Jennifer Lynch, QC, 1953-2013 RIP
By mark steyn
The Chief Commissioner of the
Canadian "Human Rights" Commission died two weeks ago. Regular
readers of SteynOnline as far afield as Australia and South Africa will know
her name: Jennifer Lynch, QC ("Queen Censor," as I liked to say) sat
at the pinnacle of the Canadian state's corrupt "human rights" regime
at the time the Canadian Islamic Congress invited it to assist them in
effectively imposing a lifetime publication ban on me in my own country. Her
role in that battle and its outcome was reflected in The National Post's headline upon her passing:
Former Human Rights Chief Dies Months After Commission Stripped Of Mandate To Fight Hate Speech
In the piece,
Jennifer Lynch is reported to have found her unsought moment in the limelight a
little uncomfortable:
Ms. Lynch lamented the "completely unbalanced" discussion in which she was cast as the Queen Censor, or even the Chief Commissar.
How odd to hear
the head of a state agency whose principal purpose is to label citizens -
Racist! Sexist! Homophobe! Islamophobe! - object to being labeled herself. I'm
proud to say I gave her both names, and made a point of referring to her as
"Commissar Lynch" in Canadian media appearances. We never met, mainly
because she didn't want to and went to great lengths to avoid my company.
Nevertheless, we had several mutual friends, who told me that Jennifer was a
decent, well-meaning sort who was simply in a mess not of her making. I don't
doubt it. When the Canadian thought police began their campaign against me and
Ezra Levant, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying,
"You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe
Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this
nonsense." Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a
Conservative government, under a Conservative Prime Minister, with a
Conservative Justice Minister, who had appointed a Conservative to serve as the
very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me: Jennifer
Lynch. Ms Lynch had been Chief of Staff to Joe Clark, a former Conservative
(after a fashion) Prime Minister. But, as a current cabinet minister once remarked
to me, when an incoming Conservative ministry takes over the reins of Big
Government, there are thousands and thousands of positions to fill in the
bureaucracy, and nowhere near enough reliable Conservatives to fill them. So
you find who you can, and the bureaucracy trundles on regardless. As I say
somewhere in After America,
you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life.
Jennifer Lynch, garlanded with every bauble the Canadian state could confer
(the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal, etc), was the sort of person a government
turns to fill all these posts. I'm sure she was decent and well-meaning and
pleasant and likeable, but she put her fine qualities in the service of a
squalid and corrupt regime whose practices could not survive the light Ezra and
others shone on them.
Even from a
distance, I grew inclined to accord her less respect as our battles wore on.
Had I found myself in her position, I would have recognized that it was
indefensible and liquidated the problem by taking the lead on the abolition of
Section 13. Instead, she embarked on her disastrous campaign for a
"balancing" of rights. "I'm a free speecher. I'm also a human
rightser," she told The
National Post, as if it were a finely nuanced trade-off between two rights.
But it's not: "Free speech" is a right the citizen is free to
exercise against the state; contemporary "human rights" are
pseudo-rights that the state confers on those citizens who meet its approval.
Aside from the intellectual dishonesty, Ms Lynch practiced a more basic kind,
forever calling for a "balanced debate", while declining ever to
engage or even be seen with anybody on the other side. She, Ezra and I all
wound up testifying
to Parliament, but she insisted not only that our
appearances had to be entirely separate, but at least a week apart - so that we
would not even be in the same news cycle. It didn't work. In my own testimony,
I mischievously quoted as a great crusader for free speech Michael Ignatieff,
then the Leader of the Liberal Party. Ignatieff was only one of many prominent
Liberals who declined to come to Commissar Lynch's aid in her hour of need.