Five Elephants and a Gorilla

24 June 2007 - In its handling of environmental sensitivities, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is ignoring five elephants and a gorilla.

The first elephant CHRC managers are invisibilizing is by far the best fed. It is the reverse onus that presumes that people with sensitivities, alone, are not credible witnesses to repeated circumstances without validation, that this reverse onus should be adopted on this subject, alone, in clinical medicine, along with a Laingian denial of having adopted it. Instead of defending human rights, the CHRC is betraying the most basic and necessary right there is. Officials presume a reverse onus and then lead the discussion as if everyone else, including clinicians, should subject patients to a reverse onus as well. As Health Canada and the Commission have known since the 1980's, until this basic reverse onus is dealt with, the most serious abuses will continue.

The second elephant the CHRC is ignoring is the actual clinical, scientific and social history of people with sensitivities, which still exists despite the revisionist versions the CHRC has published. This history includes not only hundreds of years of scientific and clinical information, but also previous Canadian government action, and efforts to accommodate in dozens of countries, including Canada, by thousands of institutions over decades. It includes legally obligating methods of diagnosis that have been publicly insured since there has been health insurance in Canada.

The third proboscidian in situ is the child of ignoring the first two proboscidea, the mounting damages, in hospitals, through injuries, through suicides, in the public, private and social costs of continued abuse.

Then there is the black-and-white-and-read-all-over elephant, the public record and the people who know that the record does not support the CHRCs revisionisms.

The fifth and final elephant is public concern about governance. Thousands of Canadians are injured or killed, ploughed under and suicide, while public officials continue to invisibilize.

The CHRC is also ignoring a gorilla. She will eventually get their attention.