Jonathan Kay on Marc Lemire, Dean Steacy, and Tuesday's landmark disaster for the Canadian Human Rights Commission

Tuesday's hearing probably won't change the outcome of the case against Lemire: Like a five-star hotel that guarantees its guests full satisfaction, the CHRC provides its handpicked complainants with a 100% success rate on hate-speech cases. Better than that: The Commission actually lets complainants waltz into their Ottawa facilities to fiddle with the evidence-gathering. Ezra Levant, who is presently locking horns with various human-rights agencies over his decision to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons when he published the Western Standard, puts this lack of professionalism in its proper context: "If this were a real investigation of a real crime with real police, and the alleged 'victim' were to walk right into the crime lab, hop on the officers' computers, and poke around the evidence, a judge wouldn't have to throw the case out — prosecutors would be too embarrassed to even bring the case to trial. Not so at the commission."

But even if the CHRC nails Lemire, Tuesday's eight-hour hearing will still be remembered as a landmark disaster for the commission. Despite efforts by Steacy and others to stonewall on specific questions of CHRC procedure, observers were nonetheless able to extract a fairly detailed picture of work practices at the Commission. The impression that emerges is an overstaffed shop in which bored, unionized desk jockeys sit around "investigating" obscure web sites in search of some scrap of actionable hatred. And when they don't find anything actionable, they try to stir things up by logging in and participating under their own house alias — a practice Lemire describes as a form of entrapment.

Great read.