Disciplining Canada at the UN

"Canada has a track record of being a human rights leader, at home and around the world. Canada will accept these visits.
"Canada has taken steps to ensure all Canadians can contribute to our economic growth and long-term prosperity. This of course includes Canada's aboriginal peoples."
Joseph Lavoie, spokesperson for John Baird, Minister of Foreign Affairs

Ah, Canada. Proud of ourselves. Of our national temperament, our narrative as an immigrant collective, respectful of one another, with our proud laws enshrining equality between persons irrespective of gender, ethnic origin, religion, ideology -- and more, much more. We are the proud parts of our sum total. A country offering opportunity and fulfilment of individual aspirations.

What's that old proverb, now? Ah, yes: Pride Goeth Before A Fall. We're about to have a fall, a morale collapse, as it were, courtesy of the United Nations in its great and fulsomely powerful influence on the internal moral corruption that exists in countries such as Canada that fail to practise what we preach: human rights.

Educational opportunities open to all and subsidized handsomely by taxpayers. Health care freely and expertly proffered. Social services second to none. Respect for all minorities, visible and otherwise. Laws that guarantee a full measure of justice. We are not too proud, however, to be humble too, about our national accomplishments in the furtherance of human rights.

And prepared and ready for three visits from UN Special Rapporteurs; one on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, another representing the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Ah, those special rapporteurs tasked by the United Nations to survey compliance among member countries.

Some of them must surely be worthy of the titles naming their purpose. Alas, it has been our misfortune to discover that many are simply disgruntled, inexpert and mean-minded individuals with an agenda of their own, one that fits neatly into the general atmosphere prevailing within the United Nations and its creature committees, poseurs of human rights entitlements.

Canada, most certainly, does not present among the fawners and self-abnegators, the deferential, the groveling, adulatory, bootlicking, cringing, ingratiating, obsequious, scraping, spinelessly submissive delegates who bow and scrape and utter the approved phrases of fealty to the bullying of the UN-approved authorities who set out on their mission of outing the non-compliant for their human rights malfeasances.

Take, for example, Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird's uncivil and unabashed statement of rejection of the stance taken by another UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, placing the blame where he believes it should rest for the Boston Bombings, on the activities of the United States and Israel, offensive to the greater Muslim world communities, hence payback.

"Once again, United Nations official Richard Falk has spewed more mean-spirited, anti-Semitic rhetoric. I respectfully call on the United Nations Human Rights Council -- again -- to remove Mr. Falk from his position."

Uh-oh! Respectfully, or -- certainly not -- Canada is in for it, once again. UN special rapporteur Maina Kiai last year listed Canada, along with Belarus, Ethiopia, Russia and Jordan as representative of countries where "the laws are particularly harsh in terms of restricting the freedom of association."