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This bombshell makes a mockery of the federal government’s 2013 move to end scrutiny of Internet speech in abolishing Section 13 of the Human Rights Act. Most worrisome, if made law, the bill would allow the Quebec Human Rights Commission (QHRC) to pursue websites it deems disrespectful to Islam.

This would put in the crosshairs, for example, the useful online publication Point de Bascule, which has for many years assiduously and with meticulous annotation, connected significant behavioural dots linking Muslim Brotherhood operatives to what is known in anti-Islamist parlance as the “stealth jihad.” (The biggest losers, if pointdebasculecanada.ca were to be censored, by the way, would be CSIS and Homeland Security in the U.S.)

The site’s publisher, Marc Lebuis — a source and a friend — who delivered a blistering denunciation of Bill 59 early in the hearings, is well placed to criticize the double standards inherent in tribunals fixated on combatting hate. In 2008, as an experiment (for Lebuis hates speech codes, but wanted to provoke public discussion on free speech), he filed a complaint with the federal HRC against a Salafist imam whose writings excoriated Jews, praised beheadings, lauded the executions of gays and called for violent jihad. As he had anticipated, the HRC declined to hear the case.

The QHRC would doubtless exercise the same willed blindness to hatred spewed by Islamists under an activated Bill 59.

The QHRC would doubtless exercise the same willed blindness to hatred spewed by Islamists under an activated Bill 59. Its driver, QHRC director and top constitutionalist Jacques Frémont, is consumed with the alleged, but unproven, scourge of Islamophobia in our society. In a speech broadcast by Radio-Canada on Dec 2, 2014, Frémont explained he planned to use the requested powers to sue those critical of certain ideas, “people who would write against […] the Islamic religion,” but did not add “or any other religion.”