Originally meant – and heavily marketed – as a low-cost, accessible means to protect the fundamental rights of individuals, Canada’s human rights commissions and tribunals have become a dangerous farce. Ruling on everything from workplace disputes to getting bumped from an airport lineup, they’ve degenerated into a means for the easily-offended to seek vengeance. That is when they’re not undermining the essential Charter-protected rights of all Canadians at the behest of aggrieved members of designated identity groups. Surveying recent decisions from across the country and interviewing experts on the front lines, Lynne Cohen considers what has gone wrong with Canada’s human rights industry, and how to fix it.

Concerns over Canada’s eroding free speech rights were eased when the Justin Trudeau government’s Online Harms Act died with the prorogation of Parliament. But this is no time to relax, writes Morrigan Geleynse. The authoritarian impulse to criminalize more and more types of speech still animates Canadian governments. As Geleynse explains, the threat stems from the rise of “legal positivism”, a doctrine that strips morality and higher authority from the time-honoured link between human purpose, individual rights and written law. The solution lies in rediscovering the wisdom and advice of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of history’s greatest and most humane thinkers.

Human rights: we all have some, although many of us apparently want ever-more of them. Although they’re written into constitutions, they seem to be changing all the time. Activists demand new rights, human rights tribunals and courts discover or invent new ones almost out of thin air, and politicians are quick to take credit for granting or defending them. But where do human rights actually come from? And what are they based on? Patrick Keeney provides a timely reminder of Christianity’s essential role in providing the key ideas that established human rights, leading the Western world out of its darkest times, shaping a singular worldview and providing a priceless bequest for all humanity.