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THE DISASTER AT THE FEDERAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

It is common knowledge that the federal Human Rights Commission promotes only the prejudicial special interest viewpoints of its administrators and Commissioners. Certainly, the Commission has never exhibited the slightest tendency to be impartial in its decisions. Despite the clear wording of the Human Rights Act, "justice", as defined by the Commission, depends solely on from which side of the political spectrum the complaint arises.

If that were not sufficient for shutting down this obsolete institution, there is yet another valid reason to disband the Commission, which came to light only last January. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has uncovered the fact that the Commission is in a financial mess. Who knew? According to the annual estimates for the 2002 - 2003 fiscal year, placed before Parliament, the 220-employee Commission was given an operating budget of $17.9 million. However, by way of secretive "adjustments" and "ad hoc supplementary and contingency" payments, the federal government has bumped up the budget for this agency in 2002 - 2003 to $25.6 million - all without Parliament's knowledge or consent. It is not known how much of the Commission's overruns have thus been secretly covered over the years by the government, but the Public Accounts Committee believes that it runs into millions of dollars.

These secretive payments to the Commission are especially disturbing because, in 1998, the Auditor General, Denis Désautels, issued a scathing report on the Commission, calling it inefficient and cumbersome. He also accused the Commissioners of empire-building. Most damning of all, however, was the accusation by Mr. Désautels that the Human Rights Commission was failing to resolve complaints either efficiently or impartially. Yet the Commission did nothing to straighten out the problems after this report. In fact, the senior executives on the Commission gave themselves a performance bonus that year!

The Commission hit rock bottom in 2001 when it faced both an unprecedented turnover in staff, and a workplace survey that found employees were highly demoralized because of the ineptitude of management. (See Reality May/June, 2001, pp. 16 and 17.)

The head of the Commission, Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay, under whose watch both the performance bonuses were awarded and the chaos at the Commission was exposed, quickly retired and was replaced in August 2002 by an experienced senior public servant, Mary Gusella. To date, this appointment does not seem to have done much good. The Commission is still knee deep in controversy and mismanagement - propped up by the government's secret attempts to bury the problems by way of doling out more money to it.

The Public Accounts Committee, which uncovered this mess, issued a unanimous report on January 30, 2003, calling on the government to immediately cut off any further "special" funding for the Commission until its administrative problems are fixed. Several of the MPs on the Committee, including Liberal MPs such as John Bryden (Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Aldershot) and Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain), called for the Commission to be shut down. An excellent idea.

The Commission was established 25 years ago and, according to Liberal MP, John Bryden, "… the world has changed and it's not the same climate as it was socially when the Canadian Human Rights Act was passed." He is absolutely right. Canadians are fed up with funding such irrelevant, self-serving agencies, whose role is to force the public into thinking and saying only politically correct thoughts, in addition to lining the pockets of the special interest Commissioners who operate the agencies.

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