Alberta Law Society's Crazy Shielding of the Crazy Alberta Human Rights Commission

The Law Society of Alberta has commenced disciplinary proceedings against Ezra Levant over his comments in a newspaper column about the Alberta Human Rights Commission and about another lawyer, Arman Chak.

In a 2014 column titled “Next stop, crazy town,” Mr. Levant wrote that Mr. Chak, a prosecutor with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, supports “a global, international Muslim super-state” known as the “ummah.” Mr. Levant quoted Mr. Chak as having allegedly diminished the gravity of the genocide and rape perpetrated in 1971 by the West Pakistan military, which killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 people, and raped between 200,000 to 400,000 Bangladeshi women. Mr. Levant stated that Mr. Chak wrote in Pakistani Link magazine: “I look at the events in the context of the fundamentals of an Islamic State and its Muslim identity. Regardless of what West Pakistan did to East Pakistan, the latter’s alliance with India makes the creation of Bangladesh one of the worst examples of the dis-unification of the Muslim Ummah in contemporary history.”

If this quote was not accurate, Mr. Chak could have sued Mr. Levant for defamation. Instead, Mr. Chak filed a complaint with the law society, claiming that Mr. Levant’s comments were in violation of the lawyers’ Code of Conduct, as “inappropriate and unbecoming” for a lawyer...