Canada's Blog Spring: Intellectual freedom in Canada: Mark Steyn says Section 13 (Canada's attempted "smackdown" of intelligence) is dead.

I can't find Mark Steyn's column on line just yet, as it is for the September 21 2009 edition of Maclean's (p. 78). If you want to find a truly snotty and reprehensible summary of recent developments, look no further than this by Matt Gurney. You would never guess from this blast from the past that people's lives have been ruined by utopian government run amuck, in the form of "human rights" commissions.

To which Gurney can offer only snide asides about political ambitions. Many of us would happily settle for just being left alone.

Anyway, Steyn notes,

In that long ago spring of 2008, the rules were very simple: under the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal, to be accused of a Section 13 thought crime was to be convicted. In the entire history of Section 13, every defendant brought before the CHRT had been found guilty. It would be unfair to compare this to the justice systems of Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot, since even those eminent jurists felt obliged to let someone off once in a while just for appearances' sake. Only in Canada was a 100 per cent conviction rate merely reassuring proof of the Dominion's humane, progressive commitment to "human rights."

This month the wheels fell off the racket.

Call it our "Blog Spring," if you like, after Czechoslovakia's "Prague Spring." The blogosphere led the charge.

And this is what happens when you allow weepy social workers to have any influence whatever in government. It always leads to a worse tyranny than anything that the typical tyrant had in mind. He only wants money, guns, and easy girls. She wants to reach deep into the recesses of your mind and remake it.

Which would be easier to buy off? The only solution in both cases is, throw it off!