Where does political correctness end and actual harm begin ?

Anyone who reads my Web Column and/or blog entries occasionally knows that political correctness is a social phenomenon that I have defined as a mental disease. Unfortunately, Canada is one of the countries most seriously affected by it.

In Canada we have reached the point where it is very hard to pinpoint and name the causes of certain problems truthfully, without facing either a defamation lawsuit or a complaint that leads straight to one of our human rights commissions - that is, if you’re lucky and not actually charged with a hate crime and threatened with time behind bars. (It goes without saying, of course, that those particular consequences are usually only suffered by those who speak the truth about the very people who do most of the hate mongering in this country.)

A few years ago, a then-MP, Jim Pankiw, distributed pamphlets to households in his riding. One contained the slogan “Stop Indian crime !” It was over this slogan that a human rights complaint was filed against Pankiw. The human rights tribunal, however, rejected the complaint, saying that such political pamphlets distributed by a sitting Member of Parliament are not covered by human rights legislation. The original complainant has vowed to ask for an appeal.

For once, a human rights commission in Canada has arrived at a reasonable decision. One of the allegations raised in the complaint was that language like “Stop Indian crime !” would expose all aboriginal people to hate and ridicule. Not true at all. It only means that there is “Indian crime”, but nowhere does it imply that all aboriginals are criminals.

That there is a lot of bad stuff happening on Indian reservations is not new and surprising news. Everyone knows about these things. What Pankiw did was draw attention to the situation but not condemn an entire ethnic group. Calling for “Indian crime” to be stopped should serve as a wake-up call, for everyone, and not as a reason to go running to a human rights commission.

Some First Nations have become fairly successful
 mostly in Western Canada - in business and tourism, for example, and investors from China and South Korea are busy negotiating resource-development deals with Canada’s aboriginals. So, things are definitely looking up, which is all the more reason not to put one’s head in the sand when it comes to such negatives as crime.

It’s like talking about the current gang problem in cities like Vancouver, with Asian gangs being the main culprits. By all rights, Canadians should be shouting from the rooftops “Stop Asian gangs !”. Would that expose all Asians to hatred and contempt and therefore warrant a human rights complaint ? Would the same be true of all the Caribbean gangs in Toronto, too ?

No, of course not. Identifying the main perpetrators of such crimes and violence should never be prohibited. If it were, we might just as well hand our cities over the gangs. In order to tackle a problem, and hopefully find a solution, we must be allowed to properly name the source or causes of the problem - while keeping in mind that, regardless of any such slogans, not all Asians or Caribbeans are criminals. They are merely unfortunate to have those criminals in their midst that are behind the most violent and most heinous crimes committed in Canadian cities.

Some may call that racial profiling, but this type of profiling is a valuable and legitimate tool
 both for fighting crime and preventing terror attacks, for example. After all, it is not our fault that certain ethnic groups create their own enclaves in our cities, with some of their members then engaging in specific criminal activities, or that virtually all terrorism today originates in a very well-known and limited number of countries. To find the culprits, we must know where to start looking.

The only thing where Pankiw did go wrong was in the conclusions he drew : he called for the end of hiring quotas, court sentencing provisions, hunting and fishing rights and tax exemptions for aboriginals. None of that has any bearing on the causes of crime, nor does any of that hold out the promise of fixing the crime problem. So the worst politically incorrect indignity that Pankiw might have inflicted on aboriginals is that he used crime as a front to push another, hidden, agenda - such as wanting to axe aboriginals’ special tax-exempt status. Many people may not agree with his position, but it is hard to see why taxpayers should not be all created equal.

The point, though, is that such arguments can provide ample material for discussions, but they should never give rise to persecution - or prosecution - of any kind.