Is Stephen Harper a Conservative?

Betrayed! Stephen Harper’s war on principled conservatism by Connie J. Fournier, Createspace, 2015, pp. 148.

On the feast of Epiphany in the first year of the new millennium, an online forum for the discussion of Canadian political issues from a conservative perspective was launched. Its founders had been Canadian members of Free Republic, a similar message board in the United States, and so naturally, called the new forum Free Dominion. The founders and administrators, Mark and Connie Fournier, gave it the tagline “the voice of principled conservatism.”

Principled conservatism meant a conservatism that consisted of ideas and principles, rather than mere loyalty to the party which calls itself conservative. At the time there were two such parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, which had been formed the previous year in the first stage of a merger between the Western populist Reform Party and the PCs. Stockwell Day was leader of the Alliance at the time but by the end of the year he had resigned and early in the following year Stephen Harper was elected the new leader. In the year after that, the merger between the two parties was complete, and Mr. Harper became leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. In that capacity he served as Leader of the Opposition, then Prime Minister in a minority government, and finally won a majority government in 2011.

This was a triumph for the Conservative Party, for sure, but was it a victory for principled conservatism? Connie Fournier, in her new self-published book, Betrayed! says no, and she has good reasons for saying so. Some of these are personal, pertaining to the persecution she, her husband, and the forum they have put so much devotion into have undergone at the hands of government agencies and employees, all during the Harper premiership. Due to the nature of these injustices she cannot tell her story in full. She cannot, for example, name Richard Warman as the man who is responsible for most of the abuses of the legal system that Free Dominion has faced since shortly after Stephen Harper became Prime Minister. What she does tell, however, is told because it perfectly illustrates how the present leadership of the Conservative Party has abandoned its principles.

When Connie – who I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of years ago when she accompanied her husband, a truck driver by profession, on a run that took them through Winnipeg – speaks of conservative principles, she means the principles that underlay the Thatcherite and Reaganite movements in the United Kingdom and United States respectively, and the Reform Party here in Canada. This set of principles was created by a fusion – to borrow Frank Meyer’s word – of classical conservative views on society and morality with classical liberal views about government and the freedom of the individual. I am more of an unmixed classical conservative – a High Tory – not because I disagree with the ideas of limited, accountable, government and personal liberty, but because I hold strongly to the classical conservative view that these things can only exist in the context of a stable and secure order of established, traditional, institutions. I bring this up to make the point that while what Connie and I would regard as conservative principles are different – in a complementary rather than a contradictory way, I hope – I find her argument that Stephen Harper has betrayed those principles to be compelling and illuminating.

She tells the story of Stephen Harper’s rise to the federal premiership, showing him to have been ruthless in his pursuit of power right from the beginning. From the curious way in which he won the leadership of the Canadian Alliance away from socially conservative Stockwell Day and the heartless way in which he confiscated the party nomination for Calgary Southwest from Ezra Levant to his stacking the party council with his yes men and negotiating the merger of the two parties against the wishes of both parties' memberships, she demonstrates how within his own party he showed the same contempt for the people who elected him as he later would as the country’s Prime Minister.


She takes us through the way he has sold out one segment of the conservative support base after another, starting with the social conservatives who have no one else to speak for them having been told that their views, which were once, and within living memory, the consensus in the land, are now unwelcome, by the other parties. Harper, knowing this, has been able to collect the votes of social conservatives while doing nothing to deserve them, a pattern established early in his leadership when he offered social conservatives, who had started a grassroots effort to put a ban on partial-birth abortion into the party platform, a discussion of same-sex marriage instead, which never materialized. Even gun owners, widely though of as having benefited from the Conservative government with the abolition of the long-gun registry, are among the betrayed, Connie shows.


The biggest betrayal, however, is of those who fought for freedom of speech against Section 13. Section 13 was part of the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. This Act, modelled on the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, proscribed discrimination on certain grounds (race, sex, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and in certain circumstances (employment, housing, etc.) even between private individuals. Section 13 declared it to be an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone, anything that was “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the basis of one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Around the turn of the millennium this was made even worse by the adding of subsection 2, which extended its application to all electronic communications including, of course, the internet. This law had, as it was intended to have, a chilling effect on public debate, adding the force of law to the creepy contemporary phenomenon known as political correctness, that protects left-wing social and cultural engineering with loud and hysterical accusations of “racism”, “sexism”. “homophobia”, or some other made-up pathology, against its critics.


In the late 2000s, the public spotlight finally fell upon this terrible law, when Muslim groups laid charges under it against well-known conservative figures Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. Traditionalists and libertarians united against it, and, through the means of a private member’s bill, ultimately succeeded in having it repealed. This was without the help of the present leadership of the Conservative Party. The charges against Levant and Steyn were made about the time Harper became Prime Minister, and it was during the battle over Section 13 that ensued, that Free Dominion’s legal woes began.


The Canadian Human Rights Commission, having received a complaint about some material that controversial Christian evangelist Bill Whatcott had posted on Free Dominion, urged the complainant to charge the website as well. At the time the CHRC had already targeted Free Dominion, having previously set up a dummy account “jadewarr” on the forum, for purposes of spying or, possibly, entrapment. The charge against Free Dominion was withdrawn by the complainant, but the CHRC, its doings, and Section 13 became hot topics on the discussion board. Richard Warman, the human rights lawyer and former CHRC employee who was responsible for most of the complaints under Section 13, launched a myriad of lawsuits against his online critics, including the suits that have been so devastating to Free Dominion and the Fourniers.


It is not just that all of this took place on Stephen Harper’s watch, however. His government has introduced bill after bill after bill in attempts to monitor and control discussion on the internet. These include bills that would order ISPs to spy on their customers and hand information over to law enforcement agencies without warrants. The worst of them is Bill C-51, which the government rammed through the House of Commons and Senate earlier this year. In the name of fighting terrorism, this bill authorizes law enforcement agencies to spy on Canadians without warrants, share the information they gather with each other, and even engage in disruptive activity.


In light of all of this damning evidence, Connie calls principled conservatives to hold the Conservative Party and their leadership accountable. The party needs to know that conservative votes cannot just be taken for granted, and that their betrayal of conservative principles and trampling all over the privacy and freedom of Canadians will not be tolerated, let alone rewarded.


Every Canadian, especially those who believe in the principles of conservatism, ought to read this book before the upcoming election.

Malice

In the Anglican prayer book the collect to be said upon the Sunday after Easter is:

Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification: Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

It is from this collect that Robertson Davies obtained the title for the second novel in his trilogy set in Salterton, a fictional, although loosely based on Kingston, community in Ontario. The plot of Leaven of Malice follows the events that unfold due to the placing of an advertisement in the Evening Bellman newspaper announcing the upcoming nuptials of Pearl Vambrace and Solomon Bridgewater. The problems with the ad are numerous. The wedding is set for the 31st day of a month that has only 30 days. Jevon Knapp, the dean of St. Nicholas Anglican Cathedral where the wedding is set to take place reads about it for the first time in the newspaper. So, for that matter, do the couple in question, whom we met for the first time in Tempest-Tost where they participated in an amateur production of the Shakespearean play alluded to in the title. They are not in fact engaged and worse the young lady is the daughter of Professor Vambrace whose one-time rivalry with the young man’s father for a deanship at the university had developed into an animosity between the two families comparable to that of the Capulets and Montagues.

The malice which spreads like leaven throughout Salterton in the book, begins with the malice of the person who placed the spurious advertisement out of spite against both the couple named and Gloster Ridley, the editor of the newspaper. It spreads to the elderly busybody Puss Pottinger and Matthew Snelgrove, lawyer and diocesan chancellor who share a dislike of Humphrey Cobbler, the irascible cathedral organist that causes them to baselessly and irrationally accuse him of placing the advertisement. The extent to which it infects old Mrs. Bridgewater who exercises a soft tyranny over her son is not fully evident until the third novel in the trilogy, A Mixture of Frailties, in which the vengeful terms of her will are revealed. It is perhaps most evident, however, in Professor Vambrace, whose response to the advertisement of his daughter’s engagement to the son of his hated rival is to threaten a suit of libel against the newspaper and, when the newspaper fails to apologize in a way that he deems satisfactory, take steps to initiate that lawsuit.

Malicious libel suits are not limited to the realm of fiction alas. Last fall a jury delivered a verdict against Mark and Connie Fournier, the administrators of the conservative message board Free Dominion, and two of the members of their board, in a lawsuit for libel that had been brought against them by Richard Warman several years previously. The jury awarded Warman $42, 000 in damages plus costs. On Thursday, January 23rd 2014, Justice Robert Smith of the Ontario Superior Court awarded those costs, raising the total bill the Fourners have been ordered to pay Warman to $127, 000. He also issued what is in effect a gag order. He gave an injunction against the Fourniers that prohibits them from publishing anything negative about Richard Warman. As a consequence, Free Dominion has been closed to the public because due to this injunction all anyone possessed of malice towards the Fourniers would need to do is post something negative about Warman and it would mean an automatic trip to jail for them for contempt of court. This, of course, means that Free Dominion, can no longer perform the function of a public forum for which it was created. Appropriately, the Fourniers have placed in large red letters the announcement “Censored! Closed to the Public” across the main page of their site.

The verdict and Justice Smith’s decision are both tremendous injustices in my informed opinion. Richard Warman, the plaintiff, is a human rights lawyer, who formerly worked for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who made multiple complaints under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and who is a noted activist for the progressive cause of anti-racism. This means that he is a public figure, whose actions affect the interests of the public and are therefore subject to public discussion and debate. The threshold for what constitutes defamation against a public figure is supposed to be much higher than what constitutes defamation against a private citizen. In this case, however, the threshold was lowered. Several of the Free Dominion posts deemed to be libelous against Warman consisted merely of name calling. Name calling is not supposed to constitute actionable defamation. It is my opinion that the handling and outcome of this case are not only grounds for the verdict and ruling to be overturned upon appeal but for disciplinary action to be taken against the court.

The ridiculously high amounts the Fourniers have been ordered to pay constitute what is known as punitive damages. Punitive damages are awarded to plaintiffs in civil lawsuits as a means of punishing the defendant. To obtain punitive damages the plaintiff is supposed to be able to show malicious intent on the part of the defendant. This would seem to be the justification on the part of the plaintiff and the court for allowing the inclusion of the kind of insults that would normally not be considered actionable within this suit.

They do not show any such thing, however, for there is no malicious intent to be shown. The Fourniers started Free Dominion thirteen years ago as a public forum for the promotion of small-c conservative ideas. What those ideas basically consist of are classical liberal views of political and economic freedom and conservative moral and social stances such as those held by evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics, and other conservative faith groups. Part of their understanding of political freedom is the idea of freedom of speech, that government and law should not be used to control what people think or say. The Fourniers’ opponents on the left have accused them of inconsistency because they moderate what is allowed to be posted on Free Dominion but this charge is not valid. Belief in free speech does not mean that you have to provide a platform for every idea out there. It means that you oppose the use of law and government power to curtail the expression of thoughts, whether you yourself agree or disagree with those thoughts.

This is where Richard Warman enters the picture. As an employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Warman worked for the government. It is my understanding that he still is an employee of the government in some capacity. More importantly, however, because this is what became the subject of public discussion, he was a complainant in multiple cases using Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Act was a bill passed by Parliament in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau that prohibits people and businesses from discriminating against other people in certain situations – employment, housing, etc. – on the basis of criteria such as race, sex, religion, etc. Section 13 of this Act, which Parliament rescinded in a bill passed last June that comes into effect this June, declared certain types of speech, i.e., speech which is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the basis of his race, sex, etc., to be discrimination when it is communicated electronically. Warman made numerous complaints under this Section which is why he and his actions came under criticism from people, like the Fourniers, who are concerned about the erosion of free speech in this country.

Many of Warman’s defenders have argued that because Section 13 was Canadian law he should not be criticized for using it. That is a ridiculous line of argument. If the government were to pass a law saying that on a certain day every year it is legal to beat up elderly people and take their money would that mean that we should not criticize or condemn those who took advantage of that law? Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was bad law. Indeed, the entire Canadian Human

Rights Act is bad law, because while it is laudable for a government to adopt a policy of non-discrimination towards the people it governs it is reprehensible for that same government to prohibit those same people from discriminating among themselves. Those who use bad laws against their fellow countrymen are as much the proper subjects of criticism as the laws themselves.

In opposing Warman’s actions and allowing them to be freely criticized on their message board the Fourniers were not acting out of malice but out of principle. Indeed, if it is evidence of malice that you are looking for you might do better to look for it on the other side. This lawsuit is one of several that the plaintiff filed against the defendants. He has launched several other similar lawsuits against several other defendants as well. He asked for a crippling amount in punitive damages and an injunction that prevents the defendants from operating their website as the public forum it was intended to be. Surely in all of this there is far more evidence of an intent that has been leavened with malice than in the principled refusal to allow someone else to dictate what you will or will not say or allow to be said on your own website? As Dean Knapp said of malice in Davies’ novel, “You find it, for instance, in unfounded charges brought against people that we dislike.”

The malice that is on display here, I hasten to point out, is not necessarily personal malice. Not being God, I am not priviledge with the ability to peer into Warman’s heart on the assumption that he actually possesses one and therefore make no judgement as to what may or may not be found there. Rather the malice on display here and in the Schadenfreude that could be found dripping from the entries and comments on blogs of those progressive, forward-thinking, types who followed this case every time they had a Warman victory and a Free Dominion set back to report is the malice that is inherent within anti-racism.

The malice in racism is easy to see. Malice is ill will and evil design towards other people. Racism can be defined either positively or negatively. Defined positively it is the belief in the superiority of a race, typically one’s own. Defined negatively it means a dislike of a particular race or other races in general. When that dislike comes with a desire or intent that its object suffer harm then malice is clearly present in racism. The malice in anti-racism is harder to see, because anti-racism defines itself as opposition to an evil that stands in the way of universal peace, harmony, and getting along, a desire for which could hardly be described as malicious. Yet malice is present in anti-racism where it has indeed leavened the whole lump.

Anti-racism is itself a leaven that has thoroughly permeated Western culture in the last half century. Clergymen in churches, pedagogues in schools, professors in universities, journalists in newspapers and on television and silly entertainers in media of all sorts have joined together in spreading the message that we must all learn to get along with each other and that in order to do so we must stop attaching any importance to race or ethnicity. Those who do so, at least if they are white people, are racists who stand in the way of universal peace and harmony. They must therefore be shunned, treated as social pariahs, and practically be considered outlaws (an outlaw is someone who has been declared to be outside the protection of law so that whatever is done to him will be without legal consequence). There is clearly malice present in this way of thinking.

Consider the anti-racist position on laws like Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. It is basically that laws like this are needed to protect “vulnerable minorities” against a resurgent Nazi movement and that the concern that such laws unjustly infringe upon basic rights and freedoms such as freedom of thought, speech, and association is unwarranted because the laws only target racists. Apart from the fact that the minorities they are concerned about are in no way vulnerable and that the resurgent Nazi movement they are worried about is nothing more than a bugaboo what this position ultimately amounts to is “who cares, it is only racists and they deserve it”.

It is the nature of malice, however, like all leaven, to grow and spread. Lawyers who defend murderers and rapists in court are not considered to be tainted by the criminal guilt of their clients. Lawyers who defend people on so-called “hate” charges are viewed by anti-racists with the same contempt their clients are viewed regardless of what their own ideas may or may not be. Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion are not racists. Indeed, if anything they are moderate anti-racists. Their stand against hate speech laws is based entirely upon the idea that infringing upon the freedom of speech of some is infringing upon the freedom of speech for all and the test of one’s commitment to freedom of speech is one’s willingness to extend it to those with whom one disagrees and not just those with whom one agrees. For taking that stance, progressive anti-racists have ridiculed them and accused them of being apologists for racism. In July of 2005, Richard Warman in an address to the group Anti-Racist Action in Toronto, described his methods of combatting neo-Nazi groups, saying that the approach he found to be most effective was one of “maximum disruption” which basically meant going after the neo-Nazi groups in as many ways possible at the same time. Can the resemblance between this strategy and his multiple-lawsuit approach to conservative critics like the Fourniers be merely a coincidence?

Sadly, the worst part of the malicious leaven of anti-racism is that its permeation of our whole culture has created widespread indifference to the injustices committed in our midst, first against those whose views are considered to be racist and second against those who are not racists themselves but who oppose the injustices committed against racists. How many more degrees removed from actual racism will the injustices have to spread before we shake off that indifference?

A Grave Injustice

We are fallen beings, living in a fallen world. Created with free will in the image of God, we were given the choice of obedience and everlasting life on the one hand and sin and death on the other. We chose sin and death – and were exiled from Paradise. God, in His mercy and grace, promised to send a Redeemer Who would lift the curse of sin and death and restore us to Paradise. He gave us that Redeemer in Jesus Christ and one day, through Christ’s redemptive work, we will be restored to Paradise in the New Heaven and New Earth. Before that happens, men will be called upon to give account at the Final Judgement before the throne of God. There, they will find perfect, uncorrupted, justice, tempered, we hope and pray, by mercy and grace.

Until that day, men look for justice upon earth. Such justice as they find will be impure - mixed with injustice and corruption. Often what they will find cannot be counted as justice at all.

We have just received a most unfortunate reminder of this fact. After several years of legal battles, the defamation lawsuit Richard Warman launched against Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion and several members of the conservative message board identified as “John Does” because they posted under online screen names, came to trial a couple of weeks ago. After several days of deliberation, the jury found in favour of Warman, who was awarded $42, 000 in damages plus costs. He is also seeking an injunction from the judge against Free Dominion, which would mean instant jail time for the Fourniers if anything negative were ever posted about him there again.

This decision is a travesty of justice.

The complainant in this case, Richard Warman, is a serial complainant. He launched several complaints under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Section 13 was the portion of the CHRA that declared it an act of discrimination to communicate electronically any words that are “likely to” expose a member of a group protected against discrimination by the CHRA to “hatred or contempt.” Section 13 was itself bad law. All laws against acts of private discrimination are bad laws for that matter, but Section 13 was particularly bad both because it forbade words and thoughts, and because it did so in such a way that virtually anything negative or critical of a protected group or its members might be considered to be grounds for a complaint. Warman is not himself, as far as I can tell, a member of any of the protected groups. Nevertheless, he launched the majority of the Section 13 complaints filed in the last ten to fifteen years before it was repealed.

He has also launched multiple defamation lawsuits. He sued British, New Age, conspiracy theorist David Icke for defamation over remarks the author made about him in his book Children of the Matrix. He sued Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression for libel, for remarks he had made about Warman on the internet. He was awarded $30,000 in damages, a ruling that was upheld in every appeal, with the Supreme Court refusing to even hear the case. When the National Post's Jonathan Kay reported on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case ever heard, Warman sued the newspaper and columnist for defamation. Named as co-defendents were conservative bloggers Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan and Ezra Levant, as well as the Fourniers and Free Dominion, all because they had reposted the assertion made in the original article about Warman, that he claimed was defamatory.

When the same person launches so many lawsuits against so many people surely it is appropriate to question whether or not he is acting in good faith. Indeed, to this writer and many others it seems obvious that he is not acting in good faith, that these are vexatious lawsuits initiated for the purpose of harassment and that they should have been tossed out of court ages ago.

Consider the merits of these suits. In his suit against the National Post and assorted co-defendants, the basis of the complaint was that the column in question had reported a claim, made by Bernard Klatt, an expert for the defence in Warman v. Lemire, that Richard Warman was himself the author of a post on Marc Lemire’s Freedomsite (not to be confused with the Fourniers’ FreeDominion) that referred to Senator Anne Cools using extremely derogatory, racist, and misogynistic language. This post – removed by Lemire from the site before anyone else ever saw it – was part of the complaint Warman filed against Lemire.

Warman denies being the author of this post. Whether he was or was not I do not profess to know. The allegation was originally made by an expert witness in a courtroom. Mr. Klatt offered reasons for why he thought the post had originated with Warman. Surely a better method for protecting his reputation, if that is truly Warman’s concern, would be to rebut Mr. Klatt’s reasoning rather than to sue everyone in sight who repeats the allegation.

Let us assume that Warman is telling the truth when he says that he is not the author of the post in question. For words to be defamatory they must have the effect of lowering a person’s reputation or esteem in the eyes of others. Would repeating the allegation that Warman is the author of the Cools post have that effect?

To answer that, let me put another question to you. If you had robbed the Bank of Montreal, Scotia Bank, and the Royal Bank of Canada, would a false accusation that you had also robbed Toronto Dominion lower your esteem in the eyes of others?

Warman has admitted to posing as a racist online under various assumed names. He posted under “axetogrind” at Vanguard News Network and under “Pogue Mahone” at Stormfront, for example. In an affidavit, quoted by Joseph Brean of the National Post, he wrote the following:

I signed up and posted to the neo-Nazi website forums vnnforum.com and stormfront.org as another means of collecting intelligence about the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements and information about the identities of individuals in Canada that it was my intention to file federal human rights complaints against. (1)

If he has admitted to posing as a racist at Vanguard and Stormfront, how can the allegation that he did the same thing at Freedomsite possibly damage his reputation?

Then there was his defamation suit against Paul Fromm. Here is how the decision in the case summarizes Warman’s complaint:

Mr. Warman pleads that the defendants are responsible for libelling him in nine posting on various Internet websites. These postings characterize him as, among other things, an enemy of free speech, a member of the thought police, a high priest of censorship, and an employee who abused his position at the CHRC in order to limit freedom of expression and pursue his own ideological agenda. (2)

So Warman’s complaint basically was that Mr. Fromm accused him of trying to censor or limit other people’s verbal expressions of their thoughts. His response to this accusation was to ask a court to force Mr. Fromm to retract this accusation and apologize for it (and pay a ridiculously large amount in “damages”)?

Do you see the absurdity in that?

Even if you don’t see the defamation suit as being itself a form of censorship or limitation of freedom of speech, think of the kind of behaviour that Mr. Fromm was commenting on. Warman had filed numerous complaints against people over remarks they made on the internet. How can describing that kind of behaviour as censorship possibly be defamatory?
Warman’s progressive defenders seem to reason that because Warman was acting in accordance with the law at the time, his actions should be above reproach, and criticism, condemnation, or ridicule of those actions should be considered defamation.

So in one defamation suit against multiple defendants, Warman complained that he was falsely accused of making a racist post on Freedomsite when he had acknowledged having posed as a neo-nazi on Vanguard News Network and Stormfront, and in another defamation suit he complained that he was accused of censorship for filing Section 13 complaints against people. These seem to be frivolous grounds for defamation suits. Yet Warman, a public figure who should surely be held to a higher standard of proof than an ordinary person in making defamation complaints, won his case against Mr. Fromm, and the National Post settled out of court. In the latter case, Warman obtained the legal copyright to the article he had complained about, and then filed a copyright infringement suit against the Fourniers! How can anyone in their right mind think that this is being done in good faith?

If the ruling against the Fourniers had been made by a judge it could be blamed on the abysmally low quality of the magistrates currently sitting on Canadian benches. It was a jury that rendered this verdict however. That speaks of an even greater problem.

The problem is that Warman is an anti-racist crusader and for decades now Canadians have been bombarded by left-wing anti-racist propaganda in the schools, from the pulpit, and in the new electronic media, both “news” and “entertainment”. In the classroom, year after year children have video footage of the Nazi concentration camps shoved down their throats. If an equivalent amount of time were spent teaching them about the GULAG and the horrors of officially egalitarian communism, perhaps a valuable lesson could be taught about how when man bows the knee to the idol of technology, he becomes like a machine himself, (3) and treats people accordingly. This is the appropriate lesson to be gleaned from the history of Twentieth Century totalitarianism in all its varieties. Instead the message attached to the Holocaust footage is “this is where racism leads to” – a message that obliterates the difference between the racial views of Sir Winston Churchill and those of Adolf Hitler and which makes the virtue of pietas – at least when practiced by white people – into a cardinal sin.

Mark and Connie Fournier are not racists. In their stand against Section 13, however, they took the position that racists should have freedom of speech like anyone else, and that a law that allows people to be sued and silenced merely because their words were deemed to be racist is a bad law. This conflicts with the antiracist programming, in which racism is the greatest of all evils, and everything done to stop racism is good. When confronted with evidence that injustice was being done in the name of fighting racism, and that those who stood up for the freedom of speech even of racists were being unfairly persecuted, some people appear to be simply unable to cope with this conflict between reality and what they have been programmed to think.

Only thus can the idiotic jury decision in this case be explained.

Mark and Connie, my prayers are with you.

(1) http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/12/undercover-work-debated-in-hate-hearing/


(2) http://www.nelligan.ca/e/PDF/Warman_Court_Decision.pdf


(3) Psalm 135:18

A Long Awaited Day Has Come At Last!

The day many of us have been awaiting for a long time has finally arrived. On Wednesday, June 26th, Bill C-304 passed its third reading in the Canadian Senate. Having cleared the Senate, all the bill needed to become the law of the land was Royal Assent, which it received later that evening, when it was signed by Governor General David Johnston, the representative of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada.

Bill C-304 is a private members bill introduced into Parliament in September of 2011 by Brian Storseth, Conservative MP for Westlock-St. Paul, Alberta. The bill’s actual title is “An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (Protecting Freedom).”

It contains six provisions. The key provision is the second which states “Section 13 of the Act is repealed”. The first, third, fourth, and fifth provisions of the bill amend other parts of the CHRA to remove all references to Section 13. The sixth provision states that the provisions of the bill will come into effect one year after it receives Royal Assent.

Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is the notorious and infamous “hate speech” law. When Parliament first passed the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977 it read:

It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

This later became subsection 1, when Section 13 was amended in 2001 to include subsection 2, which reads:

For greater certainty, subsection (1) applies in respect of a matter that is communicated by means of a computer or a group of interconnected or related computers, including the Internet, or any similar means of communication, but does not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking.

Bill C-304 passed its third reading in the House of Commons early last June.It had its first reading in the Senate on June 7^th of last year and there it sat for over a year until it had its second reading on June 20^th of this year. After the second reading the Senate referred the bill to a Committee which presented its findings shortly before the Senate heard the bill for the third time and passed it.

This is great news for Canada. It means that as of June 26th, 2014, Section 13 will no longer be part of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I am not sure exactly why it was thought necessary to include a one year delay in the bill taking effect. It hardly seems logical that a bill designed to abolish an unnecessary law that has been exceedingly abused would extend to the agency guilty of that abuse an opportunity for one last kick at the cat. Government, however, is seldom logical and we have reason to rejoice that, despite the temporary delay, the final death of Section 13 is assured. This Dominion Day we can sing with extra gusto the final word in the verse of our national anthem that describes our country as “the True North strong and free”.

For many in our great Dominion, the reality of the extent to which our traditional freedoms had gradually been eroded over the last four decades did not become clear until 2006 when Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, re-published the Mohammed cartoons that had stirred up so much controversy overseas when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. A couple of organizations, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, filed a complaint against Levant and his magazine before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.The complaint was made, not under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, but under Alberta’s provincial equivalent.

That, by the way, is a reminder to us that the work of turning back the clock on progressive thought control is not completed with the abolition of Section 13. Each province has its own provincial equivalent and freedom will not be fully restored to our Dominion until each of these are struck down as well.

About the same time that the complaint was made against Levant, the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints with the Ontario, BC, and Canadian Human Rights Commissions against MacLean’s magazine and author Mark Steyn. The complaint regarded an excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone that had been reprinted in MacLean’s under the title “The Future Belongs to Islam”. The complaint was that the article was hate speech that discriminated against Muslims as a group.

These were high profile cases that involved two widely read magazines. This brought greater exposure to the precarious state into which freedom of speech had fallen in our country. As they defended themselves in their own human rights/freedom of speech cases, Levant and Steyn brought another case to the public’s attention, one which otherwise might have attracted very little attention, the case of Warman v. Lemire.

Marc Lemire was the webmaster of Freedom-Site and a complaint had been made against him, under Section 13, by Richard Warman, the lawyer formerly employed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who has filed the bulk of the Section 13 complaints over the last decade. The complaint pertained to posts that had been made – by others – on the Freedom-Site’s internet bulletin board. Lemire, in addition to defending himself and his site against this complaint, filed a constitutional challenge against Sections 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (Section 54 is also amended by Bill C-304 to remove the elements which were problematic).

Over the course of Warman v. Lemire much material was revealed about the way in which Section 13 cases were started, investigated, and handled that cast the Canadian Human Rights Commission in a rather unflattering light. In 2009, Athanasios Hadjis, a member of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, dismissed most of the charges against Lemire and refused to pass sentence on the remaining charge, ruling that Section 13 was unconstitutional. This subsequently went into appeal and Lemire’s constitutional challenge was put on hold pending Parliament’s decision on Bill C-304 – which has now rendered the challenge moot.

These cases received wider discussion in the media than previous hate/free speech cases, due to the involvement of high profile figures like Levant and Steyn. They also received wider exposure because the development of the internet and of political blogging had created a way for people to get around self-imposed mainstream media blackouts. It also added a new dimension to the legal battle over freedom of speech.

As previously mentioned, in Warman v. Lemire much material had come to light that was unflattering to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That same material was also unflattering to the plaintiff, himself. In early 2008, he launched a defamation suit against the National Post over an article that made reference to testimony from Warman v. Lemire that suggested that Warman himself was the author of one of the contested posts on Freedom-Site, one that contained some rather rude remarks about a female Canadian Senator. Warman also named as co-defendants the author of the article, Jonathan Kay, bloggers who had made reference to the article such as Kathy Shaidle (Five Feet of Fury) and Kate McMillan (Small Dead Animals), and Mark and Connie Fournier, the founders and administrators of the small-c conservative message board Free Dominion.

This was not the first time Warman had launched a defamation suit against his opponents. He had sued British author David Icke in the early 2000’s over remarks Icke had made about him in one of his books. Icke is a New Age, environmentalist, type who specializes in conspiracy theories about reptillian shape-shifters from outer space. Nevertheless he was justifiably unimpressed when he was accused of anti-semitism in the late 1990s, which accusations became part of the basis for a campaign to have his speaking tour of Canada cancelled and his books removed from Canadian bookstores and libraries. Warman’s involvement in that campaign was the reason for the remarks which were the basis of the lawsuit. In 2007, Warman sued Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression for libel over remarks he had made about Warman on the internet.

Warman launched multiple lawsuits against Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion.In addition to the National Post lawsuit previously mentioned, he also filed another defamation suit against the Fourniers and eight members of Free Dominion over remarks they had made about him. Since the eight members posted under internet pseudonyms, they were named as “John Does” in the suit. The lawsuit therefore centred around the issue of the right to anonymity on the internet. After the National Post and Jonathan Kay settled with Warman, he became the owner of the article in question, and then sued the Fourniers over copyright infraction for reposting the article on their site!

I have encountered people who appear to believe that this is a legitimate use of the court system. I do not. In my opinion it is a shameful abuse of the legal process and it is a disgrace that the courts allow this to go on. Now that Section 13 has been taken care of, badly needed reform of Canada’s defamation laws would be an excellent next step to consider in securing and protecting the rights of Canadians to freely express their thoughts and opinions.

The passing of Bill C-304 is a significant victory for those who have been fighting to restore freedom of speech to the Dominion of Canada. The events referred to above only cover the last few years of what has been a very long battle. The Canadian Human Rights Act with its Section 13 was signed into law in 1977. I was one year old at the time. In the 1980s, when I was growing up, freedom of speech and what, if any, legitimate limitations on it ought to exist, was a matter of public discussion.

The discussion centered around two high profile cases, neither of which, interestingly, was a Section 13 case. Ernst Zundel, a Toronto graphic artist who also published pamphlets that argued that only thousands rather than six million Jews died in World War II and that the deaths were not part of an orchestrated plot of genocide on the part of the Third Reich but a consequence of the realities of war, was charged with “spreading false news” twice under a law that was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. James Keegstra, a high school teacher and at the time mayor of Eckville, Alberta was charged with spreading hate for teaching his history class that the Jews were behind a global conspiracy against Christianity. The law he was charged under was the hate speech provision which had been added to the Criminal Code by the Trudeau government a few years prior to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In fact, Section 13 had been added to the Canadian Human Rights Act because it was considered too difficult to obtain a conviction under the Criminal Code where the prosecutor was required to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Crown managed to do so in the Keegstra case.

These two cases were widely discussed in the news and in the classroom.After that the mainstream media went curiously silent on the subject of freedom of speech until the Levant and Steyn cases. There were a few exceptions. One or two writers in the Sun newspaper chain occasionally discussed a freedom of speech case. Doug Collins of the North Shore News reported on the decay of freedom of speech, and was eventually himself brought before the BC Human Rights Commission on charges of “hate speech” by Harry Abrams of the Binai B’rith. The Report newsmagazines (Alberta, Western, BC) of the Byfield family had a number of writers and editors, such as Kevin Michael Grace, who faithfully reported on these matters. Very few others would do so.

There was a reason for this. Collins, Grace, the Byfields, and virtually everyone else who defended freedom of speech against “hate speech” laws, including the late Doug Christie, the founder of the Canadian Free Speech League and the lawyer for both Zundel and Keegstra, were accused of being racists.

Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, in a speech given early in the Trudeau premiership, later published in the book Those Things We Treasure, recalled an earlier time of more civil discussion when one could disagree with the Prime Minister without being accused of prejudice. By the time Peter Brimelow wrote his book about American immigration, Alien Nation, in the mid 1990s, he could accurately say that the new definition of a racist was “someone who was winning an argument with a liberal”. Liberals, capitalizing on the disgust generated by the revelation of the horrors of WWII, had turned “racist” into a powerful weapon, an epithet that could ruin a person’s reputation, career, and life. It was a weapon they did not hesitate to use against their enemies.

Ironically, the pet projects with liberals used that weapon to protect, were themselves racist projects. This was not immediately recognizable because the targets of the racist projects were white people.

Think about it. If you were to say that your community or your country is “too black” or “too Asian” or “too fill-in-the-blank-with-any-race-but-white” you would be immediately denounced as a racist. The denunciation would be even more immediate and severe if you proposed doing something about it. The same, however, is not true of people who say that their community or country is “too white”. Indeed, such people are lauded for saying this sort of thing. This makes no sense from an ethical perspective. If racism is wrong, and racism is prejudice against people because of their race, then it is as wrong when it is directed against white people as when it is directed against any other group of people. If thinking that a community is “too black” is racist, then thinking that it is “too white” is also racist.

Yet the idea that our country is “too white” is recognizably the idea behind the liberal policies pertaining to race, culture, and immigration that have been enacted since the 1960s. When liberals talk about promoting diversity they never mean making black communities less black, or aboriginal communities less aboriginal, and they certainly never mean making any kind of non-white community more white. “Diversity” is clearly a euphemism for “less white”.

An objection might be raised to this reasoning in that most liberals are themselves white. All that proves, however, is the truth of Robert Frost’s observation that a liberal is someone “who is too polite to take his own side in a quarrel”.

Liberalism’s accusations of racism against those who dissent from its policies of self-hatred – or those who recognize and dare to point out that its policies are racist against white people – is a self-defense mechanism that has proven remarkably effective. It by itself has protected against criticism many policies that would not be able to withstand scrutiny. For the longest time our insane policy concerning “hate speech” was one of those policies.

“Hate speech” as defined by laws like Section 13 is not necessarily speech that expresses actual hatred. Statements like “I hate you”, “I despise you”, “I utterly detest and loathe you” and “I curse the day you were born” simply do not fall under the category of “hate speech”. Yet expressing the view that significantly less than six million Jews died in the Nazi concentration camps in World War II, which is an opinion about historical facts, albeit an unusual and perhaps nutty one, apparently does.

Clearly “hate speech” laws are not about hatred in any literal sense of the world. “Hate speech” laws, like all anti-discrimination laws, are based upon anti-white racism. When anti-discrimination laws were first introduced there was growing opposition to laws that were themselves discriminatory. The basis of this opposition was the idea that the law should be the same for all citizens, a modern version of the ancient concept represented by justice wearing a blindfold. It is one thing, however, for government to strike down laws that favour one group of citizens over another, and declare that it will administer the law justly. It is another thing altogether, for government to pass a law prohibiting its citizens from discriminating against each other. Not only are such laws unduly intrusive into the personal thoughts and feelings of citizens, history has demonstrated that such laws cannot themselves be administered justly. Laws which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, for example, are enforced against white people who are accused of discriminating against other kinds of people. They are seldom, if ever, enforced against people who discriminate against white people.

This is glaringly obvious in the case of “hate speech” laws. Countless examples could be given of speech, directed against white people, which is actually hateful and even violent, which has never caused those uttering it to be charged with “hate speech”. The defendants are almost always white, the only time anyone else is charged is when his “hate speech” is directed against a group that enjoys a greater degree of protection than his own. The justification given for this unjust administration of the law is that the law exists to “protect vulnerable minorities”. This, however, is merely a euphemism for “the law applies to one group differently than it applies to another”.

Thankfully, the government has finally done the right thing and abolished the abhorrent Section 13. Let us pray that the rest of the racist, anti-white, liberal house of cards, will come crashing down after it.

This and That No.19: Merry Christmas Edition

Lemire Appeal Update

The notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act has finally come under review by a federal court with the authority to strike it down. Mr. Justice Richard Mosley heard the arguments of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its sycophants and the arguments by Marc Lemire and other supporters of freedom last Wednesday. No decision has been passed as of yet but we have reason to be hopeful that one way or the other – either through judicial review or through the passing of Bill C-304 introduced by Brian Storseth – the tyrannical dragon which is Section 13, will finally be slain.

Connie Fournier on The Arena

Connie Fournier, who with her husband Mark co-founded the conservative internet message board Free Dominion, appeared on Michael Coren’s show “The Arena” last week to talk about the way Free Dominion was harassed by the CHRC and continues to be harassed by SLAPP suits. Blazing Cat Fur has put the video of the interview up on Youtube where it can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uufPRTHtPKE

Moral Clarity and Free/Hate Speech

Section 13, and similar laws at the provincial level and in other countries, do not prohibit behaviour which is inherently harmful to others, like shooting them with a gun, stabbing them with a knife, or stealing their possessions. These laws prohibit words. Advocates of such laws argue that words can lead to actual violence. This is true but it is not an adequate justification for laws like Section 13. The words prohibited by such laws are not words inciting others to violence against a particular person or group of persons. Laws against incitement existed long before someone thought up the idea of “hate speech” laws. The kind of speech prohibited by Section 13 takes the form of “Members of X group are Y”. X stands for any group protected against discrimination by the Canadian Human Rights Act. Y stands for a predicate which casts group X in a negative light. Words of this kind, supporters of Section 13 believe, deserve fines in the tens of thousands, life-time gag orders.

The laws are not consistently applied. The Canadian Human Rights Act lists “race” as one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. The way it is worded would suggest that members of any particular race are prohibited from discriminating against all other races. In practice, however, laws against discrimination are treated as a one way street. White people are prohibited from discriminating against members of other races, but members of other races are free to discriminate against white people. This is especially true when it comes to “hate speech”. From certain ethnic groups, one frequently hears language about white people that is extremely derogatory and which blames all evils suffered by the group on white people, similar to the way in which Hitler blamed all of Germany’s woes on the Jews. This, however, is not regarded by the Canadian Human Rights Commission as “hate speech”, even though it is more hateful, more extreme, and more likely to result in violence than the kind of language that is considered “hate speech” by the CHRC.

The justification given for all of this is that it is needed to combat the ever present danger of a widespread neo-Nazi movement arising in Canada to threaten the rights, liberties, lives, and security of ethnic minorities and other groups protected by the CHRA. That threat is laughable, however, and this response to it is like going after a mosquito with a tank.

Supporters of Section 13 try to muddy the waters by pointing to how unacceptable the views of the people who have been charged under Section 13 are to the majority of Canadians. They use the tactic of guilt-by-association to smear those who have opposed this persecution. Progressives would find it completely unacceptable if we were to start passing the guilt of murder, rape, or robbery onto lawyers who defend people accused of these crimes. They would see this as a tactic to scare lawyers away from defending people accused of murder, rape, or robbery, leaving people accused of those crimes without the legal right of defense, and would be morally outraged. This, however, is exactly what they themselves have done in the case of lawyers like Doug Christie and Barbara Kulaszka who have fought for the defence in “hate speech” cases. The views of their clients are attributed to them and they are themselves demonized by progressive journalists and bloggers.

“Hate speech laws” are about inflicting heavy penalties on people for nothing more than words. They, like the SLAPP lawsuits which Section 13 supporters like to make against its critics, are nothing more than a form of bullying.

Merry Christmas

This will be my last post to Throne, Altar, Liberty before Christmas. My next post will be either at the very end of the year or in the first few days of the New Year. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

This and That No. 18

It has been a few months since my last “This and That”. For those unfamiliar with these I will begin with a note of explanation. Most of my posts on this blog are extended essays on particular topics (theological, political, philosophical, ethical, aesthetical, and cultural). The posts entitled “This and That”, on the other hand, combine shorter discussions of multiple topics with personal announcements, notifications of upcoming essays and sometimes commentary on current events.

A New Liturgical Year

We are a week and a half into the new Christian liturgical year, last Sunday having been the second Sunday in Advent. Over the summer I found a copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year in a used book store. Keble was the Victorian Anglican priest after whom Keble College in Oxford is named. His name, like that of Edward Pusey, will forever be linked with that of John Henry Newman as one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, the early 19th Century Catholic revival in the Church of England. Newman credited Keble’s 1833 sermon on “National Apostasy” with launching the movement. The Christian Year was written before all that, however. It was his first publication, written while he was a young man, consisting of a series of devotional poems, one for morning and evening, ones for every Sunday in the liturgical year, and ones for other important liturgical dates.

I have decided to read it the way it was intended to be read, each poem on the day of the Christian calendar it is assigned to. I will also be listening to a collection of recordings of the surviving sacred cantatas by J. S. Bach according to their liturgical dates. The German, Lutheran, Baroque master composer wrote three full cycles of sacred cantatas. They have not all survived, so not every day in the Christian calendar is covered – last Sunday, Advent 2, was not, nor is next Sunday, Advent 3 – but there are over 200 of them still available. The version I will be listening to is the complete edition recorded by the Bachakademie in Stuttgart under the direction of Helmuth Rilling, released in 2011 by hänssler CLASSIC.

A New Concert Season

Speaking of classical music, it is not just a new liturgical year that has started, but the new concert season as well. It started back in September, of course. So far the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has given us excellent performances of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Dvorák, Shostakovich, Beethoven, Mathieu, and Sibelius, as well as a “Night of Song and Dance” about which it is probably best, in keeping with the spirit of Christian charity, to say very little. The next performance, on December 17th, will be of Handel’s Messiah, which is always something I look forward to in the Christmas season.

Manitoba Opera put on its fall production last month. This year they chose Richard Strauss’ Salome as their opener, a one act opera based upon Oscar Wilde’s play, itself based upon the Biblical story of Herodias’ daughter who asked for and received John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. It was a great performance and I am looking forward to their concert of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and their production of Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment, next year.

C. S. Lewis and the Penitential Language of the Prayer Book

Dr. Larry Dixon, who was my faculty advisor at Providence College (now Providence University College) back in the 90’s, has recently discovered C. S. Lewis’ “Miserable Offenders” An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language. He will be reproducing and discussing it at his blog (http://larrydixon.wordpress.com) in a series of posts. I recommend that you check it out. By an odd coincidence I read this same essay earlier this year myself. It was included in God in the Dock, which I reviewed here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/christianity-in-age-of-unbelief.html The title of the essay comes from the General Confession in the order for Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer which reads:

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Lewis’ essay is a defence of the repentant attitude reflected in these words, which had come under attack in his day by liberals offended at the thought that we are “miserable offenders” who must approach God in a spirit of penitence.

Interesting Discussions Elsewhere on the Web

Lawrence Auster, a traditionalist American writer has written a number of critiques of Darwinism recently, which can be found at his website A View From the Right: http://amnation.com/vfr/ Dr. Steve Burton, one of the contributors to What’s Wrong With the World, responded here: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/11/the_barrenness_of_antidarwinis.html, which, as you can see, led to an interesting debate in the comments. This also appears to be the background to a series of premises Dr. Burton has been posting about evolutionary psychology. I contributed to the discussion in the comments to the first premise here: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/12/first_premise.html

The Ongoing Fight For Freedom

Advent, like Lent, is a period devoted to penitent reflection, prior to the celebration of God’s grace given to man in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are those, however, who show very little penitence and humility in this season, or in any other. The anti-racists, for example, smugly confident in their own righteousness, continue their campaign to have the government punish and silence those who disagree with them. Thankfully, their actions are not going unopposed.

Next week, Marc Lemire of the Freedomsite will appear before the Federal Court of Canada, which will be hearing the appeal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission against the September 2009 decision of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal which ruled that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was unconstitutional. If the Federal Court upholds the original decision, Section 13 will finally be stricken from the law. Section 13 is the law which declares that it is an act of illegal discrimination to electronically communicate any material which is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of their membership in a group you are forbidden to discriminate against. You can read Mr. Lemire’s account of his upcoming court case here: http://blog.freedomsite.org/2011/12/fate-of-section-13-to-be-decided-in.html Let us pray that he will be successful and that we will finally be rid of this disgusting piece of thought-control legislation once and for all.

Meanwhile, today Connie Fournier was cross-examined by Richard Warman and his lawyer, with regards to one of his many nuisance lawsuits against Free Dominion, the conservative message board that she and her husband Mark administer. Let us also remember Mark and Connie in our prayers, that they might win their legal battles, and finally be free of these obnoxious SLAPP suits.

Let us also pray that Richard Warman and the other anti-racists will be humbled, repent, and make restitution to those they have harmed in their misguided zeal.

Upcoming Essays

I have not yet completed my 2011 “arts and culture” series of essays, and I will not have the time to complete it before the end of the year so some of the essays will be post next year. The final essays in the series will be an essay on the beauty of nature, a review of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, an essay on multiculturalism, and an essay about Matthew Arnold and his Culture and Anarchy. I had also planned about three essays on the subject of criticism but these will now be part of a new series for next year, as the research materials for one of them will take me some time to gather together. The final essays of the “Arts and Culture” series will not necessarily be posted in the order in which I have mentioned them above.

Advent and Christmas Reading

It was a few years ago that I read John Lukacs’ first autohistory Confessions of an Original Sinner. In the library yesterday I found a copy of his second autohistory Last Rites, which is a couple of years old now. I started it last night. I will also be reading a collection of the sermons of St. Augustine for Advent through Epiphany, George Grant’s Time as History (based upon his 1969 Massey Lectures on Nietzsche), Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism, and I plan on re-reading C. S. Lewis’ fiction, his Narnia series, and his space trilogy.

Defamation Law in the Dominion of Canada

James Boswell, in his exquisite biography of Samuel Johnson recounts a conversation with his friend and subject in which he said “Sir, you'll never make out this match, of which we have talked, with a certain political lady, since you are so severe against her principles.”

To this Dr. Johnson replied “Nay, Sir, I have the better chance for that. She is like the Amazons of old; she must be courted by the sword. But I have not been severe upon her.”

Boswell, begging to differ, responded “Yes, Sir, you have made her ridiculous.”

Dr. Johnson then came back with “That was already done, Sir. To endeavour to make HER ridiculous, is like blacking the chimney.”

I often feel that a paraphrase of this particular witticism would be appropriate in the mouths of judges when dismissing frivolous defamation law suits. There are far too many people in this day and age, who the moment somebody has “been severe upon them” vocally or in print, rush to their lawyer and file a defamation suit in the hopes of having their hurt feelings assuaged by being made richer at the expense of their detractors.

Much of the blame for the problem lies in the laws themselves. The British/Canadian parliamentary monarchy system is the best form of government the world has ever known. The Common Law is the fairest, most just, set of laws any human society has ever evolved. The best elements in the American republican system are elements which the United States kept from the British tradition when the Americans seceded from the British Empire to form their Republic.

In the case of laws pertaining to defamation however, whether libel (written defamation) or slander (spoken defamation) our laws have long been in need of a major overhaul. This is one of the few instances – perhaps the only instance - in which I would say that the Americans have actually improved on our system.

I am sometimes inclined to agree with the late Dr. Murray N. Rothbard that libel and slander laws should be abolished altogether. In The Ethics of Liberty, (1) Dr. Rothbard argued that laws against libel and slander are based on the idea that a man has a property right to his reputation. This idea, he further argued, is false because a man’s reputation does not consist of ideas in his own head but rather ideas in the heads of other people. Since a man has no property right to ideas in other people’s heads, Dr. Rothbard reasoned, he has no right to legal protection of his reputation against libel and slander.

That is an intriguing argument but it has a weakness in that it relies upon the classical liberal worldview. Classical liberalism teaches that human beings are sovereign individuals who possess natural rights, that the only valid societies are societies based upon voluntary agreement between individuals, and that the only valid laws are those which protect the rights of individuals. For those who accept this worldview, the starting point for the justification of any particular law must be the right or rights of the individual which it protects.

If it is false to say that a person has a right to his reputation – to be thought well of in the minds of others – it is nevertheless true that damaging a person’s reputation can cause suffering for that person, and not just hurt feelings. Damaging a man’s reputation can hurt his career, his business, and his livelihood. If a person maliciously sets out to cause this kind of harm to another person by telling lies about him then surely the law is justified in providing the person so harmed with a means of legal redress.

Dr. Rothbard’s argument breaks down because his premise is false. Protecting the natural rights of individuals is not the sole or even the primary justification for law. Laws exist, because human beings are both social creatures – it is our nature to live together in families, communities, and societies – and individual persons, with personal interests. There is often tension between one person’s interests and another person’s interests, and between our personal interests and those of the community. We also have a flawed moral nature that disposes us towards hurting others if it is to our advantage. Our human nature therefore requires laws so that disputes can be settled peacefully and grievances redressed without an escalation into violence that threatens all of society, and so that those who in willful disregard to the laws of society harm other people can be held accountable.

There are two main categories of law. Criminal law prohibits and prescribes punishment for acts in which people intentionally and without justification harm other people by killing them, stealing their property, etc. Civil law provides a legal framework in which disputes between people who have been unable to come to a private agreement can be settled.

Where do laws against libel and slander fit in?

Defamation laws fall under civil law, under the category of personal injury. Defamation is considered to be speech which injures another person entitling that person to compensation.

Since defamation law is civil rather than criminal complainants are not held to the strict standards required of the Crown in criminal law. This is where the problem with libel and slander laws lies.

The strict requirements placed upon the Crown in criminal law are there for a reason. They are there to protect people from wrongful prosecution. To even proceed with a case the Crown attorney must demonstrate to the court that a crime has taken place and that the evidence points towards the defendant. At no point does the burden of proof shift from the Crown to the defence and in order to obtain a conviction, the Crown is required to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

The criminal justice system of the English speaking world is weighted in this way, against the prosecution and in favour of the accused, because a key principle of that system as it has evolved is that it is better for a large number of guilty people to go unpunished than for a single innocent person to be punished for a crime he did not commit. This is one of the most admirable aspects of our justice system.

The reason a similar burden is not placed upon the complainant in civil law is that civil law is not supposed to be punitive. It is there to mediate disagreements not to punish people for criminal acts. If your living room window is broken because your neighbor threw a baseball through it that is basically all you have to demonstrate to the court to be entitled to compensation from your neighbor.

An injured reputation, however, is not quite like a broken window. A window cost you a specific amount of money to install in the first place and will cost you so much to repair. That is easily assessed and places a limit on how much compensation you can ask for.

It is much harder, if not impossible, to assess damages on harm to your reputation. Without that limiting factor, laws under which people can claim compensation from others become potential weapons in the hands of those who would abuse the system to harm their opponents.

Which is exactly what libel and slander laws have become.

There is another difference between libel laws and other civil laws. The man who takes his neighbor to court for a broken window has to at least prove that his window was broken. Libel complainants are held to a less strict requirement. They do not have to show that their reputation was actually damaged, only that the words of the defendant have a tendency to cause such damage.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Many people would probably say that if Person A published a statement that Person B is a sexual pervert and a serial killer, without proof and in fact knowing that he is telling a lie that that is sufficient for Person B to press a libel action against Person A regardless of whether anyone believed him or not. Most of us would probably be uncomfortable with the suggestion that people should be allowed to go around telling those kinds of lies about other people without fear of repercussions.

If, however, Person B is entitled to sue Person A over such statements without proving that they have actually damaged his standing in the sight of others, hurting his social position or his business and livelihood, then what exactly is he to be compensated for if he wins his suit? Is he actually seeking compensation for an injury or punishment for a wrong?

If one person can sue another person for libel without demonstrating that he has been denied access to certain social circles, that he has lost customers, been refused a job or promotion, been demoted or fired, or otherwise suffered a tangible, quantifiable, injury as a result of the second person’s statements then surely such laws are more punitive than compensatory and defendants in libel cases should be entitled to protection from the same safeguards against wrongful prosecution which exist in criminal trials.

It is reasonable for the system to be slanted in favour of the defence and the burden placed upon the prosecution in criminal trials. This does not mean that it is reasonable for the system to be slanted against the defence in non-criminal trials. It is never reasonable for the system to be slanted against the defence. When the system is slanted against the defence it becomes an instrument of injustice.

Those who fail to see the problem with our defamation laws frequently make the point that “words can hurt people”. So they can. Words can hurt someone’s feelings. People’s feelings, however, are not protected by the law, nor should they be. More importantly, words can cause a person to lose friends and can destroy his career. For this reason a certain degree of legal protection should exist for a person’s reputation.

It is curious, though, the way some people seem to think that a person’s reputation should have greater legal protection than his person or property. Progressive liberals, for example, whose beliefs are quite different from those of classical liberals, sometimes do not appear to place much value in the law’s protection against criminal violence to one’s person and property. They often, as I see it, allow their tendency to regard the perpetrators of violent crimes as victims of society (because of poverty, discrimination, or some such reason) to overshadow the more substantial victimhood of the people against whom violent crimes are committed. Proposals to make the system tougher on violent crimes against people and their property, are typically met with suspicion from progressive liberals who frequently denounce such ideas as a form of fascism. Yet the same progressive liberals are often the strongest supporters of our current libel and slander laws, slanted towards the complainant though they be. Indeed, they are the primary supporters of “hate speech” laws, which are an extension of the concept of legal defamation into the realm of interaction between social groups, and which are even more slanted towards the complainant than regular personal defamation laws.

Yes, words can hurt people. Laws, however, can hurt people too. Furthermore, people need far more protection from the abuse of laws than they do from people’s words. Laws exist to protect people but they made effective by government power which itself can sometimes be a bigger threat to people than the things laws protect people from. The question Juvenal placed, in his sixth Satire, in the mouth of a husband advised by his friends to keep his wife under lock and key, has become a timeless insight into the threat inherent within protective power: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? - Who will guard the guards?

Progressive liberals clearly recognize this threat when it comes to criminal law and err on the side of making criminal law ineffective in protecting people against violent crime – which is admittedly better than erring in the other direction. They do not give the impression that they recognize that the same threat exists in civil law.

Civil law can be abused, however, to harass and persecute people. This is particularly true of defamation law.

How then should this tort be tweaked?

For starters it needs to be made clearer that only false statements can be considered defamatory. Laws should never prohibit people from speaking the truth and people should never be punished by law for speaking the truth. Most people assume that “false” is part of the essential definition of defamation, and it is generally accepted that truth or accuracy of statement is a valid defence in defamation cases. The courts, however, have not consistently seen it this way. That needs to change.

One of the most disturbing rulings in the history of Canadian law was the ruling in the CHRT v. Taylor and Western Guard case that truth was not a defence. Now that ruling pertained only to Section 13, the “hate speech” clause of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the constitutionality of which is about to be debated in the courts. The Canadian Human Rights Act is a separate category of civil legislation but the theoretical justification for Section 13 is derived at least in part from the concept of defamation. “Hate speech” is said to injure the reputation of social groups – races, nationalities, religions, sexes, groups with a particular sexual orientation, etc. – the way libel and slander injure the reputation of individual persons.

Section 13 was particularly bad law, being so slanted towards the complainant that until the ruling in Warman v. Lemire in 2009, when the defence persuaded the tribunal adjudicator that the law itself was unconstitutional, the defence never won. This is because Section 13 – like the entire Canadian Human Rights Act – was written to serve a political agenda. Ordinary personal defamation law is not quite that bad. It needs to be made unquestionably clear, however, that in defamation cases truth is not just a defence, but an absolute defence.

Secondly, malice must be defined as an essential component of defamation. In civil law one does not ordinarily have to show malicious intent in order to obtain compensation. The way it currently stands in Canadian defamation laws, no burden of proving malicious intent is placed upon the plaintiff, but if he can prove malicious intent it is allowed to negate the truth defence. This needs to be reversed. The truth defence must be made absolute, so that demonstration of intent can not negate it, and a burden of demonstrating malice placed upon the plaintiff.

Defamation law differs from other civil laws in several ways as we have seen. Since laws against libel and slander have the effect of placing limitations upon our freedom so publicly speak our mind the demonstration of malice must become an absolute requirement on the part of the complainant in order for these laws to brought into harmony with the spirit of British/Canadian law viewed as a whole.

Every society recognizes that there must be limits on personal freedom. Some societies regard freedom as something given to their members by government and which is limited to those liberties clearly defined by law. Societies within the tradition which evolved in Britain do not think this way. We regard freedom as something people possess as a gift from God, not a gift from government, and in our tradition laws define the limits on liberty, not the extent of liberty. Under the Crown, people are free to do whatever is not expressly prohibited by law, and government needs to justify the limitations it places on our liberty.

The justification for the major prohibitions of criminal law is fairly obvious. Acts like murder, robbery, rape and assault are acts which are clearly malum in se – wrong in themselves. Nevertheless, to convict a person of having committed one of these crimes, the Crown needs to demonstrate that the person knew he was committing a crime. The principle behind this is actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – the act does not make one guilty unless the mind is guilty. If this burden is placed upon the prosecution in cases of murder, rape and robbery, how much more then does it make sense to require a demonstration of malicious intent before we place limits on a person’s freedom to speak their mind.

What does it mean to demonstrate malice in a defamation case?

To show that the person making the defamatory remark a) knew that what he was saying was false and b) spoke with the intent that his remark would be believed by others so as to damage the complainant’s social status, career, or livelihood.

Finally, if someone files a complaint of libel or slander against someone, over some petty remark, in order to waste that person’s time and money in a lengthy court battle, then he should be held in contempt of court and charged with mischief in a criminal court.

The recent decision of Mr. Justice Peter Annis in John Baglow v. Roger Smith and Connie and Mark Fournier is a refreshing indicator that judges in this country are starting to wake up to how our defamation laws can be misused against opponents in the age of the internet. Lets hope this trend continues and that the changes suggested above are implemented to protect people from the abuse of libel and slander laws and make our defamation laws more compatible with the spirit of the British/Canadian legal tradition, rooted in justice and liberty.

(1) Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1982)

This and That No. 16: De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est

Today is the final day of the state funeral for Jack Layton who passed away from cancer on Monday. It is only a few months since the election which was a historic victory for both Stephen Harper and the Conservatives and Jack Layton and the New Democrats. Harper, finally won the majority government he had been hoping for. Under Layton's leadership, the New Democrats won the largest number of seats they had ever obtained at the federal level. It was only a few months after replacing Michael Ignatieff as the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition that Layton announced that his cancer had returned and that he would be taking a temporary leave of absence. That leave of absence turned out to be permanent. One suspects that Layton actually knew at the time that it would be as it was slightly less than a month later that he died.

Jack Layton was not a man with whom I agreed on much. The New Democratic Party is Canada's official socialist party (as opposed to Conservatives and Liberals who are the unofficial socialist parties). I am an old-fashioned Tory - a supporter of royalty, aristocratic leadership of society, the institutional Church and the Christian faith, and traditional families and communities. A Tory is neither a liberal (an individualist who believes that society is or should be based purely upon voluntary contractual arrangements between individuals) nor a socialist (a collectivist who believes that the wealth a society produces should be collectively owned and pooled and distributed to the members of society by the government). George P. Grant, another old-fasioned Tory like myself, believed that when forced to choose between the two, the conservative should choose socialism. I disagree, thinking liberalism is the lesser of the two evils. That pretty much places Jack Layton and myself at the opposite polar extremes of the political spectrum.

Having pointed out how our views differed, I say farewell to Jack Layton, and pray that he will find mercy and grace before the Throne of God. Since we will all stand to be judged there one day, it behooves us to wish for everyone, that they will find the mercy and grace for which we ourselves look. To Mr. Layton's family, his widow and his two children, and all of his loved ones, let me say that it is a terrible thing to watch a loved one die from cancer. I know because twenty years ago I watched my mother die from liver cancer shortly after my fifteenth birthday. I would not wish that experience on anyone else. May God be with you in your time of sorrow.

I will leave it to others to comment on Prime Minister Harper's decision to offer a state funeral to Mr. Layton's family. Instead I congratulate Mr. Harper on his government's decision to restore the word "Royal" to the titles of our navy and air force. Evelyn Waugh once complained that "the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second". This was spoken in the context of Sir Winston Churchill's return to the Premiership of Great Britain. What Sir Winston failed to do, Stephen Harper has succeeded in doing and that is truly worthy of praise. It was the Liberal Party that removed "Royal" from the titles of our navy and airforce back in the 1960's. They removed "royal" from quite a few titles back then. The opposition to these changes was led by John G. Diefenbaker and you can read what he had to say about it in Those Things We Treasure, a collection of some of his speeches, that was published by Macmillan in 1972.

The attitude of the Liberal leadership of the 1960's is reflected in the juvenile comments of columnists who have criticized ther Harper government for restoring the old titles. They have complained that it is a return to our "colonial past" and an insult to the millions of Canadians whose ancestors did not come from the United Kingdom. It never seems to occur to such people that it might be an insult to the millions of Canadians whose ancestors did come from the United Kingdom to remove all the symbolism that our country inherited from the UK. Nor does it seem to occur to them, that people who move to Canada from other parts of the world are making a deliberate choice to join a society that is a parliamentary monarchy that recognizes Queen Elizabeth as its sovereign, and that therefore the real insult to such people, is to profess to be speaking with their interests at heart when you abolish the traditional symbolism of the country they have chosen to join.

As for this nonsense about our "colonial past", Canada left that behind in 1867. That was the year we became a country. We chose the title "Dominion of Canada" for ourselves - it did not denote colonial status. Our Fathers of Confederation chose the term "Dominion" out of the Bible when the British pointed out to them that their original choice of title "Kingdom of Canada" might be offensive to the Americans. Our country's proudest moment was when we stood beside Great Britain in her war with Nazi Germany. We entered that war under our own Parliament's Declaration of War. It was the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force that fought against Hitler - under the Red Ensign, the flag that the Liberals two decades later would sniff at and condemn as a "colonial flag".

So Mr. Harper, I salute you. It may seem small to many but the restoration of the historic titles of our armed forces is a reconnection with the tradition our country was founded upon, the tradition which Liberals like Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau tried so hard to bury and replace. Reconnecting to our roots is a vital step in the restoration of our country. An excellent next step, speaking of Lester Pearson, would be to restore the honour of our military by ending the arrangement whereby they serve the interests of the increasingly corrupt United Nations.

Having praised Mr. Harper, it is now time for a negative note. Mark and Connie Fournier, the founders and administrators of the conservative internet message board Free Dominion, have been bravely fighting for freedom of speech for years. Yesterday they were informed that the Ontario Superior Court had denied their appeal in the John Does case. That is the case in which Richard Warman demanded that they turn over all information they have on 8 members who post under screen names at Free Dominion so that Warman might take legal action against those members for things they have said anonymously. As it currently stands, the Fourniers will have to turn the information over to Warman and pay his expenses. This is an unjust ruling. The Ontario Superior Court was and is wrong. The Fourniers have been harassed and persecuted and it is they who should have their expenses paid by the serial litigator who is suing them.

The situation will only get worse, however, if the Omnibus Crime Bill passes when Parliament resumes. Mr. Harper, after having undone one wrong the Liberals inflicted on our country, do not make another wrong worse.

This and That No. 15

My last essay, Christian Orthodoxy Versus the Gnostic Heresy of The Suicide Cult, was the final essay in my 2011 theological series. It is also the sequel I promised back in February to The Suicide Cult. This series has taken longer than I expected or wished to complete. I had planned on posting the final essay on Trinity Sunday. This is the Fifth Sunday after Trinity.

My next series of essays, on the topic of Arts and Culture, will begin with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. Before writing the review I intend to re-read it, although my most recent reading of it was less than half a year ago. I will start my next reading of Eliot's book once I am finished one of the books I am currently reading, Charles Williams' Descent into Hell. I am down to the last few pages of this book so I expect to be finished it, and starting on Eliot's book again tonight. I am also currently reading Simone Weil's Waiting for God and Paul Johnson's Art: A New History. I might review the latter in my Arts and Culture series.

Charles Williams is an author I have intended to read for quite some time but have until recently had difficulty finding copies of his works. I read his War in Heaven last week - which I recommend to anyone who likes C. S. Lewis' space trilogy. Williams was a friend of Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and was with them and a number of others part an informal club of sorts that met at a pub called the Bird and Baby to read and discuss their writings. Like Lewis and Tolkien he was a traditionalist Christian (he was orthodox Anglican) whose views are reflected in his books. He wrote seven novels in total. I hope to read the other five soon.

The news this weekend has been full of the tragic massacre and bombing in Norway. The newsmedia has been placing a great deal of emphasis upon the madman's blond hair and blue eyes. Ordinarily they try to under-emphasize the ethnicity of criminals and terrorists. I wonder why that is?

In case you failed to pick up on it that last question was written with a heavy dose of sarcasm. In this sick-minded murderer the "Great White Defendant" sought after by the Bronx D.A. in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities has finally materialized. He is a bit out of the Bronx D. A.'s jurisdiction however.

The media is reporting that the killer is a "Christian" even a "Christian fundamentalist". That is a curious way of describing someone who said "I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie", described himself as "pro-gay" and was apparently a Freemason. "Christian fundamentalist" appears to be a more inclusive label than we had previously realized.

Whatever the killer's religious views actually were this was, of course, a terrible tragedy and a horrible atrocity. Norway needs our prayers in this time of suffering.

Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion also continue to need our prayers as their legal battles against their persecutors continue. This past week their motion to dismiss the libel suit against them by left-wing blogger "Dr. Dawg" was heard. Dr. Dawg sued the Fourniers because one of their posters, the venerable Peter O'Donnell, called him a Taliban supporter or something to that effect over his position on the Omar Khadr case. If such name-calling now counts as libel, then surely countless people such as Free Dominion's Maikeru, who have been falsely labelled "Nazis" by Dr. Dawg in the past have a case for a libel suit against him. So, for that matter, do I. Dr. Dawg called me an "apartheid supporter". I have declared on many occasions, my sympathy for the Afrikaner people, my disgust with the dishonorable and cowardly Western governments that betrayed the Afrikaners and forced them into their present plight, and my absolute contempt for the ANC, their Communist ideology, and the white-washed former leader of their militant wing the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela. I never supported their policy of apartheid, however, which I considered unjust but also none of my business, none of the business of the self-righteous, progressive, do-gooder, busy-bodies who were determined to end it, and a lesser injustice to that which was brought about by the rise of the ANC. I suppose Dr. Dawg would call that a "distinction without a difference". Whatever. I have no intention of suing him and if he has any decency he will drop this silly lawsuit against the Fourniers.