In Canada, reviewing a fictional book can be considered evidence of a hate crime.

Mark Steyn, who is currently being brought up on hate speech charges by an extrajudicial government arm inappropriately called a “Human Rights Commission,” once reviewed a novel depicting a future in which America succumbs to Sharia law by the year 2040.

Steyn’s description of the book’s plot points is now being cited as evidence of “blatant Islamophobia,” to which he responds:

But the plaintiffs, and presumably the "human rights investigators" to whom they took their complaint, apparently believe that describing the plot of a novel should be actionable. I wonder how, say, Margaret Atwood feels about that. A few years back, she wrote her own dystopian theocratic fantasy about an America renamed the Republic of Gilead and under the thumb of a Falwell-Schlaflyesque Christian tyranny. What's to stop a Christian group taking a doting Atwood reviewer - or maybe the author herself - to a Canadian "human rights" kangaroo court? C'mon, you leftie novelists, what do you think there’ll be left for you to write about once the plot of a work of fiction becomes a recognized “hate crime”?

Of course, the “leftie novelists” probably aren’t worried. They’re in on the joke, and they know that hate speech laws will never be applied to them as long as their invective is directed at the right targets.