http://www.reason.com/news/show/133221.html
What the hells' going on up there in Canada?Ezra Levant wrote:...Eight months passed.
The AHRCC offered to set up a “conciliation meeting” with Soharwardy and representatives from the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, which had filed an almost identical complaint. I told the commission there could be only one form of “conciliation” that I would accept: that these complainants reconcile themselves to Canadian values and leave their Saudi-style approach to free speech overseas. The AHRCC’s next move was to offer me a plea bargain: It told Tom Ross, my lawyer, that if I agreed to publish an apology in the magazine and pay a few thousand dollars to the complainants, I could walk free. I replied that I would fight the AHRCC and its hijackers all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court before I did that—and even if I lost there, I’d contemplate doing jail time for contempt of court before apologizing.
One year after I had rejected the commission’s terms of surrender, it told Ross it was launching a formal investigation. I was to present myself to a “human rights officer” to be interrogated about my decision to print the controversial cartoons. If I refused the AHRCC’s “invitation” to be interrogated, its officers, under Section 23 of the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, could enter my office and seize any “records and documents, including electronic records and documents, that are or may be relevant to the subject matter of the investigation.” Computer hard drives, confidential files, private correspondence, even letters between me and my lawyer could be seized, all without a search warrant. Section 24 of the act allowed AHRCC employees to ask a judge for permission to enter my home and take whatever they liked there, too. ...
When I got home, I watched the video of the interrogation. Then I spent the weekend uploading clips onto the Internet, using the video site YouTube. I emailed a couple of dozen friends, relatives, and colleagues about them. I thought the clips would get 1,000 views, maybe 10,000 at most. But that weekend, my “channel” on YouTube was the fifth-most-watched video site on the Internet. Within 10 days, 400,000 people had seen them....
In short, the Internet saved me. In that sense, my story isn’t just about free speech. It’s also about the way new technology has leveled the playing field between big government and private citizens.
An earlier review of "Shakedown" is here
