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.

With nearly 190 million downloads per month, Joe Rogan is arguably the world’s most popular podcaster. Yet employees of the streaming platform Spotify want to exert editorial control over his show. Josh Dehaas looks at the rise of censorship of social media and Big Tech’s banishment of people who hold certain views.

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?” asked Abraham Lincoln. “Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”  Alas, it appears that Mr. Lincoln was in error. As the enlightened among us now know,  a tail is a leg — provided, of course, the dog says it is a leg. Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, looks at the bizarre case of Johnathan Yaniv, a transgender male. Yaniv is arguing before the B.C. Human Rights Council that female beauticians who refuse to perform a Brazilian wax on his male genitalia are violating “her” human rights.

Jessica Yaniv, the self-described B.C. transgender activist, was in the news again recently, the RCMP searching her Langley, B.C. apartment after she brandished a prohibited weapon during an online debate. Yaniv, you may recall, is seeking redress from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal after more than a dozen female aestheticians refused to perform a Brazilian Wax on her (his?] male genitalia. Yaniv’s claim appears preposterous. Yet as Patrick Keeney explains in this thoughtful essay, framing public morality exclusively in terms of human rights ushers in a certain logic, one which suppresses personal responsibility and allows any human desire to be transformed into a moral claim.