(Also, currently on your newsstands, a very important article on lobster guts.)

Kady O'Malley's account of the exchange between Dallaire and Kenney at the Subcommittee on International Human Rights today:

Jason Kenney quotes Dallaire as having said that the US is “no better than the other guy,” AKA the terrorists, and Dallaire is only too happy to reaffirm that any country that infringes civil and human rights and the rule of law is no better than that which doesn’t recognize them.

Kenney is now asking whether, by terrorists, Dallaire means people who behead women, and who “kidnap people with Downs’ Syndrome” and who believe Israel should be destroyed, and—wait, what does this have to do with Omar Khadr? Dallaire tells him, point blank, you’re either with the law, or against it. You’re a child soldier, or you’re not. If Kenney wants to use extreme examples, fine, but if you go against those principles, you are going down “the same road.”

Or, as Kenney so eloquently put it to reporters later, Dallaire was arguing "that the fact that Canada has not made an extraordinary political effort to repatriate Omar Khadr is the moral equivalent to using adolescents with Down's Syndrome to blow up kids in a pet market."

You know, it shouldn't matter that the bombers in question weren't adolescents, and didn't have Down's Syndrome. The topic of the day was Khadr, the child soldier, and the "extraordinary political effort" folks like Dallaire are asking the government to undertake on his behalf, just like every other western nation did on behalf of its citizens at Guantanamo. (Clearly "extraordinary" switched meanings with its exact opposite at some point without my noticing.) So part of me said, don't worry about Kenney's latest feat of jackassery, especially since the press gallery already seemed to be peppering MPs with five questions about Dallaire and whether he should be "censured" for every one they asked about Khadr. In fairness, when reporters did try to haul Kenney back to earth, this is what happened:

Question: But isn't his point that our moral standing is somewhat lessened by the whole Khadr case?

Hon. Jason Kenney: I think his point is dead wrong.

But it does matter, because it shows what Khadr is up against. Dallaire believes "… that the fact that Canada has not made an extraordinary political effort to repatriate Omar Khadr is the moral equivalent to using adolescents with Down's Syndrome to blow up kids in a pet market," says Kenney. I mean, just look at that. This file is essentially being managed by one of Kate McMillan's less edifying comment threads.

Does Kenney really imagine that John Howard enjoyed the repatriation of David Hicks? That righteous Aussies were marching on Canberra in his defence, clutching copies of the constitution in one hand and ice cold cans of Victoria Bitter in the other? I am not naïve enough to believe that the westerners once imprisoned at Guantanamo were brought home purely because their governments believed in doing what was right. Quite apart from everything else, they were doing George W. Bush a favour. But Canada would be all by itself on this even if Khadr hadn't been 15 motherloving years old when he was captured in Afghanistan.

It doesn't matter what Dallaire said; it doesn't matter if he gets censured, though the idea that he would fear the wrath of Stéphane Dion is good for a wry chuckle at least; and it doesn't really matter what happens to Omar Khadr, though I'm obviously sympathetic to his plight. What matters is the malignant tumor Khadr's situation continues to expose in the Canadian psyche (for lack of a better word). "'Child soldier' Khadr needs protection, Dallaire says" (Globe and Mail)--that's a headline. "Dallaire compares U.S. actions to those of terrorists" (Toronto Star)--that's utterly beside the point. Not unlike Canada itself in its weaker moments.

(Note: This post has been edited so it makes more sense than it originally did. I think so, anyway.)

• No team that really values winning would party in the streets after a first-round playoff victory.
• No team that really values winning would get a standing ovation from its fans for bowing out of the playoffs one game short of a second-round sweep.
• The Habs should have drafted one of Anze Kopitar or Marc Staal instead of Carey Price, who'll probably be pumping gas in five years.
• Trading Cristobal Huet was an incredibly suspect move in the first place: why would a team that ostensibly had designs on the Stanley Cup deliberately downgrade in goal, not even get a human being in return, and strengthen an Eastern Conference opponent in the process? But with Price's collapse against Philadelphia, the move attained the status of catastrophe.
• The Habs' Stanley Cup drought is currently the 13th longest in the NHL. Wait, that doesn't sound damning enough, so let's make it among teams that have actually won at least one Cup. Ergo, the Habs' Stanley Cup drought is currently the ninth longest in the NHL.

(That said, I hasten to add that I prefer the media's deference to the Habs as an abiding national treasure to their treatment of the Leafs as an abiding national cold sore, since the former at least recognizes that NHL hockey, for all the passion it quite rightly arouses, is a game.)

With that out of the way, I present a random sampling of other relatively recent other contributions to the Maclean's empire:

A Q&A with Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft. It's just as breathtakingly exciting as it sounds!

A tragically, scandalously short contribution to the magazine about the return of the McRib.

A probably too-long short contribution to the magazine on the occasion of junior Tory pitbull Pierre Poilievre's visit to Toronto to turn his nose up at the Ontario budget. (Honestly, I've never encountered anyone less prepared to answer the most basic question imaginable—"What are you doing here?")

A history of brutal Leafs trades. And, with my colleague Philippe Gohier, what I think is a rather fun "Harper's Index"-style rundown of the blue-and-white nightmare.

For the love of cripes, why can't we get rid of drugs in Canadian prisons?

British Columbia is the capital of Canadian kidnapping. Thankfully, the perpetrators are all morons.

Human rights legislation protects drug addicts, but not casual drug users. Discuss.

Shock-horror! Bosses don't have to give Ontarians Family Day off! But then, they don't have to give them Christmas Day off either...

With regard to Robert Latimer's case, a look at how other jurisdictions have dealt with gut-wrenching child murders.

A naive attempt to hold commentators in the abortion debate to account for their pronouncements, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of R. v. Morgentaler.

And, of course, you will want to visit Macleans.ca's new blog setup, which is, to say the absolute bloody least, extremely better than it was. Soon—very soon—there will be comments. Ideally, Megapundits I have slighted will turn up to exact their awful revenge.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, Brent Sutter quite justifiably threw a stick on the ice in fury and escaped any censure. Why? Because the interference call against Jamie Langenbrunner--and the subsequent, dead-easy even-up non-call against the Rangers--was too god-awful. Too completely, jaw-droppingly wrong. Sutter would have torn one of Dave Jackson or Chris "Who?!" Rooney a third corn-chute.

Please, NHL. Stop this.

Meanwhile, at the H.P. Pavilion, Greg Kihn sings the national anthem! Well played, San Jose. Well played.

Special prosecutor Richard Peck was appointed by Attorney General Wally Oppal last year to submit a legal opinion on polygamy.

Section 293 of the Criminal Code prohibits "any form of polygamy [or] entering into a conjugal union with more than one person at the same time." The maximum penalty is five years in prison.

But Mr. Peck found the law likely would not survive a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the ground it infringes the constitutional guarantee to freedom of religion.

Mr. Peck found no such thing, and he couldn't have been much clearer about it:

After extensive study of the relevant material, I have come to the conclusion that polygamy itself is at the root of the problem. Polygamy is the underlying phenomenon from which all the other alleged harms flow, and the public interest would best be served by addressing it directly. There is a substantial body of scholarship supporting the position that polygamy is socially harmful. With great respect to those who have given opinions to the contrary, I believe that s. 293 may well be upheld by the courts as consistent with the Charter’s commitment to religious freedom. Religious freedom in Canada is not absolute. Rather, it is subject to reasonable limits necessary to protect "public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." Ultimately, in my opinion, there is a good case for upholding s. 293 as compliant with the Charter.

Indeed, had Peck been predisposed against such an argument, it's unlikely Oppal, who's made quite a show about finally tackling the Bountiful problem, would have sought his opinion. But Mr. Oppal's tough talk has evidently escaped the notice of Adam Yoshida, one of the denizens of the ostensibly less crazy new incarnation of the Western Standard, who believes officially legalized polygamy is on its way to Canadian shores, thanks mostly to liberals. Today, he blogged thusly: "[C]an you really imagine Wally Oppal - or anyone else in this most cautious of Provincial Governments - having the guts to step out and say something like, 'polygamy is wrong, abusive, and runs contrary to our fundamental values.'"

Google doesn't really get along with Macleans.ca all that well. (We're just a little too real, I think.) But for what it's worth, I can certainly imagine Oppal saying something like that, because he said it to me some months ago:

I think right-thinking Canadians can't believe the principle of freedom of religion is absolute, that we would throw away all our other principles in order to abide by that principle. That's the argument that's always raised, that the freedom of religion under the Constitution allows people to go to their own devices, as long as everybody consents, on religious grounds. I just happen to think that there are other issues involved here, such as equality of women, the apparent treatment of women as objects and property, and those are things that I think are intolerable in our society.

This doesn't explain why it took six months, instead of Oppal's predicted one month, for Leonard Doust to reaffirm Peck's original opinion—which is that Oppal should send the anti-polygamy section of the Criminal Code to the British Columbia Court of Appeal (and thence, likely, to the Supreme Court of Canada) as a reference case. It makes all kinds of sense, and I'm not sure why Oppal was leery of it in the first place. But I don't think he's talking tough for squeaks and gigs--where's the benefit in that? I'm still holding out a lot of hope that this truly outrageous situation in the B.C. interior can be resolved, legally anyway, in the relatively near future. Bountiful has been allowed to operate outside the law because the B.C. Attorney-General's office has, in the past at least, been terrified that Canada's human rights framework might deem the community's lifestyle legally permissible. Everyone--polygamists, doctrinaire libertarians, and pragmatists who think legalization might actually improve conditions for women and children--should be able to appreciate how silly that is.

Over the last year and a half, three young adults who have set foot in my house, in the well-to-do, tree-lined Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto, have been murdered.

So begins the harrowing, utterly riveting account of Dan Hill--yes, that Dan Hill--in the matter of his teenage son's habit of befriending extremely unsavoury characters.

Jon Kay writes: "Just about every intelligent person in the country — on both sides of the political spectrum — has sided with Levant and Martin. But not Kinsella..."

Actually, Warren Kinsella sides with Ezra Levant to a pretty significant degree:

The problem, here, is that human rights commissions have the power to dismiss frivolous and vexatious complaints speedily - and they haven't been using it. … They needed to establish a reasonable threshold for jurisdiction, and that they didn't do.

And that's what pisses me off the most about this ongoing debate. I'm sure, pace Kay, that there are intelligent people who don't want to carve Section 13(1) out of the Human Rights Act, as Liberal MP Keith Martin has proposed. But there's near consensus among reasonable people that the human rights complaints against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn shouldn't have gotten even to the preliminary stage they're at. Despite that consensus, Martin has been fairly widely accused of facilitating Canadian Neo-Nazism—including, implicitly, in this frankly disgusting CP story—simply because he proposes a more radical solution to the problem than Kinsella does.

Actually, I'm not sure I've seen Kinsella or Levantsteyn's other opponents really propose a solution to that problem at all. Kinsella, for one, just seems to prefer the status quo because the Criminal Code prohibitions against hate speech are so infrequently used that they "may as well not even exist"—that is, they offer insufficient protection to the Canadians who ostensibly need it. But that's glossing over a different problem, surely. Look at what happens when they do get used. David Ahenakew was found "guilty of wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group to wit people of the Jewish faith," and yet his punishment was a measly $1,000—next to nothing, but even the prosecution was only asking for twice that. Why? So as not to make him a "martyr for bigots and racists," in the words of the judge. That's spectacularly self-defeating even before you consider the guy's now looking down the barrel of yet another trial. I'm quite sure media will be in attendance, and that Stormfront will stand in solidarity.

Of late, I've heard a lot of reasonable members of Team Smart ask, more or less, "can't they all lose?" They see Steyn and Levant as politically objectionable and terribly intemperate adherents to a "war of civilizations" philosophy that's totally foreign to them, as it is to me. And they see Kinsella, as I do, as a talentless, preening bore. Meanwhile, Team Right and Team Left are busy caricaturizing the players involved, the better to cheer for or against them. Ezra's caricature is most notable. He's clearly enjoying himself, after all; ergo, to Team Right, he's a freakin' rock star, while to Team Left he's a big old bully, which is further evidence there's nothing to worry about here. Oh, and given his penchant for libel suits, he's a hypocrite—to Team Left, perhaps the ultimate sin.

It is ironic that a devotee of one brand of speech chill should portray himself as champion against another. But that doesn't make him wrong about the human rights commissions. What are we, in high school? This isn't about personalities, it's not about political team sports, and it doesn't necessarily even have to be about free speech absolutism. For now, it can and should be about simply this: should Canada's human rights commissions accept complaints about the published word, and, given that they do, what effect does that have on free speech as a general concept in Canada?

So, then. The inconvenience Steyn and Levant are being subjected to is not earth-shattering in practice or, assuming their cases are dismissed, even in principle. It isn't "persecution" in any non-Canadian sense. (I will note, however, that should these cases not be dismissed, a great many of Steyn's and Levant's detractors will find themselves marooned up Argument Creek without a paddle.) They didn't need to lawyer up. And they don't need to fly across the continent to show up in person; they could just send a letter. But they shouldn't have to do that either, say their supporters, and however benign the process, it's a ridiculous intrusion and it will have an inevitable if (for now) imperceptible chilling effect on free speech.

I agree. And I agree without even taking the Criminal Code hate speech provisions into account. To me, it simply makes no sense for human rights panels to have jurisdiction over mass publications, and these two cases could scarcely illustrate that better.

When someone is denied a job or an apartment because he's black or gay, it's a question of law. If an HRC finds against an employer or a landlord, it will point to their legally prohibited acts. But those cases are also questions of personal relationships, in which party A has purportedly wronged party B. Mark Steyn simply cannot have wronged Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh and Naseem Mithoowani in any comparable way, most fundamentally because he didn't even know they existed. He didn't address his actions—in this case, his words—to anyone.

The fact that Section 13 is conceptually different from the rest of the Human Rights Act doesn't make it wrong. But to even consider the complaint in question is to admit it might be upheld—and if it were, where would that leave us? People like Rex Murphy have keyed in on the prima facie absurdity of stately old Maclean's possibly running afoul of hate speech legislation. But I'll go you one better: that "article" that so offended Osgoode Hall's finest was a book excerpt. If the text is harmful in Maclean's, it's harmful everywhere. But there's no conceivable remedy. There's thousands upon thousands of copies of that book all over Canada on bookshelves and in bookstores and public libraries. Canadians would have been free to publish, distribute, sell, buy and read it—but not to excerpt it. It's absurd.

The Western Standard's decision to publish the Mohammed cartoons is similar in some ways—the material in question existed in thousands of different places around the world before Levant decided to reprint it. But in another way, it's even weirder. Consider Levant's justification for running the cartoons: "We're not publishing them for their editorial merits. They're boring cartoons, they're bland. We're not running them because we share their views," he told the CBC (between jabs at the national broadcaster). "We're running them because they're the central fact that caused radical Muslims around the world to riot." Not that he should have had to justify it to anyone, but to me, that's absolutely unimpeachable.

The cartoons were news. This, from the December 14, 2002 edition of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, was also news:

A respected Saskatchewan Indian leader said Friday Hitler did the right thing when he "fried" six million Jews during the Second World War.

In comments one local Jewish leader described as unfortunate, David Ahenakew, a senator with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), a former chief of the organization and a former chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), said in an interview Friday the Nazi leader was trying to clean up the world during the war.

"The Jews damn near owned all of Germany prior to the war," Ahenakew said.

"That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe. That's why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing. They're killing people in Arab countries."
…
When asked how he could justify the Holocaust, Ahenakew said: "How do you get rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going to dominate?"
…
Ahenakew said the Canadian army was trying to liberate the world when it fought in Europe during the Second World War, not liberate Jews. When reminded the Nazis committed genocide against a variety of ethnic and social groups, he said "exactly, they were trying to clean up the world."

"I don't support Hitler. But he cleaned up a hell of a lot of things, didn't he? You would be owned by the Jews right now the world over. Look, a small, little country (Israel) like that and everyone supports them. Who the hell owns many of the banks in the states, many of the corporations? Look at here in Canada. Izzy Asper (chair of CanWest Global, the owner of The StarPhoenix). He controls the media. What the hell does that tell you? That's power. That's f- --ing power."

Ahenakew, who was FSIN chief from 1968-78 and AFN chief from 1982- 85, grew impatient when told non-Jews own media companies, as well.

"The hell with the Jews. I can't stand them. And that's it. I don't want to talk about them."

The Star-Phoenix prints that brand of hate speech and Ahenakew goes on trial. The Western Standard prints the cartoons and it goes on "trial." I'm not saying a human rights commission is the end of the world, or the equivalent of a criminal trial. I'm just saying that makes no bloody sense, and shouldn't happen.

Because I tend towards absolutism on free speech, I have no problem with Martin's motion. Those who wish to keep "hate messages" within the Human Rights Act's purview should probably be focusing on ways to get the HRCs to dismiss these "frivolous and vexatious" complaints—which they admit are a problem—before they get this far. That could have been accomplished without even saying the word "Nazi." But it's a damn sight too late for that.

Is it so outlandish to assert that the same Charter that applies when the military responds to Canadian weather emergencies, such as floods and ice storms, is still relevant when soldiers are deployed outside the country, involved in activity that will, much more readily, lead to imprisonment and loss of life?

Uh... yes? Like, obviously yes? Just for starters, what would A.I. have the peacekeepers it's demanding we send to Darfur do with the baddies they capture? Send them to Kingston Pen?