Paul Fromm
May 16, on the eve of the Victoria Day weekend, when press coverage will be slight, Athanasios Hadjis of Montreal, the Chairman of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal inquiring into the Warman v. Marc Lemire case, issued two rulings. One turned down the application of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a pro-civil liberties group, to intervene in the Lemire case and to make final submissions backing Mr. Lemire in his challenge of the constitutionality of Sec. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hadjis, who for years has been a close ally of the Canadian Jewish Congress, whom he permitted to join as an intervenor, never disclosed this apparent conflict of interest.
CAFÉ has demanded that he recuse himself from this case on the basis of a reasonable apprehension of bias. His decision to deny Mr. Lemire a potential heavyweight legal ally makes our apprehensions even stronger.
For nearly a year, Hadjis has acted like a man either with fire ants in his pants or a very hot date he’s eager to blow the hearings to run off and see. He seems forever impatient to be done with it. On March 25, he peremptorily announced that the evidence was over.
While a further extension has been granted for written submissions, there is still the outstanding matter of reams of “redacted” – that is, whited out or blacked out – disclosures from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, outstanding material still on its way, and, we suspect, considerable subterfuge correspondence that has not been disclosed. Logically, how can you make your final arguments when all the evidence is not in? Hadjis refusing to plainly order the disclosure of this material.
Still before Hadjis is a CAFÉ motion demanding new hearing dates to call or recall relevant witnesses who have evidence raised by recent disclosures.
Ezra Levant has written a scathing analysis of Hadjis’s decision not to grant the Canadian Constitution Foundation “interested party” or intervenor status in this case for the purposes of final submissions.
Paul Fromm
Director
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
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