The responsible step

by Kevin Michael Grace

COMMUNIST activist David Lethbridge has a fine new name for his bullies. According to the September 29 Edmonton Journal, “He heads a group called the Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies.” (Would neo-Nazis get respectful media coverage if they styled themselves the “Horst Wessel Institute for Anti-Bolshevist Studies”?)

In an attempt to force cancellation of a meeting of the Canadian League of Rights, Mr. Lethbridge sent a fax to Leduc manager Menaz Rahmani:

“Many other hotels have taken the responsible step of cancelling similar meetings once the nature of these events has been brought to their attention.”

One of these hotels was Edmonton’s Coast Terrace Inn, which cancelled a booking in 1996 after an intervention by Mr. Lethbridge and Alberta Human Rights Commission chief commissioner Charlach Macintosh.

How typically Canadian — businessmen taking moral instruction from a Communist. Could this be the Third Way one hears so much about? 

Alberta Report, along with its sister publication, British Columbia Report, is a weekly magazine published by the Byfield family (of Edmonton, Alberta), and in size and format looks a lot like, say, Maclean’s magazine (or Time or Newsweek). Its ideological orientation is Christian and conservative, pro-business and, on issues regarding free speech, somewhat libertarian.

Alberta Communist functionary David Lethbridge is, with CHBC, in deep trouble, having been ordered by the Canadian courts to pay to Eileen and Claus Pressler damages totalling $70,000 for libelling them in news reports which, inter alia, liked their new home to an “armed military compound.” Eileen Pressler is pursuing further action against Lethbridge in a suit for defamation in connection with an interview he gave to the Creston Valley Advance newspaper.

The traditional enemies of free speech do not like finding themselves sued in the law courts — not one little bit.