Tim Hudak, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, made a pledge during his leadership campaign to get rid of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. He called the Tribunal an “increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracy”, and under the stewardship of current Premier Dalton McGuinty has “advanced nuisance claims and denied justice to legitimate complaints.” Hudak proposed that the OHRT be disbanded and human rights cases tried in real courts with specially trained judges.

Many at the time recognized that the pledge was aimed to earn the support of a particular faction of the Ontario PC party, namely fellow leadership candidate Randy Hillier and his supporters. Now that he is approaching a general election as the leader of the front-running party, Hudak has suddenly started to sing a different tune.

Instead of scrapping the Tribunal, he now says he will fix it in such a way that the backlog is reduced, and a means by which frivolous cases can be dismissed early in the process. He declined to give any details as to how he would do this.

While many in Ontario are dismayed at the leader’s backtrack, most will agree that this retraction was a predictable political decision. The PC party wants desperately to avoid a repeat of the last election, in which they were hammered on a social policy pledge to extend the funding that Catholic schools currently enjoy to non-Catholic religious schools. They can ill afford an election showdown over a powderkeg like the Human Rights Tribunal.

This is a disappointing, but pragmatic move for the leader of any party. The time may not yet be right for a federal or provincial leader to campaign on sweeping changes to the abusive and dysfunctional human rights apparatuses. There have been too many political land mines planted around them, threatening to blow up any politician who dares a headlong charge.

To give an example, consider the decision to shut down the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s satellite offices in an effort to consolidate services and increase efficiency; a decision that was actually made by the CHRC itself with no input from the government. The overall budget was never reduced, but yet the Harper minority government was savaged in the media by its political opponents for allegedly gutting the CHRC and “attempting to destabilize human rights organizations”. This kind of coverage is not what any political party needs in the middle of an election campaign.

But we at Stand Up For Freedom are looking for leaders and representatives to begin defusing these land mines. Sitting governments have a role to play in this, but government backbenchers and those in opposition are in the best place to be exposing the problems with the human rights apparatus and demanding legislative changes. Strong voices that stand up for our fundamental freedoms are urgently needed in our parliament and provincial legislatures.

For sitting governments, there are paths to real reform that don’t involve electoral suicide. Just as fiscally conservative governments don’t campaign on service cuts but nevertheless enact those cuts early in their mandate to balance the budget, it may be wise to leave the HRC’s off the agenda until after the election is over. As an example, The BC Liberal Party did away with their province’s particularly galling Human Rights Commission early in their first term in power.

Likewise, the Brad Wall government in Saskatchewan did not campaign on radical changes to their province’s human rights system, but after winning the election engaged in extensive consultations with many stakeholders on how to move Tribunal hearings to real courts with proper procedures and rules of evidence. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government made some much-needed reforms to the provincial system in 2006, for which he was not spared the wrath of activist groups. Minor reforms to the current system are still better than the status quo.

Another strategy is to take an incremental approach. Stephen Harper has not signaled any intention to date of reforming the federal Act. But after winning the election, prominent Tory Jason Kenney remarked on Sun TV’s The Source that an effort by the government to reword or repeal the infamous Section 13 was “a definite maybe”.

There are a small number of Canadians who will defend the human rights system because they stand to benefit immensely from it. Those minds will never be changed. But there are a great many others who see the Commissions and Tribunals as a necessary evil to combat a much greater evil. For those, it is incumbent upon us all, elected representatives included, to make it known that the inherent problems of the cure pose dangers that far outweigh the disease.