• Taken with permission from the Toronto Star, June 25, 2000
  

ALAN BOROVOY grew up in downtown Toronto in the 1940s, around Grace and Harbord Sts., ``a small, upper working-class island of Jews in a sea of anti-Semitism.'' One of the most memorable moments of his youth was at his bar mitzvah in 1945 when the war was in its last stages and word was filtering out about the horrors of concentration camps.

``With tears streaming down his face, my grandfather talked about the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry, and he admonished me never to forget, and always to protect, my people, '' he recalls.

Following that advice, Borovoy became increasingly convinced that ``the best way to protect the Jewish people was to promote greater justice for all people.''

So the Jewish Labour Committee, where he started working, broadened into combatting discrimination against everyone. That experience led him, in 1968, to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. That's where he has been since, on low pay, far less than what a legal analyst of his brilliance and clarity would make in private practice, and struggling to run the organization on a shoestring budget.

One is hard-pressed to find a more dedicated Canadian soldier crusading against injustice.

In standing up for the underdog, he has battled police, the security establishment, right-wing politicians and religious fundamentalists. But over the last decade, he has been skewering liberals, social democrats and feminists - people found in his own constituency.

He thinks too many of them have strayed too far from the three bedrock principles classical liberals must work from: freedom of expression (and its two corollaries, freedom of the press and freedom of association); equality; and procedural fairness.

The first principle is violated, he says, by restrictive campus speech codes (that prohibit discriminatory statements, as opposed to discriminatory conduct), and anti-pornography and anti-hate laws. To him, all three entail censorship that will rebound in unintended ways.

The second principle gets dented in two areas: by the zealotry of employment equity advocates who do not pay enough attention to avoiding reverse discrimination against white males; and by Jewish, Muslim and other religious groups urging government to fund private schools, a move that, he says, will inevitably weaken public schools, one of the best Canadian instruments for advancing equality.

The third, procedural fairness, gets diluted, he believes, on three fronts: in the rape-shield law that restricts an accused from probing relevant evidence from a complainant's sexual history; in proceedings against Nazi-collaborating war criminals who can, and should, be stripped of their fraudulently obtained citizenships but - and here is his caveat - only after ``a higher standard of proof than merely on a balance of probabilities;'' and, lastly, in the disabled calling for the imposition of maximum sentences, as they did in the case of Robert Latimer, found guilty of killing his 13-year-old daughter to relieve her of agony.

``Mandatory maximum sentences in all such cases, regardless of circumstances, would be inherently unjust,'' he says.

These are tough stands for Borovoy to take against comrades who have been with him in many trenches. But he felt strongly enough to put it all in a book, The New Anti-Liberals (Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.), last year, and discuss them in two recent interviews.

``Extremists among equality seekers are promoting their objectives in contravention of liberal values,'' he says, with a mixture of mischievousness that is his intellectual hallmark and sadness that springs from the knowledge that the criticisms will comfort the right wing.

But he has a higher objective: to convey a key message to his friends. There is a co-relationship, he says, between the excesses of the left and the successes of the right, between ``the contemporary rise of anti-egalitarian conservatism in North America and the excesses committed by equality seekers during the preceding several years.''

The parallel he draws is of the extreme measures taken by Quebec governments to protect the French language that ended up creating a backlash in English Canada.

But, then, how should we get at, say, hate-mongers?

``Go after them in the political arena. Raise hell about what they say. Force them to apologize. Distinguish between those who have standing and those who don't. I didn't think (Ernst) Zundel was worth the effort but (Jim) Keegstra was when he was a mayor and a teacher. But once he was decertified as a teacher and ousted as mayor, there was no point in prosecuting him, and he should have been allowed to wallow in the obscurity he so richly deserved . . .

``We should not censor those making racist statements but censure them. Create an inhospitable climate for their racist invective.''