The human right to convenient parking

[Urbane]

While some people are being sidetracked by the atrocities of Joseph Kony or the slaughter going on in Syria it's interesting to know that our Ontario Human Rights Commission will be tackling another human right - the right to convenient parking in Ottawa:

Rex Murphy: The human right to convenient parking

Rex Murphy Mar 10, 2012

How does that great warning go again? Oh, yes … “First, I couldn’t get a parking space for my Mazda 5 … And then the horror descended … parking on the street! That passage, of course, taken from the great dystopian novel — A Day in the Life of the Ottawa Commuter.

The Post’s editorialists have weighed in on the Jobean tribulations of Patricia Howson of Ottawa, and her arduous and inventive quest to park her Mazda 5 on her home’s front lawn. She began that quest because parking it in back of her house requires just a little move careful manoeuvring in the lane space that leads to the back than she is comfortable with. She has spoken, I think tearfully, of perils to her side mirrors, possible scrapes on the paint and a potential blistering of the pristine chrome of the door handles.

There should be a sign at the beginning of that laneway, I gather: “Lay off the clutch, all ye who enter here” or whatever is the equivalent for a modern day automatic.

Well, all of us know what a trauma it can be when one or more of your side-mirrors gets dinged. On the scale of oppression and misery it’s even worse than a flailing, about-to-fall-off wiper, and just short of an oil pan leak — milestones of grief and torment both. So, as the Post’s editorial board detailed, and columnist Matt Gurney ever so industriously expanded upon, the much beset Ms. Howson went to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, pleading — obviously — a diminishment of her human rights.

Ms. Howson is herself a former investigator for the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, so she brings to this matter an expertise that only first-hand exposure to the nebulous clouds of current human rights thinking can supply.

I struggle to keep this matter in proportion. Granted, frustration about parking the family Mazda 5 is not perfectly parallel (if that word may be forgiven in this context) with Cambodia under Pol Pot, Ukraine in the perfidious days of the sadist Stalin, China under Mao or the Congo in those days of unspeakable horror when Leopold of Belgium set the world to weeping by his cruelties and brutality.

The municipal regulations of Ottawa are not even, in their various inflictions upon the innocent commuter — as my colleague Gurney so worthily pointed out well before me — strictly speaking, equivalent to the torments of contemporary Syria, with its daily shootings, beatings, detentions and Lord knows what other outrages.

Pamela Howson wants to build a parking pad in front of her Ottawa home, and that doing so amounts to a human right.
Canadians, fortunately however, have a broader understanding of such matters. We begin with the idea that here in Canada, nothing is too small or, on the face of it, too ludicrous to be matter for a human rights complaint. If it keeps up, one of these days shoe polish will be listed as a human right.

Here in Canada, mainly due to the conceptual largesse of the human rights commissions themselves, we’ve been schooled to take a less grim view of human rights. Our human rights codes are more upbeat, something like what Anne of Green Gables might draw up in a whimsical moment. When must you wash your hands? Is it right to heckle? That sort of “basic” stuff.

In Canada recently, human rights have been put through a great experiment. They have become unhinged from any basic understanding of their cardinal meaning, stripped of the aura that we accord our highest aspirations. If the current diluted concept of human rights is grounded in some coherent philosophy, related to a set of first principles, we all await the news of what that philosophy, those principles, might be. It isn’t enough to say that Archbishop Tutu likes the way we do things and leave it at that.

This latest reality-playlet from Ottawa should be satire. None of us, thank God, is born with a Right to Park Where We Want To In Ottawa. That a former agent for one of these commissions considers where her Mazda 5 spends the night a “human right” is, or should be, appalling. That her plight should even be considered under the rubric of human rights demeans the concept. Indeed, I would offer it as an axiom that if a human rights complaint even contains the word “Mazda 5,” someone has stepped off the bridge of reason altogether.

There is a cost to this nonsense. The more ludicrous the claims being made under the human-rights banner, the more the concept itself is stretched and mauled completely out of shape, the more that the real elements of human rights are degraded or forgotten. Human rights are not a sticky post on which you paste the latest silly thing that annoys you.

Canadians have been alerted to the mischiefs — and injustices — being played out in this field for some time now. This latest illustration from Ottawa should be a cue for some action in the matter: a taming of the commissions and a return to a more sane and noble understanding of what is truly meant by our common rights as humans.

National Post

[NAB]

Good one! And ya, most people (particularly the younger ones), don't have a clue as to what constitutes a legal "right". They seem to see so many things these days as a "right", when actually they are nothing more than dreamt up desires and lay opinions. They wave the Constitution and its Charter around like it is some sort of pandora's box of rights, ...when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

Nab

[The Green Barbarian]

The UN has played a big role in this whole "human right" nonsense - every other day they are passing another resolution granting some new issue "human right" status, just so the bleeding hearts out there can bleat "The UN says this is now a human right so the government has to pay for it". Just pure garbage.

[Urbane]

Here are some more details on this "human rights" story:

By Don Butler

OTTAWA — An Ottawa woman is claiming city officials have violated her human rights by not letting her park in front of her house.

Pamela Howson said she has three young children and her vehicle is too wide to easily negotiate the narrow laneway that leads to her backyard parking spot.

In a novel case before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario in Ottawa Monday, Ms. Howson argued that the city discriminated against her on the grounds of family status by not letting her build a parking pad in front of her house.

But city lawyers argued that Ms. Howson has never applied for a minor variance from the city’s committee of adjustment — the body legally able to consider her request — so she actually has never been denied anything.

‘We have a legal parking spot we cannot access due to the circumstances of our family.’ Ms. Howson and her husband have three children, aged one, four and nine. She told tribunal chairman Michael Gottheil that because of her family circumstances, she couldn’t reach the parking spot at the back of her century-old house.

Ms. Howson shares with a neighbour a narrow driveway that varies in width from 2.6 to 2.78 metres. It’s technically possible for her car — a 2.25-metre-wide Mazda 5 — to squeeze through the laneway.

But such manoeuvring is difficult at the best of times and impossible in winter because of snow and ice buildup, she said.

Under the current zoning, front-yard parking isn’t permitted on her street, which is in a heritage preservation district.

However, exceptions can be granted under certain circumstances.

Two years ago, Ms. Howson — a former investigator with the Ontario Human Rights Commission — approached the city to see if it would grant an exemption based of her family’s “special circumstances.”

The city’s refusal “constitutes discrimination on the grounds of family status,” she said.

“We have a legal parking spot we cannot access due to the circumstances of our family.”

Ms. Howson said city officials told her to apply to the committee of adjustment, an arm’s-length panel that considers minor variations to zoning bylaws.

Alain Miguelez, a senior city planner, testified that city officials do not have the authority under the Planning Act to grant exceptions to zoning bylaws. Only city council and the committee of adjustment can do that, he said.

Postmedia News

[FreeRights]

Good one! And ya, most people (particularly the younger ones), don't have a clue as to what constitutes a legal "right". They seem to see so many things these days as a "right", when actually they are nothing more than dreamt up desires and lay opinions. They wave the Constitution and its Charter around like it is some sort of pandora's box of rights, ...when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

Nab

Well, the young people of every generation do this. Young people when these ones are older will do it as well.

People of all ages are ignorant about what our Constitution actually says.

[The Green Barbarian]

Well, the young people of every generation do this. Young people when these ones are older will do it as well.

People of all ages are ignorant about what our Constitution actually says.

Our Constitution says we all have the right to put parking spots on our front lawns? Wow - our founding fathers really were amazing futurists!

[jennylives]

The lady in Urbane's story is lucky. I don't have a driveway and now the city wants to charge me for street parking. It doesn't gaurantee me a spot though. It's not too fun hauling my groceries down the street and up a hill with no path on it, easpecially when there's snow.

[The Green Barbarian]

The lady in Urbane's story is lucky. I don't have a driveway and now the city wants to charge me for street parking. It doesn't gaurantee me a spot though. It's not too fun hauling my groceries down the street and up a hill with no path on it, easpecially when there's snow.

that sucks!

[FreeRights]

Our Constitution says we all have the right to put parking spots on our front lawns? Wow - our founding fathers really were amazing futurists!

What?