Human rights case over article angers free-speech fans

Vancouver

Human rights cases are normally low-key, sedate affairs in Canada.

They take place with little notice or fanfare in small boardrooms, and the issues are mostly personal grievances between individuals.

But bigger stakes were being wagered at a human rights tribunal last week in Vancouver, with issues of Canadian identity, freedom of speech and discrimination converging in a single case.

Supporters of Mark Steyn, a conservative writer, demonstrated in front of the tiny Vancouver Provincial Court building where the hearing was held into an article in the weekly newsmagazine Maclean's that critics said amounted to discrimination against Muslims.

Steyn's supporters voiced their displeasure that the tribunal even had the right to rule on whether Steyn's article, 'Why the future belongs to Islam', constituted a breach of the British Columbia Human Rights Code by encouraging hatred towards Muslims. For Steyn, the magazine and his supporters, the debate is all about freedom of speech.

The 2006 article, which was an excerpt from Steyn's book America Alone, cited basic and uncontested statistics that Muslims have higher birth rates than their non-Muslim counterparts. From that starting point, Steyn went on to his main thesis that an ageing and coddled nanny state in the west was no match for a hungry and youthful Muslim population.