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By Lloyd Mackey
 THIS OttawaWatch will be much shorter than usual, but I hope to make up next week.
In a few minutes, I head off to a two-day conference, here in Ottawa, of the Canadian Christian Relief and Development Association (CCRDA).
The conference theme is 'Keeping the Faith: A Multi-Faith Dialogue on Spirituality and International Development in the Current Global Context.' The conference will, hopefully, be the basis for next week's OttawaWatch, as well as the subject of a news story to appear shortly in ChristianWeek, both the national and Ontario editions.
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It could well be that the CCRDA conference could provide some partial answers to the questions which will have been raised as a result of a media conference that will be in the public domain by the time OttawaWatch readers see this piece.
The Canadian Islamic Congress leaders plan an announcement of a "settlement" of their complaint against Maclean's magazine and one of their columnists, Mark Steyn. It concerns a piece that Steyn wrote several months ago, which, to put it mildly, was quite critical of some aspects of Islam.
The CIC, which represents a small sliver of Muslim thinking in Canada, took its complaint to several human rights commissions. Two weeks ago, Barbara Hall, the Ontario Human Rights Commission chair and left-leaning former mayor of Toronto, declined to hear the complaint pleading jurisdictional inappropriateness. Nevertheless, she lectured Maclean's from on high about its exercise of free speech in a manner that apparently did not impress her very much.
Lost in the shuffle was the fact that some of the law students who joined in the CIC complaint had already tried to withdraw, suggesting that they realized belatedly that "hate speech" should not be heard by human rights tribunals.
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I would agree that human rights bodies have gone too far in believing that they are appropriate bodies to limit the speech or writing of Canadian media.
But I would also agree that it is quite in order for Maclean's, free of the constraints of the tribunal, to work out with the CIC an arrangement which will permit the Islamic group to respond, in print, to some of Steyn's allegations. (Incidentally, some of those allegations were direct and indirect quotes from some of Islam's internal leaders and/or critics.)
I don't know how all this will turn out, but I believe that some Christian organizations operating in Islamic-dominated societies might well be able to shed some light on the issue.
That is why I look forward to reporting on and analyzing what CCRDA people have to say this week in Ottawa.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006) He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
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