In publishing the controversial drawings, which continue to spark riots in the Muslim world, Levant?s Western Standard became one of only two Canadian publications to do so. Not long afterwards, Canada's oldest newsweekly, Maclean's, printed an excerpt from the bestselling book America Alone, by their columnist Mark Steyn. The essay explored the implications of Europe's changing demographic profile. As Steyn saw it, below-replacement-level birthrates among native secular Europeans, combined with the high fertility rates of the continent's largely unassimilated Muslim immigrants, was creating a perfect storm on the continent.

This all proved too much for a couple of self-styled Muslim "community leaders," one of whom initially tried to have Levant arrested. Reminded by the Calgary police that they were no longer living in Saudi Arabia, the imam and his Ontario counterpart brought their respective grievances about Steyn and Levant to the closest thing Canada has to an Islamic sharia court: the Human Rights Commission.

Canada's Human Rights Commissions (CHRCs) were established in the 1970s to address case-by-case discrimination in areas such as housing and employment. Initially empowered to investigate legitimate violations, the Commissions and their tribunals soon began using their powers to silence citizens who declined to embrace the new vision of Canada being foisted upon them by then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: multicultural and pacifist; blindly tolerant; anti-tradition, anti-family and anti-life.

So when a Catholic bishop sent out a pastoral letter explaining the Church's opposition to gay marriage, a gay activist filed a CHRC "discrimination" complaint. Similar complaints were filed against letters-to-the-editor and newspaper ads perceived to be "homophobic."

Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."

And few Canadians cared. On the rare occasions that these cases made the news, the average citizen either sided with the complainants over "those old fashioned, bigoted Christians" or took the unmistakable hint and kept quiet.

Most Canadians don't realize that these Commissions and tribunals aren't "real" courts. They operate outside the criminal justice system in an Orwellian world of their own. To the CHRCs, traditional rules of evidence don't apply. Truth is no defense. Commissioners can confiscate a defendant's computer without a warrant. Defendants can be forced to apologize to their accusers, even though the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that even convicted murderers cannot be obliged to apologize to their victim's family; that, the Court ruled, would be, "cruel and unusual punishment."

Incredibly, the CHRCs boast a Stalinist 100 percent conviction rate: no one has ever been found "not guilty." Columnist David Warren's chilling description of CHRC tribunals is impossible to improve upon:

"They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, 'the process is the punishment' in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing. (...)

"That's why you go to an HRC: because your case is not good enough to stand up in a legitimate court of law. And because you don't want to invest your own time and money, but would rather the taxpayer provide officers to do the paperwork, and pick up the tab. Instead, you want