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Lubomyr Prytulak (UKAR) to Sherri Helgason (CHRC)
10-May-2004
The Sherri Helgason 07-Apr-2004 letter which occasioned the reply below can be found at www.ukar.org/chrc/chrc06.html

  10 May 2004

Sherri Helgason
Director, Investigations Branch
Canadian Human Rights Commission
344 Slater Street
Ottawa, ON    K1A 1E1


Re: CHRC File no. 20031527


Dear Ms Helgason:

Thank you for your letter dated 07-Apr-2004.

The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) complaint dated 27-Nov-2003 contains quotations � occupying 2.85 kb of computer memory � of Ukrainian Archive (UKAR) material.  Under the heading "remedy sought," though, the CJC complaint asks not for the removal of the quoted matter, but rather for "the removal of this web-site from the Internet."  However, the UKAR web site presently occupies 213,020 kb of memory and addresses a wide range of subjects, many of them unrelated to the snippets quoted by the CJC; for example, UKAR includes an entire book on scientific method, Companion to Correlation, at www.ukar.org/corr/corr02.html.  A question before the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), then, is what obligation it has to evaluate the contents of the approximately 213,017 kb that the CJC has not quoted but wants suppressed.  The UKAR position is that the CHRC is under an obligation to know the nature of all the material that it is being asked to suppress, and thus has an obligation to acquaint itself with the entire UKAR web site, all 213,020 kb that are available today, and all material that will be added between today and the date of any future decision to suppress.  All material published from December 2003 to the present is particularly relevant, being written with its pertinence to the CJC complaint in mind.  The alternative of the CHRC contemplating the suppression of a vast quantity of material that it has glimpsed one one-thousandth of one percent of (that's what 2.85/213,020 equals) is unconscionable and unprecedented, and will not survive scrutiny.

As all this relevant material is as available online to CHRC staff as it is to Lubomyr Prytulak and to the CJC and to everybody else in the world, there seems no point, and prohibitive expense, in reproducing it in hard copy and mailing it.  Therefore, to your statement "you are welcome to make any submissions you wish to the investigator involved in the processing of the file in which you are the Respondent," Prytulak replies that he considers all correspondence mailed to all CHRC representatives to be under submission in relation to File #20031527, and that he considers all 213,020 kb of UKAR to be under submission as well, and that he particularly considers all material published on UKAR Dec 2003 and onward to be particularly under submission.  On the possibility that it may prove helpful to the CHRC, Lubomyr Prytulak encloses with the instant letter a CD which holds the entire UKAR web site.  And on the principle that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) is without jurisdiction to suppress documents unread, the CHRC may wish to be notified of each new document published on UKAR, for which purpose it should supply Prytulak with a CHRC email address to which such notification can be sent.

You state that Mr. Richard Warman � whom Lubomyr Prytulak expressed concern about in his 20-Dec-2003 letter to Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) Chief Commissioner Mary M Gusella, Concerned About Richard Warman www.ukar.org/chrc/gusell01.html � is not CHRC lead counsel on Internet prosecutions.  It would assist Prytulak in testing the reasonableness of his apprehension of Canadian Human Rights Commission bias

Among the first questions that such information might begin to answer is the degree to which CHRC hate-message staffing reflects Canadian demographics, and the degree to which CHRC hate-message personnel might be viewed as carrying out the agendas of the ethnic-national-religious groups of which they are members.

You state that Lubomyr Prytulak comments concerning Mr. Simon Wiesenthal are outside the purview of the Commission; however, if a respondent Jew (whom the Commission was investigating for hate messaging) complained of a Palestinian CHRC counsel having his and his family's trip to Paris paid by Islamic Jihad, the CHRC would not brush aside the respondent Jew's apprehension with the comment that the Islamic Jihad was "outside the purview of the Commission."  Furthermore, you do not address the question of whether it is ethical for a CHRC lawyer to receive substantial benefits from any business or political organization, whether it is an organization connected with Mr. Wiesenthal or not.

You state that Mr. Richard Warman's personal litigation is not conducted on behalf of the Commission; however, if Mr. Warman litigates against the same individuals as are targetted by the Commission, this would be symptomatic of the lack of impartiality of his CHRC work, and would bring the administration of justice into disrepute by projecting the impression that he was supplementing government persecution with his own.  A more convincing statement of the irrelevance of Mr. Warman's personal litigation to his employment at the CHRC would be that there has been no overlap between the respondents targetted by the CHRC and by Mr. Warman.

You state "I would like to assure you that every complaint received by the Commission is dealt with on a case by case basis, consistent with the principles of thoroughness and neutrality"; however, you do not report whether CHRC thoroughness and neutrality have ever been tested by a Ukrainian or a German or an Arab lodging a complaint of hate messaging published by a Jew.

You state that the CHRC allocation of resources is equitable; however, the question of CHRC prejudice and discrimination would be better answered by evidence than by unsupported assertion.  Specifically, in two letters to CHRC Chief Commissioner Mary M Gusella, Lubomyr Prytulak has requested disclosure of funding allocation which would permit the testing of the hypothesis that CHRC support of Jewish complaints of hate messaging exceeds support of Ukrainian or German or Arab complaints of hate messaging by a ratio in the order of a million to one:

09-Jan-2004  Urgent call for disclosure of usage statistics and personnel data   www.ukar.org/chrc/gusell02.html

13-Jan-2004  Muslims are targets of hate propaganda too   www.ukar.org/chrc/gusell03.html

If the awaited CHRC data should be discovered to support the hypothesis of inequitable funding, and if it were further established that Ukrainians and Germans and Arabs and others are more often the targets of hate messaging than are Jews, then the incongruity of allocating almost all CHRC hate-messaging resources to those who need them least would support a presumption of bias and would raise the question of whether the CHRC hate-messaging unit was Canada's leading practitioner of ethnic-national-religious discrimination.

A plausible explanation of the CHRC discriminatory funding hypothesized above views it as resulting from a spontaneous, unorganized boycott:

  1. The heavy reliance on the CHRC hate-messaging unit by the Canadian Jewish Congress projects the image that the CHRC works as an arm of the CJC toward the goal of suppressing criticism of CJC leadership, which image leads to a boycott of the CHRC by groups such as Ukrainian-German-Arab out of their reasonable apprehension that the CHRC would be incapable of dispensing justice to them.

  2. Another reason that Ukrainian-German-Arab groups may boycott the CHRC hate-messaging unit is that their acquaintance with the receiving end of totalitarian dictatorship makes them distrust and fear any institution like the CHRC which attempts to overthrow the Western tradition of protecting truthful utterance.

  3. But even if the CHRC were impartial, and even if the CHRC did require proof that complained-of statements were false, Canadians who had been educated in a liberal tradition would still find odious and would renounce the CHRC's "familiar Stalinist-fascist doctrine that the State has the right to determine historical truth and to punish deviation from it," to borrow the words of Noam Chomsky speaking of the courts of France.

  4. The hate propaganda that Ukrainians-Germans-Arabs might like to complain of prevails in the press, on radio, on television, and in movies.  However, the hate-messaging provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) § 13(1) appears by § 13(2) to "not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking."  But what is a "broadcasting undertaking"?  If "broadcasting undertaking" refers to newspapers, radio, television, and movies, then the CHRA leaves Ukrainians-Germans-Arabs without recourse for their main complaints.  All that is left to complain of � perhaps � is any web sites that might be unable to lay claim to being "broadcasting undertakings."  CHRA § 13, then, does not aim to block up the giant conduits of hate, it aims to pinch off small web sites.  The beneficiary of the CHRA, then, will never be the victim crushed by the hatred emanating from newspapers, radio, television, and movies, he will be the victim irritated by a web site that not one Canadian in a thousand has heard of.  Who gains from the CHRA, then, is obvious, and it is discriminatory � it will be any group which already dominates the press, radio, television, and movies, but not yet the Internet.  The CHRA, then, is capable of benefitting only the people who already control 98% of the flow of information, and now want to choke off the remaining 2%, as argued by Noam Chomsky: "There�s plenty of racism, but it�s directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real.  Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately.  It�s raised, but it�s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control.  That�s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue.  Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there�s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East."
The four mechanisms above, then, might explain how the CHRC hate-messaging unit comes to be under boycott by Ukrainians-Germans-Arabs and many others.  Such certainly are the considerations which induced Lubomyr Prytulak to not proceed with his complaint of Canadian Jewish Congress hate messaging, and instead take his stand with the boycotters, as announced below:

06-Feb-2004  I join the boycott of the CHRC hate-messaging unit   www.ukar.org/chrc/gusell04.html

The Canadian Human Rights Commission failing to disclose the funding statistics first requested four months ago does little to dissuade the public from supposing that the requested statistics will reveal the CHRC year after year bankrolling the hate messaging complaints of Jews but not Ukrainians-Germans-Arabs, even as it watches everywhere vilified Ukrainians-Germans-Arabs but not Jews.


Yours truly,



Lubomyr Prytulak

cc:

Irving ABELLA, National Honourary President, CJC, Department of History, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON  M3J 1P3
Hon. Irwin COTLER, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, 284 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON  K1A 0H8
Bernie FARBER, Executive Director, CJC, 4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON  M2R 3V2
Mary M GUSELLA, Chief Commissioner, CHRC, 344 Slater Street, Ottawa, ON  K1A 1E1
Paul MARTIN, Prime Minister, Office of the Prime Minister, 80 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON  K1A 0A2
Ed MORGAN, Chair, CJC, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, 84 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON  M5S 2C5
Moshe RONEN, Chair Board of Governors, CJC, 4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON  M2R 3V2
Len RUDNER, Director of Community Relations, CJC, 4600 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON  M2R 3V2
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