We do not need human rights tribunals

David Polansky

Re-printed without permission.

https://thehub.ca/2026/03/16/we-do-not-need-human-rights-tribunals/

March 16 2026

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Back when it was still funny, The Onion ran a very silly story about a disgruntled “office ninja” who brutally slaughters his colleagues after suffering a psychotic break. The story included the particularly amusing detail that one of his victims “on several occasions had questioned the wisdom of having an office ninja.”

This story came to mind recently, following the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal decision to penalize an elected school trustee three-quarters of a million dollars for his vocal criticism of his school board’s gender identity curriculum. For all the understandable focus on this particular decision, not enough people have questioned the wisdom of having a human rights tribunal in the first place.

After all, the purpose of legitimate liberal government is precisely to safeguard individual rights. If it fails to do so, this failure is fundamental and needs to be rectified at the source, not through the appointment of three unelected ersatz philosopher kings. On the other hand, if the rights in question are novel or somehow ambiguous, then assigning authority to those same “expert” adjudicators represents a remarkable abrogation of democracy.

Indeed, on reflection, this is really the true purpose of such a tribunal. Whatever imperfections or inefficiencies may exist in the criminal and civil justice systems, human rights tribunals were not established to compensate for them. They were established in order to identify and de facto legislate hitherto unknown rights and corresponding obligations.

For, rights broadly come in two forms: natural rights, which prefigure established societies, and which all legitimate governments are obliged to respect and safeguard; and civil rights, which are established by some reasonable legislative consensus on the understanding of the value of expanding equality of practice.

For example, life and liberty are understood to be natural rights that exist prior to any established law, and which cannot be restricted without grave cause and due process. Women’s suffrage is a civil right; having created voting institutions, it came to be recognized that there were no good reasons not to extend the franchise to adult women as well as men, and this recognition was made official by, e.g., the ratification of the 19th Amendment in the United States and by an Act of Parliament in Canada, and so on.

Of course, the reality is that there are certain rights that we would not wish to submit to the democratic process. An electoral majority cannot legitimately vote to micturate in the cornflakes of some recognizable minority simply because they got enough votes. In a more serious vein, this question was the crux of the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery in the United States.

The matter is that such rights are limited in scope, and there is a finite number of disputes to be had over such first-order questions, which is why events like the American Civil War do not recur every 10 years or so.

The kinds of rights taken up by the tribunal fall under neither of these categories. That is to say, they do not exist in nature in some way that is foundational to our society; but also, they do not arise from any sort of deliberative consensus among the country’s citizens or their elected representatives. These kinds of rights rather reflect certain unusual or niche beliefs and preferences that, while not necessarily illegitimate, would have been unlikely to enjoy widespread legislative assent.

Hence, the creation of these tribunals was in effect meant to do an end run around certain democratic processes by those who favoured such causes, as well as an abdication of parliamentary responsibility by those members who helped establish them.

Moreover, having now been established for some decades, they have acquired a certain authority simply by dint of precedent. While many may lament or criticize certain individual decisions, it simply does not occur even to them to doubt the validity of the tribunals that issue them in the first place. In this way do citizens cede their democratic prerogatives without even realizing that they are doing so.

Now, it is true that in examining the quality of reasoning in the tribunal decisions, one is not filled with confidence in their discernment. But the real problem is not that flawed reasoning leads to dubious conclusions, but the reverse. That is, the pre-ordained outcome of constricting the sphere of public expression in the service of particular political agendas necessitated the use of whatever logic could have produced these effects.

Thus, anyone who defends the system by invoking the appeals process elides the fact that, as anyone who has ever dealt with the legal system knows, the process itself is part of the punishment.

Similarly, it is true that tribunals do not invariably make wrong decisions: In the farcical Yaniv case, both the Ontario and British Columbia tribunals ultimately dismissed claims that various cosmeticians had violated the plaintiff’s human rights by refusing to wax the genitals of a biological male.

But while the tribunals ultimately made the correct decision in that case, like someone acknowledging that The Beatles are superior to Nickelback, this is not really an opinion for which one deserves credit. After all, the entire business inevitably exerts a chilling effect on future discourse. Even if you knew you’d ultimately be absolved, wouldn’t you take pains to avoid undergoing a costly and painful legal battle? It is the rare person who wouldn’t moderate their speech with an eye toward such examples, which is, of course, precisely part of the purpose of the system.

It must be emphasized, then, that the human rights tribunals and theirrulings represent not so much an excess of liberalism but a violation of it. This is not well understood in a political milieu that basically equates liberalism with the practices of au courant progressivism. But liberalism has an actual meaning, and grasping it correctly is not a mere academic exercise.

For liberalism forms the basis of every existing democracy. And while it is a sufficiently large tent as to accommodate the parliamentary systems of the Commonwealth, Scandinavian models, and the American republic, it is not infinitely roomy. In particular, freedom of expression and disagreement—liberty here being not just a cognate—is a sine qua non for any liberal society.

Such measures not only amount to de facto legislation but legislation in the sense of the term as used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: to shape the mores and habits of a body of citizens so as to fit them for a certain set of laws. That these particular mores and habits and laws ill befit a free people should give anyone pause.

All of this is to say that there is no “good” version of a system like the provincial human rights tribunals. To paraphrase an old bit of political sloganeering: end it, don’t mend it.

David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. Follow him on X, and read him at Strange Frequencies.