown 7; Shakedown - 6; Levant's Shakedown - 5; Shakedown - 4; Shakedown - 3; Shakedown - 2; Shakedown - 1; From Mark Steyn's "Introduction" to Ezra Levant's "Shakedown"; Mark Steyn introduces Levant's work. Ezra Levant's Shakedown: A Preliminary Note