A candidate for one of the top jobs at the new Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario told a government committee yesterday he thinks print journalism should be subject to racial discrimination complaints.

Alan Whyte, a veteran employer-side labour lawyer, told an all-party panel vetting the two dozen government nominees that he supports the media's broad freedom to report stories "as they see fit."

"Having said that, if there is some sort of discrimination that comes out in the reporting that is arguably contrary to the code, then I would also feel that it would be open to a complainant to challenge the reporting as being discriminatory on the grounds of race," said the candidate for vice-chair.

His statement seems to contradict a high-profile clarification by Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, in the case of an Islamophobia complaint against Maclean's magazine, that the Ontario Human Rights Code "cannot be interpreted to include the content" of print journalism.

Controversially, Ms. Hall added that OHRC's educational mandate empowered her to denounce Maclean's anyway for publishing Islamophobic articles.

Mr. Whyte was one of four people interviewed yesterday by a panel of five Liberals, three Progressive Conservatives, including the non-voting chair, and one NDP, for nomination to the new Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Under a wholesale restructuring of the human rights legal bureaucracy, complaints will no longer go to the Commission for approval or mediation, but straight to the Tribunal, whose case load is projected to increase.

Not all nominees are to be interviewed in the process that ends on Wednesday.

Lisa MacLeod, who led the Tory questioning, said in an interview she has been inspired by the recent failed human rights case against Ezra Levant and the Western Standard for publishing the Danish Muhammad cartoons.

"I'm of the opinion that even if I don't like what you have to say, I have to accept it. There's lots of times I don't like what I read, but I'm not the judge of that," she said. "I'm having a real philosophical problem with Barbara Hall recognizing freedom of expression and at the same time telling the media what their responsibility is."

"I wanted to call every single one of [the nominees] in, because if we're going to have a human rights system in Ontario, I think we deserve as Ontarians to know what the individual philosophies are of these tribunal members," she said. Procedural restrictions dictated she could not.

The nominees also included Andrew Diamond, a lawyer in the public service. Ms. MacLeod pressed him on whether he agreed with Ms. Hall's statement that "for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level."

Fewer complaints are better, he said, "because it means that as a society, we are treating people fairly and equally, and that members of society don't feel the need to complain about their treatment."

He added that, as a student, he wrote a paper for the philosopher Charles Taylor about "a hate law and where it crosses over. It is the most difficult area, about inciting hatred versus someone's right to say what they feel and think."