Wrongs and Rights

I've finally gotten around to reading Ezra Levant's book Shakedown, which aims to expose Canada's federal and provincial Human Rights Commissions as bloated, self-interested bureaucracies that have drifted a long way from their noble beginnings. I'm only halfway through, but so far Levant's done a good job illuminating both the problems themselves - most notably the idea that the HRCs have a vested interest in sowing societal disharmony - and the reasons why Canadians should be upset about them. I expect the rest of the book to further raise my hackles, if for no other reason than, as I've written before, finding oneself in agreement with Ezra Levant on anything is disconcerting.

I'm already guilty of bestowing too much verbiage on him, but I can't help wondering what Levant makes of the case of Frank Ricci, a firefighter in New Haven, Connecticut who claimed reverse-discrimination when he was passed over for a departmental promotion. On the surface, Ricci made for a sympathetic plaintiff - despite suffering from dyslexia, he studied hard for a written test that was supposed to carry the most weight in the evaluations for promotions and achieved one of the top scores. However, almost no visible-minority candidates scored high enough on the test to receive a promotion, a fact that resulted in the New Haven government, nervous about a politically-correct backlash, changing the promotion criteria after the fact. Ricci was denied his promotion and learned first-hand the terrible injustices that one faces when one is white and male in North American society. 

I kid, of course, but it's true that Ricci was a sympathetic figure. It did in fact seem that his whiteness cost him a promotion that he'd earned, and what's more, the achievement was actually snatched away from him after he'd achieved it. His story was the kind that would make even the most ardent (white) affirmative-action supporter pause. It certainly made an impression on the U.S. Supreme Court (seven white males, one white female, one black male), which ruled in Ricci's favour a couple of weeks ago in a decision that may have grave implications on civil rights law in America.

In Shakedown, Levant makes a convincing case that Canada's HRCs have created an industry wherein both Commission employees and thin-skinned or disingenuous citizens make their living through serial complaining. Most of these complaints, he argues, have little to do with what most people would think of as human rights. In this environment, Ricci would be right at home - it turns out that this blue-collar everyman has no problem suing his way up the employment ladder. What once seemed sympathetic now seems opportunistic. Would Levant champion Ricci as a man of the people who dared to challenge politically correct orthodoxy? Or would he denounce him as a cynical manipulator of a skittish legal system? 

The same question applies to lefties, considering how Ricci and some of the HRC complainants in Canada have ju-jitsued well-intentioned discrimination laws for their own selfish ends. This is all part of a larger debate, one that Levant flicks at in his book when he paints Canada as a country where intolerance is largely a thing of the past. I don't think that's true. But it's possible that affirmative action and HRCs, as they're currently constituted, could be outdated and in need of reform. Otherwise, the future of human rights belongs to professional complainers like Ricci.