Complaint to the British Columbia Press Council

FREE SPEECH

They're lining up to lodge complaints about columnist

Businessman's allegations of hate incitement added to human rights file on Doug Collins

By Les Leyne
Times Colonist staff

A Victoria businessman has joined the list of people taking a controversial North Vancouver columnist to tribunals over his views on the Holocaust.

Harry Abrams has filed two complaints with the Human Rights Council over the writings of Doug Collins in the North Shore News. The complaints cite the new section in the Human Rights Code introduced by the New Democrat government in 1993 that make it an offence against the code to expose a person or group of persons to hatred or contempt. Abrams has complained that Collins has incited hatred and contempt against Jews and also against Iranians, Chinese, Sikhs and Japanese.

The Canadian Jewish Congress filed a similar complaint against Collins. All three complaints are caught in the backlog of cases at the Human Rights Council, but Abrams said Tuesday they have been accepted for investigation.

Abrams, who runs an advertising company, said if multiculturalism is accepted as a basic premise of society, then "we are going to be compelled to enforce legislation remedying incitement of ethnic hatred and violence."

He also cited in his complaint a defunct Victoria weekly which once carried Collins' writing. The veteran writer's column has also been circulated on the Internet on a far-right, white supremacist web site.

Collins has also been called before the B.C. Press Council by retired professor Lionel Kenner. (Not the Canadian Jewish Congress, as reported Tuesday).

Kenner has submitted a detailed critique of sources Collins relied upon in a series of columns disputing the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and is demanding a censure against the newspaper for publishing deliberate lies. The hearing is scheduled for Monday in Vancouver.

North Shore News editor Timothy Renshaw denied the claim and said he is running a community newspaper, "not an organized conspiracy."

"He [ Collins] has a right to express his views."

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