Canadian Human Rights Tribunal an extortion ring, says ex-chair

By Karine Keyser —

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal was set up to crack down on discrimination at jobs, education, housing. They also intensified enforcement against hate speech.

But now the former national chairman, David Thomas, calls it “a state-funded extortion ring.”

A former school trustee in British Columbia, Barry Neufeld, was fined a whopping C$750,000 penalty for objecting to LGBT-related content in the school curriculum.

In 2006, conservative firebrand Ezra Levant republished Danish cartoons of Mohammad that sparked riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Nigeria and Somalia and the deaths of 200 people worldwide. The tribunal questioned him, and Levant had to spend C$ 100,000 to defend himself.

“The vast majority of Canadians oppose the kind of discrimination that such tribunals were originally designed to remedy,” says Thomas. During his tenure as federal tribunal chair 2014-’21, he says, “Some cases had merit. But at many times, I felt like the agent of a state-funded extortion ring, my job being to persuade innocent parties to pay money to avoid further pain.”

Many of the cases were “absurd,” Thomas says.

While Canadians widely opposes discrimination and hate speech, they are rankling against the egregious fines being levied and the unfairness of the process, which includes low entry barriers for complainants and high costs for respondents.

“We were no longer getting buy-in from large swathes of the Canadian public,” Thomas says in Quillette.

The CHRT was founded in 1977 as a quasi-judicial administrative body that adjudicated complaints of discrimination regarding race, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability and pardoned criminal conviction. There are provincial and territorial tribunals, as well as the federal one.

The original purpose was to protect Canadians who’d been denied housing, basic services and employment because of their immutable characteristics. But the recent judgment against Neufeld “illustrates the degree to which the system appears to have been captured by ideological special interests,” Thomas says.

“The decision (has) potential to chill free speech in Canada,” Thomas says.

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