Aftermath Reflections

The Canadian Dominion Election of 2019 is now over. Since disappointment consists of hopeful expectations being shattered I suppose my response to the results is one of disgust rather than disappointment. As I said in My Druthers prior to the election I did not expect it would turn out in the way in which I wanted.

The Grits, led by Captain Airhead, survived the election. They no longer have an absolute majority. They won 157 seats in the House of Commons, which is twenty less than they had when the last Parliament was dissolved and twenty seven less than they received in the last Dominion election. Most of the mainstream media are hailing this as a victory for Airhead. Andrew Coyne of the National Post, who is often more perceptive than the average MSM commentator, has argued to the contrary, that the Liberals “didn’t win the 2019 federal election, they just lost less than the Conservatives.” This is an interesting perspective, but I doubt that Captain Airhead himself sees it that way. Others have said that this reduction from majority to minority status will be a humbling experience for the Prime Minister. I think it is safe to say that it will be nothing of the sort. Trudeau has never shown the slightest capacity for learning from his mistakes. Having won the most seats, even after the Kokanee Grope, SNC-Lavalin, and blackface scandals, among his other huge embarrassments, he will be more insufferably smug and cocky than ever, and will treat his minority mandate as a blank cheque to do whatever he wants.

The ancient Greeks had a word that describes Trudeau’s attitude perfectly - ὕβρις. Hubris was an intense, overweening, pride, in defiance of the limitations of divine law, especially, at least as Aristotle describes it, by humiliating those one sees as his inferiors for his own pleasure. In Greek thought, hubris inevitably led to the destruction of those who practiced it. Nemesis, the dread daughter of Nyx, goddess of the night, was the figure whom their mythology assigned the task of wreaking divine vengeance upon the proud and arrogant. This concept was not limited to the pagan Greeks. In the Book of Proverbs it says “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” and the falls of both Satan and man illustrate the point. It may not have come this election, but eventually Trudeau’s arrogance will be his own undoing.

Of the three major parties, the biggest loss in this election was that of the New Democrats. They won only 24 seats, fifteen less than they had at dissolution and twenty less than they received four years ago. This is despite the fact that around the time of the blackface scandal the progressive media dumped Trudeau and threw all their resources into promoting the NDP and their leader Jagmeet Singh. Indeed, they even tried to make the blackface scandal all about Singh, as if Captain Airhead somehow owed Singh a personal apology for his clownish antics. There was, of course, no demand that he apologize to those whom he truly owed an apology, id est, all those whom he has himself labelled “racist” for disagreeing with his hyper-progressive, “woke” agenda. From this point on it was almost impossible to turn to any of the major news networks on television and not find Singh either giving an interview or speaking at some rally. Polling companies began reporting that Singh’s popularity was on the rise, and even the neo-conservative press got in on the action regurgitating the progressive talking point about how “likeable” Singh was, which, frankly, I never understood as I find the man to be quite unbearable. Despite all of this, the NDP ended up going down almost four percentage points in the popular vote which translated into a significant seat loss for them. I am not sorry to see this happen, even though it contributes to the Grits winning the plurality. It shows that the progressive media cartel’s ability to mold Canadian public opinion is not as infallible as is often assumed. It is also nice to see a man who has displayed contempt for the constitutional monarchy of the country he wants to lead and contempt for the customs and protocols of its Parliament fall flat on his face.

I have mentioned that the NDP went down almost four percentage points in the popular vote. The Grits went down almost six and a half percentage points. The Conservatives went up by two and a half points and, in fact, came out of the election with the largest percentage of the popular vote. Had Captain Airhead kept his 2015 election promise and brought in proportional representation the Conservatives, rather than the Liberals, would have won the plurality. This notwithstanding, I still support the traditional first-past-the-post, for the reasons I have given in the past. The principle of having Members of Parliament represent the actual realities of particular locations (first-past-the-post) rather than the fictional construct of partisan percentages (proportional representation) outweighs, for me, my preferences with regards to the outcome of elections.

Andrew Scheer and the leadership of the Conservative Party are undoubtedly now asking themselves how they failed to defeat an incumbent Prime Minister who seemed to be hell-bent on self-destruction. They will be hearing an awful lot of misguided, foolish, and downright wrong answers to this question from the mainstream media. For what it may be worth, the following is my answer to the same question.

First, in this election the Conservatives relied far too much on the hope that other parties – the NDP, Greens, and the Bloc – would draw votes and seats away from the Liberals instead of focusing on presenting a superior alternative to the Liberals and thus increasing their own percentage of the vote. This is a bad strategy, and in the end the “orange wave” did not materialize, the Greens gained only one seat, and the revival of the Bloc was not large enough.

Second, the Conservatives attempted to sell their leader, Andrew Scheer, to the public as a fiscally responsible, average Canadian husband and father, who would be a more reliable alternative than the irresponsible, privileged and cosmopolitan Trudeau. Their efforts to do so were undermined because Scheer contradicted the image they were trying to present with his own evasiveness. Consider the way he answered questions about his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. I have seen several commentators suggest that Scheer’s answers hurt him because he failed to dispel the fears of those with liberal opinions on these subjects that he was secretly pining to turn Canada into the kind of theocratic caricature that can be found in the pages of a bad Margaret Atwood novel. This is nonsense. His answers hurt him, not because the electorate was afraid of someone whose opinions deviate from the politically correct party line of the Liberals but because they were evasive rather than straightforward. Evasiveness is not a quality that suggests trustworthiness but rather the opposite. This is why all of the scandals the progressive media raised over Scheer – his insurance broker career before politics, his dual citizenship, the bizarre last minute allegations that he hired Warren Kinsella to wage a smear campaign against Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party – hurt him more than the sexual harassment, corruption, and racism scandals hurt Trudeau. They struck at the very quality on which the Conservatives were trying to sell Scheer to the public. Worse, they did so in a way that turned the Canadian public’s conservative instincts, which the Conservatives needed in order to win, against Scheer. Trudeau may be the devil, but as the old adage and the Kylie Minogue song say “better the devil you know.” Scheer could not afford an image of anything less than 100% straightforward honesty.

Every time that the Conservative Party has lost an election in the past, it has been beset with counsellors offering the advice that their platform was too right-wing and that they needed to move to the centre. Their having listened to this bad advice so often in the past is one of the reasons that the centre has moved so far to the left. This time these advisors will be pointing to the People’s Party and saying “see, they ran on a platform considerably to the right, and failed to win a single seat, lost even the seat of their leader Maxime Bernier, and won a mere 1.6% of the popular vote.” The exact opposite of this is true. The Conservative Party cannot win elections by moving further to the centre and helping move the centre further to the left. The only message this sends is that the Conservatives have nothing to offer that is different from the Liberals and the other progressive parties. Canadians have no good reason to vote for a Conservative party that offers only centrist, progressive, liberal, and leftist policies. The fact that Maxime Bernier was unable to sell the public on a more right-of-centre set of policies does not mean that the Conservatives would similarly fail. They will never be able to sell right-of-centre policies to the Canadian public, however, if they do not try, and certainly not if they continue to undermine themselves by wasting their resources in the sponsorship of progressive, anti-racist, attacks on those further to the right.

One thing that the outcome of this election shows is the foolishness of the proposal that the CBC seemed to be seriously pondering last Friday, namely the lowering of the voting age to 16. What we ought to be considering is the opposite of this – raising the voting age. Wisdom is the most desirable quality in an electorate, enthusiasm and idealism are the least desirable qualities. As a general rule, the former increases with greater maturity while the latter decreases. This same point can also be demonstrated by noting the most obvious example of foreign interference in the election, the way the wealthy foreigners, probably mostly American, who wish to sabotage Western Canada’s energy industry, brought an ignorant teenage twit over from Sweden and sent her and her crowds of adulating youthful fans, even more clueless than her, on a celebrity tour that not-coincidentally coincided with the election.

Things are looking extremely grim for the Western energy industry now as Rex Murphy has superbly explained in his post-election remarks in the National Post. The talk of Alberta or even Western separatism – “Wexit” – began pretty much the moment the outcome was declared. This talk of separation disgusts me as much as the election results that provoked it and reminds me of nothing so much as the way Hollywood liberals respond every time the Democrats lose the White House. As much as I admired the late Doug Christie in his role as a crusader for freedom of thought and speech I never had any use for his Western Canada Concept and all of this talk of breaking up Confederation and forming a – ugh – republic, makes me want to puke. The blame for the revival of Western separatism, however, belongs entirely to that smug, arrogant, filius canis, who is willing to sacrifice the economy of an entire region of the Dominion in order to win the accolades of eco-socialists around the world.

God save the Queen – including from Her Prime Minister – and Heaven Bless the Maple Leaf forever!

Obnoxious Self-Righteous Jerks versus Basic Human Decency

The late Fred Phelps was a man who earned for himself the reputation of being a jerk. Not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, jerk, either, but a jerk on such a scale that the character which Denis Leary portrayed in the song “Asshole” from his 1993 album No Cure For Cancer had absolutely nothing on him. It is not just that the founder and “pastor” of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas disavowed the conventional Christian wisdom that God hates the sin but loves the sinner and that we ought to do the same in favour of an extreme five-point Calvinism that proclaimed God’s literal hatred for certain people. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, the way he choose to publicize his message. It requires an astonishing level of low-life creepiness to intrude upon the grief of people who are mourning the loss of a loved one by picketing a funeral. Indeed, perhaps the kindest thing that can be said in Mr. Phelp’s favour, is that he never – at least to the best of my knowledge – took it a step further and attempted to prevent the funerals he picketed from taking place.

As we shall see in a moment, that cannot be said of certain other people. First, however, let us consider just how contrary to the wisdom of the ages this sort of thing actually is.

Of the ancient Greek poets, none was more inspiring and influential than Homer, the epic poet of the eighth century BC. The most important of his works was the Iliad the story of which is set in the last year of the Trojan War. The many different conflicts and intrigues that take place among gods and men over the course of the poem’s twenty four books are tied together by the poem’s theme, identified in its very first line: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος “Sing goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” At the beginning of the poem, that wrath is directed against Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the leader of the Greek forces. Achilles, in his anger withdraws his Myrmidons from the war. His mother Thetis secures from Zeus the promise that the tide of the war will go against the Greeks until Agamemnon gives Achilles the honour he deserves and he returns to the war. When the Trojans are on the verge of burning the Greek ships, Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus obtains his permission to lead the Myrmidon army back into the battle. Wearing Achilles’ own armour, Patroclus is mistaken for Achilles and, ignoring the latter’s instructions to fight only in defence of the ships, he drives the Trojans back to their city where he is killed by the crown prince of Troy, Hector. At this point Achilles’ wrath turns from Agamemnon to Hector, and he re-enters the war himself, lays waste to the Trojan forces, and eventually kills Hector. Then, however, Achilles takes his wrath too far. Rather than turn the body of Hector over to the Trojans for proper burial, he ties it to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Ilium. This is in violation of the laws of the gods but he continues to do this until his mother arrives from Olympus with a message from Zeus telling him in no uncertain terms to knock it off. So rebuked, Achilles turns the body over to Hector’s father, King Priam, when he, smuggled by Hermes into the Greek camp, pleads for it, and assures Priam that he will make the Greeks abide by an armistice that will allow Priam sufficient time to bury Hector with all the proper honours.

The idea that it is against divine law to refuse a proper burial even to an enemy recurs in the Antigone, one of three surviving tragedies by fifth century BC playwright Sophocles that deal with the curse that Oedipus brings upon himself and his city, Thebes, by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. After Oedipus learned the truth, blinded himself, and went into exile one of his sons, Eteocles, drove the other, Polynices, into exile. The latter found refuge in Argos where he married the daughter of king Adrastus who then supported him in an expedition against Eteocles in Thebes. In the course of the battle, both brothers were killed. Creon, Oedipus’ uncle/brother-in-law was then made king of Thebes and he decreed that Eteocles was to be fully honoured, but Polynices was to be left to rot, imposing capital punishment upon anyone who defied this edict. This is where the Antigone begins for the title character, daughter of Oedipus, refuses to obey the edict and performs the burial rites for her brother. Although he is warned by the seer Tiresias, Creon persists in defying the law of the gods and orders Antigone to be buried alive. Divine judgement falls upon him in the loss of his own house, as his son Haemon who had been betrothed to Antigone kills himself in anger and grief, to be followed into suicide immediately thereafter by his mother Eurydice.

That one ought not to interfere with the proper burial even of those who were your enemies was evidently an idea that the Greeks felt rather strongly about. The Romans had a saying, de mortuus nil nisi bonum dicendum est – “about the dead, nothing except good, must be spoken” – which, while not entirely the same concept, nevertheless indicates a sort of consensus among the ancients, that the grievances we have against people in their lives ought to be buried with them in the grave and must not be allowed to interfere with the duty owed by the living to the dead.

There are some here in Canada today, I am sorry to say, who disagree with the wisdom of the ancients and have recently shown it in actions that make Fred Phelps look classy by comparison. It is not merely the ancient tradition dictating respect for the dead and mourning that they have disregarded, however, in their recent attempts to shut down a memorial service for an Ontario lawyer, but some of the most foundational principles of our system of justice. Their indecorous posthumous vendetta against this woman is based entirely upon who her clients were. One of the fundamental principles of our system of justice is that it is better for the guilty to escape punishment than for the innocent to be unjustly condemned. This too is a principle with ancient antecedents. Socrates argument against Polus in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer wrong than to commit it is one example, Abraham’s negotiations with God over the fate of the righteous in the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis is another. Upon this foundation rest such other basic principles as the right of the accused to confront his accuser and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Imagine what would happen to these principles if we were to allow the precedent to be established that defence advocates are to be treated as participants in the guilt of their clients.

If that were not bad enough in this case the lawyer’s clients were not people accused of crimes that are universally recognized as such – murder, robbery, rape and the like – but rather of thought crimes.

There is a backstory to all of this that goes back several decades. For a long time certain groups lobbied Parliament to have laws against “hate literature” passed. NB that hate literature does not mean literature that literally expresses hatred of the “I hate you, you lousy rotten sonuvabitch, I wish you were dead” type but rather literature that portrays racial and religious groups in a negative light. Unless, that is, the racial and religious groups are whites or Christians. In the 1960s, Lester Pearson appointed a committee to look into this and in 1971 Pierre Trudeau, who had been a member of that committee, added Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause, to the Criminal Code. Those who wanted these laws were still unsatisfied, because those charged under this law were entitled to the full protection of the rights of a defendant and so Trudeau passed the Canadian Human Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in 1977 and this included Section 13 that defined the communication via telephone of anything “likely to” expose a member of a protected group to “hatred or contempt” as a discriminatory act. Later Jean Chretien would add Section 13 b) that extended this to all electronic communication to cover the internet as well. Since the Canadian Human Rights Act is considered civil rather than criminal law it was much easier to charge and convict people under this law than under Section 318.

For anyone acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes or with the body of literature by authors such as Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that shone a light on the nature of such regimes the outcome of these laws will be chillingly familiar. A list of prohibited books was drawn up which were seized at customs and removed from libraries, public and academic. About a decade after these laws were passed widely publicized show trials of a handful of individuals accused of this new form of crimethink were held. The press tried these individuals in the court of a public opinion which they manufactured by making these individuals the subjects of a two-minute hate but remained largely mute about the much larger number of people who were being dragged before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals under Section 13.

That would change, of course, in the late 2000s when two magazines with national circulation were charged under the provincial equivalents of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hoist with its own petard, the media which had stood by and said nothing while Section 13 was used to ruin the lives of Canadians for daring to express forbidden thoughts, but now aware of the threat to its own freedom, began to report on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case to be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The light this shed on Section 13 and the shady behaviour of the Canadian Human Rights Commission generated enough of a backlash that Conservative MP Brian Storseth was able to garner sufficient support in Parliament for a bill that brought about the repeal of Section 13. Nevertheless, there is much more work that needs to be done to completely rollback this Soviet-style thought control and recover the atmosphere of freedom that Canadians used to know and which our Common Law birthright as subjects of the Crown.

In this fight for traditional Canadian freedoms against this kind of soft totalitarianism those who deserve the most honour are those who stood up against it from the beginning. It is one thing to speak out when someone tries to censor MacLean’s magazine. The true test of commitment to freedom of conscience, thought, and speech is when you dare to speak out when they go after an Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, or John Ross Taylor. This is a point that Pastor Martin Niemöller would certainly have understood. Foremost among those who demonstrated such commitment were BC lawyer Doug Christie and his long-time associate Barbara Kulaszka of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Although Christie, who passed away four years ago, was the better known of the two, Kulaszka had been a key figure in the fight for free speech from the beginning, when she worked alongside Christie in the Zündel case back in the 1980s. She passed away from cancer this year on the fifteenth of June.

The Canadian Association for Free Expression rented space in the Richview Public Library in Toronto for the purpose of holding a memorial service for Kulaszka last Wednesday. When word of this got out several individuals and organizations placed pressure on the Toronto Public Library system to cancel the event and a number of newspapers and other media outlets expressed manufactured outrage when the library, to its credit, refused to do this. Keep in mind that this was a memorial service – an occasion for those who had known Kulaszka, had worked with her, and whom she had defended in court, to remember her and pay her public tribute. It was not, despite the dishonest way in which it has been reported in many media sources, something akin to a Klan rally.

Overlooked and ignored by Kulaszka’s detractors is the fact that while many of her clients are said to have expressed admiration for Nazism and the Third Reich and questioned the accuracy of the crimes and atrocities attributed to it – I use the words “said to” because hate speech laws by their very nature are intended to prevent us from having access to what the thought criminal has actually said and to force us to rely upon the word of hate speech experts, themselves extremely hostile to the thought criminals, to tell us what they think and say - in fighting on their behalf against those who sought to penalize them for their ideas she was fighting, not for the ideology of National Socialism, but for the principles of freedom and justice that belong to the tradition of Great Britain and the Commonwealth – the countries that went to war to defeat Nazism. It is this desire to silence people with laws that penalize them for their thoughts and words that lies behind the hate laws that Kulaszka fought against which is akin to the spirit of the totalitarianism that was Nazism, not her brave and dedicated efforts to fight this tyranny.

So who are these people who are so utterly lacking in class as to begrudge Kulaszka her memorial?

Well, there are the politicians of course. John Tory, the present mayor of Hogtown, and Toronto City Councillors James Pasternak and John Campbell all gave quotes to the media expressing their dismay over the library’s decision to allow the memorial. Politicians being what they are it is reasonable to suspect that if the media had taken the opposite approach to the story they would have been quoted as supporting the library’s decision. So take their words for the nothing they are worth.

Then there are the usual suspects – the professional anti-bigots. Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, and Warren Kinsella were all on hand to vent their impotent rage at the library that actually dared to defy their edict as to who should or should not be allowed to rent public facilities for a memorial service. It is easy to see why these three are so upset. Warman, whom the media describe as a “human rights lawyer”, is a former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission who went on to become the complainant in the vast majority of Section 13 cases. Farber was the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress until it was swallowed up by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs about six years ago. The CJC was the chief organization that lobbied for hate literature laws before the Liberals acquiesced and while this was before Farber’s time as CEO he was himself an avid supporter of hate laws throughout his career. Kinsella, lawyer, Liberal Party strategist, and political commentator, has also been an outspoken advocate of hate laws over the years. It is people like this, who have devoted their lives to the cause of fighting views that they perceive to be bigotry, who, blinded by their zeal, seem incapable of distinguishing between lawyers and their clients or understanding that those who hold the views they object to do not thereby forfeit their rights.

Smug, soulless, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, they see no need for showing the basic human decency of allowing their opponents to mourn their dead in peace, and so they have been carrying on with the lack of class we have come to associate with Westboro Baptist Church. Is it that surprising, therefore, to learn that Fred Phelps in his first career, before starting Westboro Baptist Church, was a lawyer who specialized in racial discrimination cases?

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.

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought

This essay is dedicated to the late Douglas H. Christie Jr., who passed away Monday, March 11, 2013.   Mr. Christie championed the cause of freedom of speech, both as the lawyer who defended James Keegstra, Ernst Zundel, Malcolm Ross, and virtually everyone else who has been charged with a “hate crime” over the things they said in the last three decades, and as the founder of the Canadian Free Speech League.

Liberalism, which became the dominant political ideology in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was wrong about a great many things.   It was also right about a number of things.   It tended to be wrong – extremely wrong – about first principles and what we might call “the big picture”.   Its view of human nature, the nature of and relationship between the individual person and society,  the relationship between religion, state, and society, the source of suffering, injustice, and other evils in the world, and of history, were completely and totally wrong.  It was in the realm of applied politics that liberalism produced its best ideas.

There is a reason for this.  The ideology of liberalism had two parents.  One of these was the English political tradition that had developed over more than a thousand years.  The other was the Enlightenment project.  The English political tradition and the Enlightenment project were not sympathetic to each other.  Indeed, they were mortal enemies.  The English tradition had evolved as part of the larger tradition of medieval Christendom.   Indeed, as Christopher Dawson explained in The Formation of Christendom, the founders of the English tradition had been very important in the development of the larger tradition. (1)   The Enlightenment project, however, was the sworn enemy of all things medieval and Christian.  It’s roots go back to Renaissance humanism (2), which sought to revive classical civilization after what it considered to be the dearth of culture and civilization in the Middle Ages (3).   The architects of the Enlightenment regarded religion in general and Christianity in particular, especially Christianity as an organized, public, institution, as the enemy of human reason, knowledge, creativity, and happiness, and sought to establish a secular society, in which religion would be entirely private and personal.  In such a society and only in such a society, the Enlightenment philosophers believed, could man, guided by reason and science, escape the suffering and evil which had plagued him from time immemorial and build a better and brighter future for himself.

So how did these two radically different sources come together to produce liberalism?

The best explanation of it that I know of is found in the essay “Rationalism in Politics” by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was Professor of Government at the London School of Economics.(4) Ever since the Renaissance, Oakeshott explained, Western thought has gradually come to be permeated by modern rationalism. This modern kind of rationalism reduced human knowledge to technical knowledge, i.e., knowledge that can be expressed as a formula and written down. This, however, was a kind of intellectual impoverishment because technical knowledge represents only a fraction of human knowledge. A tradition of thought contains much knowledge that is valuable but which cannot be formulated as technical knowledge. Rationalism strips a tradition of this knowledge, abbreviating it and reducing it to its technical elements, thereby producing an ideology. As an example of this, he pointed to the political ideology contained in the writings of John Locke, as what you get when the English political tradition is reduced by rationalism to an ideology.

This was the genesis of liberalism, of which John Locke was the father.   The English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   Or, to be more precise, one side of the English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   For in the seventeenth century, in a conflict stemming from the English Reformation of the century before that, the English tradition had split into two warring sides.  One side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Tories after the Restoration, sought to preserve the ancient constitution of church and state, the traditional prerogatives of the monarch, and the organic connection via apostolic episcopal succession of the Church of England with the early Catholic Church.   The other side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Whigs after the Restoration, consisted of radicals who wished to subvert the constitution, seize the powers of government for the House of Commons, and eliminate the remaining links between the Anglican Church and medieval Catholicism.  The Tories, in other words, emphasized the elements of the English tradition that connected it to the larger tradition of medieval Christendom, whereas the Whigs sought to purge the English tradition of those elements.   The Revolution of 1689 was the ultimate triumph of the Whigs.   John Locke was a Whig, and liberalism was his rationalist abridgement of a tradition that had already been whittled down by his party’s century long attempts to severe its roots in medieval Christendom.

Neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described the Enlightenment project as an “attempt to discover an independent rational justification for morality.” (5)  In the case of English classical liberalism it was more an attempt to discover an independent rational justification for the common law and constitution of Great Britain, at least in the form they would take when the modifications the Whigs were undertaking at the time Locke was writing were complete.   Thus liberalism’s inheritance from the Enlightenment project was a set of theories that provided arguments justifying English laws and government that did not depend upon the Christian tradition in which those laws and government evolved.   Liberalism’s grossest errors arise out of these theories. (6)

If liberalism’s theories were tainted by Enlightenment rationalism, they were at least developed to justify good laws and a good constitution. The Whigs had modified the English tradition and constitution, but they had not obliterated them, and so classical liberalism often argued for rights, freedoms, and laws, that had their source in the pre-Modern, Christian English tradition.

In developing their rationalist case for a constitution, laws, rights and liberties that had evolved within the Medieval Christian tradition, the liberals occasionally hit upon a brilliant and worthwhile principle or ideal. The most important of these were the closely related ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Freedom of speech is the idea that a person should be free to express the thoughts that are on his mind in whatever words he so chooses and that he should not be silenced or penalized over the content of what he says. Freedom of thought or opinion is the idea that a person should be free to use his own faculties of reason and observation to come to his own views and conclusions. These two freedoms are inseparably intertwined.

The classical liberal argument for freedom of speech and thought was penned by liberal and utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill, as part of his famous treatise on the civil liberty of the individual.     On Liberty was first published in 1859 and it was a liberal essay from start to finish.   The wrongheaded ideas of liberalism are on prominent display within it from the first page, indeed from the first sentence in which Mill declared his subject to be “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Mill thought of liberty and authority as being in perpetual conflict, of non-democratic governments as the antagonists of their subjects, and of civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks as things which patriots had to wring from the hands of the authorities by force.   All of these ideas arise out of the all too human spirit of suspicion of and rebellion against authority, which Whiggery made into a virtue, but which St. John declared to be the very essence of sin, (7) justifying Dr. Johnson’s remark that “the first Whig was the devil.”

Nevertheless, Mill had some good insights. He went on to talk about how liberals had grown dissatisfied with civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks and balances and how they had demanded that government power be placed in the hands of elected and temporary governors, but that many of them had come to think that with this new form of “popular government” that was supposed to embody the voice of the people, they could abandon civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks on the sovereign power because these things would now be a hindrance rather than a help. Reflecting upon what this line of thinking had produced in France at the end of the previous century, but also unconsciously anticipating the direction liberalism would take in the English-speaking world a century after his own time, Mill rejected this line of thinking and argued for the necessity of civil rights and freedoms and limitations on government power under any form of government, warning against the “tyranny of the majority.”

In his second chapter, entitled “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”, Mill articulated the basic concepts of freedom of thought and speech. He wrote of freedom of these freedoms as things long and well established in his own day, as indeed, they were. As he put it:

[S]peaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.

What, however, if there was a government that truly was completely in tune with its people, that spoke with their voice, and only exercised power in accordance with their will?


Even then, Mill declared, it would be wrong for that government to try and control the expression of thought. The people did not have the right to do so, nor did any government good or bad, because “the power itself is illegitimate”. In one of his most memorable statements, Mill declared freedom of thought and speech to be absolutely, not to be limited by government, society or the people under any circumstances:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

This is a powerful assertion.  Mill argued, in favour of his position, that to silence an opinion is to rob mankind, and especially those who disagree with the opinion, because if it is right and they are wrong, they lose the opportunity to be corrected, whereas if it is wrong and they are right, they lose the confidence and certainty in the truth that comes from it having coming into conflict with and triumphed over opposing errors.   Over the course of the chapter he expanded this argument into four basic supporting points – that a silenced opinion might be true, it being an assertion of one’s own infallibility to claim otherwise, that the conventional view is seldom if ever the whole truth, that even if the conventional opinion is the whole truth people will accept it as a mere prejudice without understanding the reasons it is true apart from conflict with opposing views, and that people will give mere lip service to the truth apart from any real conviction in the absence of a free debate.

While many of the things Mill wrote in the course of making this case for free speech are questionable, the main idea that comes across, that the truth is better off for being allowed to compete with error in free discussion and is weakened by the suppression of dissent, rings true.

It is a great irony that Mill, in laying down the intellectual foundation for absolute freedom of thought and speech, was championing the cause of liberalism against its sworn foe – religion and religious orthodoxy.   The irony lies in the fact that freedom of speech and thought may ultimately prove to be the means of the preservation of religious orthodoxy, while liberalism evolved in the twentieth century into the archenemy of freedom of speech and thought.

Liberalism thought of religion, especially organized public religion, as the enemy of freedom.   This was in part due to real abuses of religious authority within Christendom in the late centuries of the Middle Ages, but also because of liberalism’s individualistic orientation.  Liberalism conceived of freedom in strictly individualistic terms.  Religion, on the other hand, was and is a community institution that serves a social purpose.

Religion is not, as some evangelical Protestants have grown accustomed to saying, “man’s attempt to reach God”.   The term  religion comes from the Latin word religio, which means reverence for the sacred.   Religio was itself believed to be derived from the verb religare, which means “to bind fast”. (8)   This etymology points to the social function of religion as the institution which connects the members of a community to one another and to the sacred..  Religion does this by means of shared beliefs and rituals which, because they are passed down from one generation to another, are able to connect past, future, and present generations of a community into an organic whole. (9)   This is also the role of culture, which is why, as a myriad of commentators including Christopher Dawson and T. S. Eliot have pointed out, religion is the heart and soul of culture.

Liberals like Locke and Mill, obsessed with the individual, have never fully appreciated the importance of the community, or of the essential social function of religion within the community and the larger society.  Thus they fail to appreciate the importance of orthodoxy, apart from which religion could not perform its function.   Orthodoxy, which means “right belief”, is a religion’s definition, as a community of faith, of what its essential shared beliefs are.   If a religion did not identify a set of core beliefs as its orthodoxy, it could not create a sense of organic oneness between those who share its beliefs.

While there is tension between orthodoxy, the right of religion as a community to define what its common beliefs are, and freedom of thought and speech, the right of the individual to dissent from the community and think his own thoughts, the two do not necessarily contradict each other. Indeed, if the religious community in defining a set of beliefs as orthodox and the individual in drawing his own conclusions are both guided by the ideal of what is true, there is reason to hope that the relationship between the two might be one of harmony rather than opposition. In fact, by Mill’s own arguments, free discussion should strengthen orthodoxy, by clarifying the reasons behind orthodox beliefs and deepening the believer’s convictions.


Of the rationalist, Michael Oakeshott wrote “And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics.” (10) The importance of this insight cannot be underestimated. Tradition, which includes everything that a community, society, or civilization passes down through the generations, including its religious orthodoxy, is a living thing, which like all living things, is a combination of change and constancy. From birth to death, a living organism remains the same being, but it also undergoes changes. Some of these changes, such as natural growth and the replenishing of dying cells, are necessary to sustain the life of the organism, whereas others, such as severe disease or injury can cripple or even kill the organism. The same is true of a tradition, and while liberals believed that the ideas that would arise in a free discussion would kill tradition by emancipating the individual, they may also be the fresh ideas that will keep the tradition alive.

Whichever is the case, liberalism itself has become noted for the inflexibility that Oakeshott rightly said was the attribute of ideology.   In the twentieth century it became itself the enemy of freedom of thought and religion as, in pursuit of the next stage of what it considered to be social progress, it demanded that certain ideas and forms of speech be driven from polite society.   In the phenomenon that has come to be known as “political correctness”, liberals have insisted that language they consider to be offensive to racial minorities – regardless of whether or not the racial minorities themselves consider it to be offensive – be banned, that the structure of the English language be altered to be “gender inclusive”, and that ethnic humour, unless directed at one’s own ethnic group (or against whites) be forbidden.   More disturbingly, liberals have demanded that major academic disciplines including the sciences, adhere to the egalitarian doctrines they are currently obsessed with.   Worst of all, they have in some places, including Canada at both the federal and provincial levels, introduced laws that define the expression of certain thoughts as criminal acts or as acts of discrimination that make the speaker liable to expensive civil lawsuits.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief the rascally adventurer Basil Seal, having fled England and his mother’s attempt to impose respectability and responsibility upon him, and arrived in Azania, where his Oxford friend Seth has just been crowned emperor, agrees to help Seth modernize his empire with disastrous consequences.  “You know”, he remarks to the emperor “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…”  In response the emperor asks “What is all that?” to which Seal replies “Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.” (11)

  So, it would seem, freedom of thought and speech, have ceased to be liberal. The kind of thinking that Mill identified as being common in continental liberalism in his own day and which was represented in England by Jeremy Bentham in the generation prior to his own, in which constitutional rights, freedoms, and protections are regarded as hindrances to progress when the government is democratic has eclipsed Locke’s and Mill’s emphasis on personal liberty to become the mainstream of liberal thought.

In defense of their new position, some liberals make a distinction between what they call “hate speech” and “free speech”. Hate speech, they maintain, is not covered by Mill’s arguments for freedom of speech, because it has no value and would not be “robbing the human race” of anything. It is not the expression of a thought, right or wrong, they say, but a verbal assault upon “vulnerable” groups like racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and homosexuals.

The first clue that something is wrong with this reasoning is that the hate speech liberals believe should be suppressed may be true.   Liberals have argued that those accused of hate speech should not be allowed to present evidence that what they have said is in fact true in their defence.   What matters, they claim, is that the speech has the effect of casting negative aspersions on a group that hate speech laws are designed to protect.   It makes no difference if the speech is true.  Hence the wording of the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which declares speech to be defamatory if it is “likely to expose” members of protected groups “to hatred or contempt” and the ruling by the Supreme Court in the John Ross Taylor case that “truth is no defense”. 

The second clue that that distinction between hate speech and free speech is spurious can be found when we look at what is considered to be hate speech.  What is hate speech, anyway?  Actually saying “I hate you” to someone does not seem to be prohibited by any existing hate speech law.  Attempting to prove that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War II was less than six million, by contrast, is prohibited by hate speech laws.   Surely there must be something terribly wrong with a theory that justifies the suppression of speech that contains hate, but allows expressions of actual emotional hate, while silencing those who claim that Hitler only murdered five million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine Jews.

The final clue that something is wrong with hate speech laws is the expanding nature of the definition of hate speech. At first, when hate speech laws were introduced, they were used against people who had extremely marginal views and few defenders. Today it is not uncommon to hear expressions of Christian opposition to the deliberate taking of the life of the unborn or of the Christian doctrine that sexual intercourse outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful denounced as hateful, no matter how much the Christian may say that we are to hate only the sin but love the sinner.

What we can see in all of this is that laws against hate speech are not really exceptions to the arguments Mill made for freedom of speech but examples of the very thing he was arguing against, the social engineering of public opinion by democratic governments.

Whatever else the classical liberalism of men like Mill may have gotten wrong, at least their concept of absolute freedom of thought and speech was superior to this.

(1)   Christopher Dawson, The Formation of Christendom, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), especially chapter eleven (pp. 165-177) and chapter thirteen (pp. 190-213).  In chapter eleven, Dawson describes how the Celtic monasticism of St. Columba and St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and the Benedictine monasticism of St. Augustine of Canterbury had planted a Christian culture in Northumbria and Kent respectively, and how out of this culture arose men like St. Bede “the real father of medieval history” and St. Boniface the evangelist of northern Europe.   In chapter thirteen he describes how Alfred the Great of Wessex, while the Vikings were wiping out these monasteries in the north, preserved the Christian culture they had founded in the south,  and “found time to think out afresh the problems of Christian education and to lay with his own hands the foundations of a Christian vernacular culture.”       

(2)   Richard M. Weaver traced its roots further back, to the nominalism of William of Ockham in the thirteenth century, in his Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).   Weaver saw the nominalist break with Christian Platonism by rejecting the reality of the forms as the start of the unraveling of the Christian worldview of an order of being descending from God.   Interestingly, Christopher Dawson, through a different line of reasoning, also traced the origin of the breakdown of the unity of medieval Christendom to Ockham, in  The Dividing of Christendom (London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1965), pp. 24-25, 27.

(3)   Robert Nisbet in Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 261, wote “The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century is unique among ages of claimed cultural efflorescence, or so-called golden ages, in that it is almost entirely the product of egocentric illusion.  The century was barely under way when the Italian humanists began to celebrate what they called, with consummate impudence, the eta moderna, the modern age, the age of renewal of civilization, after the long dark night of the church-dominated millennium, the medium aevum, that separated them from classical civilization.   They were destined, the humanists believed, to terminate the murk of scholasticism by calculated revival of Greek and Roman ideas, style, dress and ceremonies.  On the basis of this revival, they would bury medieval culture and at the same time build imperishably to the future.   They and they only were the true heirs of Plato and Aristotle and also the architects of the future of Europe.”   This attitude towards itself and toward medieval Christian civilization, which Nisbet went on to mercilessly tear to shreds, is the attitude, taken to the nth degree by Voltaire and Diderot, became the foundational view of the world and history of the Enlightenment project.

(4)   This essay was first published in the first volume of the Cambridge Journal in 1947.  It was later republished as the first and titular essay in a collection of his writings entitled Rationalism in Politics: And Other Essays (London: Metheun Publishing, 1962), Oakeshott’s second and best known book.

(5)   Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2^nd edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 1984) p. 39.

(6)   Locke, for example, in his Two Treatises Of Government borrowed the theory of the social contract from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.   In this theory, man in his “natural state” is an individual rather than a member of a society, and society is an artificial construction of man, external to his nature, formed by compacts made between individuals.   This in itself is obviously wrong.  It is the opposite of what is observable all around us. Human beings are born into their families, communities, and larger societies and that their individuality is something that gradually develops. Man is a social animal by nature, hence the same basic social institutions recur, albeit in different forms, wherever there are people, in every place and time. While some social relationships – friendship, business partnership, and recently marriage, are entered into voluntarily – many of the most fundamental social relationships, such as those between father and son, mother and daughter, and brother and sister, are not voluntary at all but are permanent relationships defined by blood.  As wrong-headed as social contract theory is – except for Edmund Burke’s version of an “eternal contract” written by God Himself – Locke made it even more unrealistic when he modified Hobbes’ version to fit his liberalism (if Locke’s writings put forth an “independent rational justification” for the Whig interpretation of the English political tradition, reducing it to an ideology, Hobbes’ writings could be said to have done the same for the Royalist/Tory interpretation of the English political tradition) .   Hobbes recognized what human beings in the absence of law, government, or society, would actually be like – a war of all against all.  Locke rejected this “bellum omnium contra omnes” view of man outside society – as he rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of Original Sin – in favour of an optimistic view of human nature as being basically cooperative and good.

(7)   “he hamartia estin he anomia”, 1 John 3:4

(8)  Lactantius, for example, asserted this derivation in his Divine Institutes.

(9)  Religion, of course, cannot be reduced to just its social function.  This is particularly true, I would add, of Christianity, which is built on the foundation of God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, as St. Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 12, Christianity, does perform the social function of a religion, by binding its members into an organic community, the Church.

(10) Oakeshott, op. cit.

(11) Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1932], 1962), p. 128.

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.

The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada

Five years ago, the Conservative Party of Canada was elected to a minority government and its leader Stephen Harper became the twenty-second Prime Minister of Canada. Many conservative Canadians, including this writer, hoped that a Conservative government might do something to reverse the loss of free speech that has taken place in our country over the last few decades beginning with the Liberal premiership of Pierre Eliot Trudeau. Such hopes were quickly dashed to pieces. In Harper’s years as Prime Minister with a minority government he made no attempt to curb the threat to our freedom of thought and speech posed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Instead, as we will see, he made the problem worse.

Some Canadian conservatives, loyal to Harper, believed that this was only because of his minority position. If he ever achieved a majority government, they argued, he would govern according to conservative principles and the threat of the Canadian Human Rights Commission would be ended once and for all. On May 2, 2011, Stephen Harper achieved his majority government. In his campaign, he promised that within 100 days of his election, he would see passed an Omnibus Crime Bill. This Bill contains legislation aimed at eliminating “house arrest” as a soft-option penalty for serious crimes, establishing stricter sentences including mandatory jail time for certain offences, and basically making it easier for the police to do their jobs. Hidden within this Bill, however, are laws which pose a serious threat to whatever remaining freedom of thought and speech, Canadians have left.

One of those laws, for example, if passed will make everybody who posts a link on the internet responsible for the content of the site to which they have linked. If the site contains an article that is deemed to be “hate speech” by the absurd and draconian laws against “hate” that the Liberal Party saddled us with, then you will be guilty of a hate crime for linking to the site, even if you linked to a different article.

We will shortly take a look at how Canada arrived at this place. First, however, we need to be clear on what free speech is and why it is important.

WHAT IS FREE SPEECH?

Some people seem to think that free speech means “the right to say anything you want, anywhere you want, at any time you want, under any possible circumstances”. They then point out that there are laws limiting such a right which nobody ever objects to, such as laws against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre. They reason, therefore, that if we do not object to laws of that nature, we should have no objection to laws limiting free speech in another way, by for example outlawing the distribution of “hate speech” on the internet.

Other people seem to think that free speech means “the right to disrupt other people’s lives”. Suppose for example, that a psychologist who has written a controversial paper about how the influence of the hereditary g’ factor on the gap between racial averages on IQ test scores is invited to lecture at a university. A left-wing professor who opposes the lecture talks to the leader of an organization of student radicals and they decide to stage a protest. They protest in such a way that many people, including the speaker himself, are prevented from entering the auditorium. Many progressives would refer to the thuggish actions of the protestors as “an expression of their freedom of speech”, even though they have prevented a speaker from giving a lecture he was invited to give to people who wanted to hear what he had to say.

Both of these concepts of “free speech” are erroneous. Free speech, is a person’s legal right to verbally express his thoughts to those without being penalized by the law for the content of those thoughts. It is a legal protection of an even more basic freedom – the freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is your freedom to think your own thoughts, form your own opinions, and to hear the opinions of others and form your own judgment as to who is right and who is wrong.

Freedom of speech/thought does not mean that one person’s ideas are just as good and just as authoritative as any other person’s. The views of a man who is an expert in physics, for example, are more authoritative when he is speaking in his field of expertise than the views of a man who has never studied physics but is an expert landscape painter. An intelligent audience, seeking to be informed about physics, would consider the lecture of the physics expert as having more weight than the lecture of the landscape painter, even prior to hearing both lectures.

It does mean that if the landscape painter has formulated a theory about physics he should be allowed to present it to anyone willing to listen – and they are also free to laugh him to scorn and listen to the physicist instead.

Laws against yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre are not limitations on freedom of speech as I have defined it. Such laws do not penalize anyone for holding or expressing a particular point of view. Instead they penalize an act of mischief. The act of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre is likely to start a panic, in which a mob in a hurry to leave the room through its tiny exists, may hurt or even kill somebody.

At this point, the supporter of laws against “hate speech” might jump in and say “That is what hate speech laws do. They penalize people for spreading propaganda which can result in members of vulnerable groups in our society being harmed or killed”.

This, however, is a load of codswallop.

Laws against “hate speech” are never limited to threats of violence, calls to violence, or other such incendiary talk. Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act reads:

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.

Note especially the highlighted portion of the text. The “matter” communicated does not have to include the advocacy of criminal violence. Nor does it have to actually expose a single person to criminal violence in order to be proscribed by this law. It does not even have to actually expose a single person to the stated “hatred or contempt”. It only has to be “like to” to do so. The question of what constitutes being “likely to” is left up to the adjudicating body.

The matter in question does not even have to be demonstrably false to qualify as “hate speech” under Section 13.1. This is what the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canadian Human Rights Commission v. John Ross Taylor in 1990. The law only addressed adversity, therefore truth is no defence.

Laws of this nature are not used to prevent criminal violence to “vulnerable” minorities. They are used to establish a secular orthodoxy of official egalitarianism about race, sex, religion, language, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and to suppress viewpoints which conflict with that orthodoxy.

“Hate Speech” and Free Speech in post 9/11 Canada

Section 13.1 is currently in a state of legal limbo, although other “hate speech” laws across the country, including the provisions added by the Trudeau government to the Criminal Code remain in effect. To understand how this came about we need to look back over the developments of the last ten years.

The September 11, 2001 attack by Al Qaeda upon the United States of America affected the countries of North America and the world in general in many ways. As the American and Canadian governments passed new anti-terrorism legislation the tension between the need for effective national security against terrorist attacks and the rights, liberties, and privacy of law-abiding citizens came into focus and became a matter of debate. Back in 1992 the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had identified the “clash of the civilizations” as the source of regional and global conflict following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the arms race and the Cold War. 9/11 and the military response on the part of the United States and its coalition of allies made this “clash of the civilizations” real to people in way it had not previously been.

In this context, it was inevitable that discussion would arise about Islam, how it differs from Christianity and Judaism, and how Islamic culture differs from Western culture, and what the historic relationship has been between the Islamic world and the Western world. (1) The wisdom of the reigning liberal orthodoxy on immigration and multiculturalism was seriously called into question and the fundamental contradiction inherent in the progressive view of multicultural tolerance became apparent to many.

In a controversy that began in September of 2005 this contradiction was made manifest when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a number of editorial cartoons which featured the founder of Islam, Mohammed in a less-than-positive light. Needless to say the joke was not appreciated by Muslims and many protests and riots broke out as a result. All of a sudden the contradiction within progressivism was laid bare. Progressives had been actively encouraging large-scale immigration to Western countries in the hopes of creating secular, pluralistic, multicultural societies in the naïve dream that such societies would be harmonious and peaceful. Then they discovered that their secular, pluralistic, tolerant values were not shared by many of the immigrants whose importation they had been cheerleading.

The Jyllands-Posten cartoons were republished in several newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world as a statement of commitment to freedom of speech in defiance of Islamic attempts at intimidation. One such publisher was Canada’s Ezra Levant (2).

Ezra Levant, a lawyer from Alberta, had founded a magazine called the Western Standard in 2004, to fill the gap that had been created by the folding of the conservative Report Newsmagazine (the last incarnation of the publication better known as the Alberta Report or Western Report). In his February 27, 2006 issue Levant reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on pages 15-16 along with an article by Kevin Steel that criticized the North American media for having capitulated on freedom of the press with regards to these cartoons in marked contrast to their defense of the freedom of expression of everyone who mocks Western beliefs and culture.

A complaint was launched against Levant and the Western Standard before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, the Alberta provincial equivalent of the CHRC, by a number of Muslim organizations. Levant vigorously fought back, even going so far as to record his interview with the Human Rights investigator and post it to YouTube.

Meanwhile, the same year that Ezra Levant republished those cartoons the book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It was published by Regnery Publishing in the United States. The author of this book was Mark Steyn, a well-known Canadian-born conservative writer who has been widely published in periodicals in Canada, the UK, and the United States. The book quickly became a best-seller.

In October of 2006, Maclean’s magazine ran an article entitled “The future belongs to Islam” which was an excerpt from Steyn’s book. The article was about the implications of the demographics of the Muslim world for the West. The Canadian Islamic Congress filed a complaint against Maclean’s with the Ontario Human Rights Commission the following year, as well as with the federal and the BC Human Rights Commissions. Several other pieces by Steyn were also brought up in the complaint.

These cases generated a lot of bad publicity for the Human Rights Commissions because they brought to public attention the state to which free speech had fallen in Canada. The problem, as we will see, goes back to the 70’s but the Canadian media had largely refused to discuss it following the 80’s (the various versions of the Alberta Report being virtually the only exception). In this case, because the victims of the Human Rights Commissions were major publishers and writers, the media woke up and took notice. Eventually these complaints were withdrawn, dropped, or dismissed.

In the process of the reporting on these cases attention was brought to another case, that of Marc Lemire. Lemire was, among other things, the webmaster of the Freedom Site, a website he had started back in the 90’s. Lemire’s site was highly critical of multiculturalism and liberal immigration from what could be described as a “white nationalist” (3) perspective. His site was bulletin board style website to which people could post messages. Richard Warman filed a complaint against him with the Canadian Human Rights Commission under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal began to hear the case roughly around the same time that the Levant and Maclean’s cases were making news. Lemire, who like Levant and Maclean’s was not the kind of person to take this sort of thing quietly, had filed a challenge to the very constitutionality of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, long before his own case was finally heard.

In the course of the Lemire hearings, all sorts of scandalous things about the way in which the Canadian Human Rights Commission operated were brought to light, which Levant, Steyn and a number of courageous conservative bloggers did their best to make known to the Canadian public.

Ultimately, the case against Lemire was dismissed. The decision was made on September 2, 2009 by Athanasios Hadjis, chairman of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, who dismissed all of the charges against Lemire but one, and on that one ruled that a violation of Section 13 had taken place, but that in his opinion Section 13 was unconstitutional. Hadjis does not have the judicial standing to actually strike something out of law, and the CHRC filed an appeal against this decision. This has left Section 13 in limbo.

Libel Law and Freedom of Speech

Section 13 was not, unfortunately, the only tool available for those who wish to punish other people for the words that they say. Our libel laws have also been available for that purpose.

The term libel refers to defamation that is written (as opposed to slander which is defamation that is communicated orally). Defamation is when you communicate something about someone else with the intent of harming their reputation so as to lower their social status and/or destroy their business or career. Canada’s defamation laws are sorely in need of revision.

First, the definition of defamation needs to be revised so that it only applies to demonstrably false statements where it can also be shown that the person making the statement knew the statement to be false at the time. As our defamation laws currently stand a person can be punished for telling the truth if the truth happens to reflect negatively on someone else. That is a situation that should be unacceptable in a country that values personal liberty. In criminal law, the English-speaking world has long had a concept of justice in it is considered to be far worse to use the law to do a positive injustice to a defendant than to fail to give justice to a complainant by freeing a guilty defendant. There is absolutely no reason why this should not hold true for defamation as well.

As mentioned above, when the Human Rights complaints against Levant and Steyn were in the news, these writers and many conservative bloggers reported on proceedings of the Warman v. Lemire case. Much of this cast the CHRC, and the complainant, a lawyer and political activist who was at one time an employee of the CHRC and had subsequently become the principal section 13 complainant, in a particularly bad light.

In addition to filing section 13 complaints, Warman has over the years filed a number of libel suits against his critics. The defendants of these suits have included David Icke, the British author and New Age conspiracy theorist and Paul Fromm the director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression. He launched a libel suit against Jonathan Kay and the National Post over one allegation that the newspaper reported out of the Warman V. Lemire case and against several bloggers who also reported on the story, including Ezra Levant. Mark and Connie Fournier, the founders of Free Dominion, a small-c conservative message board are also among the defendants in that case. They are also being sued by Warman in a libel case that features eight “John Does”, i.e., people who post under a pseudonym at FreeDominion. Warman has demanded that the Fourniers turn over the identities of the “John Does” to him. These cases are still in the courts and the Fourniers are bravely standing their ground.

One hopes that Levant, the Fourniers, and the other bloggers who are being sued will win their cases. The process of defending themselves against, however, is incredibly expensive. It is itself, as others have pointed out, a punishment.

What is desperately needed is an overhaul of Canadian libel law that prevents abuses such as this from taking place.

Instead, Stephen Harper is smuggling in a piece of legislation that will make them easier.

How Did We Get Here?

The Right Honorable John G. Diefenbaker, the last Canadian Prime Minister who was a decent human being and not either a crook or a traitor to the traditions upon which Canada was built, in a lecture delivered to the Empire Club of Toronto, on March 9, 1972 said:

Thirty-two years ago I came into the House of Commons, and even though we were in the darkest days of war Members by their speeches brought about change. No one was then a “bigot” because he disagreed with the Government. (4)

That changed considerably in the premiership of the two Prime Ministers that followed Diefenbaker. The Prime Minister in power at the time he gave that speech, Pierre Trudeau, would become famous for accusing his critics, especially in Western Canada, of being bigots. The establishment media would quickly come to follow his example.

When Diefenbaker spoke those words, the first steps in the erosion of freedom of speech in Canada had already been taken. The Liberal Party’s new media-backed strategy of accusing their opponents of racism was only a miniscule part of it. The first legislation, making it illegal to communicate “hate propaganda” had already been passed.

The legislation in question was not Section 13, the problems with the wording of which we have already looked at. Section 13 was only a few short years away, but the first “hate speech” provisions were what are now Sections 318-320 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The first of these makes it a criminal offense to advocate genocide. The second of these prohibits the public communication of statements that incite hatred in a place where it is likely to result in a breach of the peace and the communication of statements other than in private conversation which “wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group”. Section 320 prohibits the written equivalent of what is verbally prohibited in the previous two sections and allows for such material to be seized.

Although these sections are more responsibly worded than Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act - truth is clearly stated as a defense in Section 319, for example – there was no compelling need for these provisions to be added to the law. Laws against inciting violence and other criminal behavior were already in place and anything that is covered in Sections 318-320 that should be illegal was already covered under such provisions. “Hate speech” laws are seldom passed in order to address a real problem. They are passed in order to limit public discussion of certain topics and to thereby enforce a civil orthodoxy with regards to those topics.

Auberon Waugh, writing with regards to the British equivalent of such laws, explained their stupidity many years ago:

Long before the passing of the Race Relations Act there were perfectly adequate laws against public conduct or language likely to cause a breach of the peace. They [The National Front] may well be a nasty, boring and humourless collection of fanatics, but I have never seen that there was anything more wicked about race hatred than there is about class hatred or religious hatred or the peculiarly intense and inexplicable hatred which my dear wife feels for Jimmy Connors, the tennis player. They are all part of the rich panorama of life. If I forbade my wife to express her true feelings for Jimmy Connors, I have no doubt they would fester inside her, creating little black eddies of resentment and paranoia which would eventually burst out in some hideous drama on the Centre Court at Wimbledon when Connors would expire, coughing blood, in front of the television cameras, with a lady’s parasol sticking between his ribs; public subscriptions would create a Jimmy Connors Memorial Trust and we would be stuck with a hideous modern stature of the young man somewhere on those green and pleasant lawns. So, wisely, I let her have her say. (5)

The government had been under pressure from various organizations to pass hate speech laws for quite some time. In the 1960’s, Lester Pearson had instructed Justice Minister Guy Favreau to appoint a Special Committee on Hate Propaganda. Maxwell Cohen, the Dean of the Faculty of Law in McGill University, was appointed to chair the committee and Pierre Trudeau, the future Prime Minister sat on the committee which gave its report in 1966. It was on the basis of the recommendations of that report that these provisions against the advocacy of genocide and the communication of hatred were added to the Criminal Code in 1970.

The relatively responsible way in which these laws were written made it less easy to abuse them. They therefore failed to satisfy the sort of people who wanted such laws passed in the first place. This is what created the pressure for what would become Section 13.

In 1977, the Trudeau government passed the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Act is considered to be part of civil law rather than criminal law in Canada. Therefore, a complainant need only meet the standard of proof in civil court which is considerably less than the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard of criminal law. A defendant is not guaranteed counsel and there is no process for recovering expenses even if he wins. The system is stacked against him and the government has added unreasonably high penalties for CHRA offenses.

Section 13 was brought in to the CHRA, largely through the efforts of one man, F.W. Callaghan, who had been the deputy attorney general in Ontario, and would later become Chief Justice of the Ontario Court. F. W. Callaghan wished to prosecute John Ross Taylor, an old man who had supported the fascists and Nazis in the 20’s and 30’s and had not seen fit to change his views when those parties were defeated and discredited in World War II. At the time he was using a telephone answering machine to communicate his ideas on various topics to the public. Callaghan found it unacceptable that he should be allowed to leave messages on his answering machine for the 5 or 6 people in Canada who actually bothered to call his number (most, if not all, of whom would have been government agents) and found the limitations of the existing laws so frustrating that he wrote to the federal government and asked them to bring in a civil law statute against “hate speech” that would be easier to use to shut Taylor up with than the existing criminal code provisions.

Taylor was charged under Section 13 and it was in the Supreme Court’s final decision of his case in 1990 that truth was ruled not to be a defence. Subsequently, additions would be added to Section 13 that allowed it to be applied to the internet.

Before the Supreme Court passed its decision in the Taylor case, however, two other free speech cases made nation-wide headlines. These were the cases of James Keegstra and Ernst Zündel. The former was a high school teacher and the mayor of Eckville, Alberta. He was charged under the Criminal Code provisions against hate propaganda. Zündel had been born in Germany around the start of WWII and moved to Canada in the late 50’s where he became a graphic artist and printer by profession. He was charged under an old law against “spreading false news”.

What brought upon these charges? Both men promoted, Keegstra in his classroom, and Zündel in pamphlets produced by his Samisdat Publishers, the holocaust revisionist theory of WWII.

What is that?

Called “holocaust denial” by its opponents, it is the view that contrary to standard history texts, Nazi Germany had no systematic plans to exterminate the Jewish people, that the Jews who died in the Nazi camps in WWII numbered in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions, that they died primarily from typhus and other diseases brought about by concentration camp victims, and that the gas chambers found in Auschwitz and the other camps were used to delouse clothing rather than to kill people. (6)

While we can perhaps see why someone might be offended by these views it is not at all clear why they should be criminalized. They are a take, albeit perhaps a crazy one, on what happened in the past. There is nothing within those views that demands violence against any person or group.

Someone at this point might interject and say “If these laws are only being used against unrepentant Nazis like Taylor and guys who promote crazy theories like Keegstra and Zündel, who cares?”

The answer is: we all should.

Pastor Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis in 1937, in a famous poem said:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

A similar poem could be written about Canada, but it would have to begin

First they came for the nazis,
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a nazi.

This sort of thing began with John Ross Taylor. It did not end with him. By the end of first decade of the 21st century, even Maclean’s, a long-standing Canadian institution, a mainstream weekly publication, was regarded as a fair target for these insane laws. There is a direct line of precedent leading from the Taylor case to the Maclean’s case.

Why should we punish and seek to destroy personally men who hold strange beliefs about history? We don’t do this with people who question the official version of the JFK assassination. We don’t do this with people who question the official version of 9/11. We don’t do this with people who attribute every war of the last century to causes other than the officially stated ones. We don’t do this with people who think the moon landing was faked. Perhaps there are some people think we should, but we should not be listening to those people.

Neither should we be punishing people for calling the standard history of the holocaust into question.

James Keesgtra was found guilty and fined $5000. Upon appeal, his conviction was upheld, but the sentence was reduced.

Ernst Zündel was also convicted in 1985, had his conviction overturned, and was then charged and convicted again. The Supreme Court upon appeal, struck down the law under which he had been convicted. In the late 90’s he was charged again, over the content of his website. He ended up leaving Canada for the United States where his wife was a citizen. American immigration officials arrested him in 2003 and sent him back here where he was held in custody and absurdly charged with being a threat to the state. We deported him to Germany in 2005, at which point he was arrested by the Germans, charged with a hate crime there (for his words over here) and given a five year prison sentence.

We ought to be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for all of this. Whatever his views are Zündel committed no violent acts against other people while he was in our country and was subjected a number of times to violence from progressive, anti-racist, terrorists who even went so far as to bomb his house.

After the 1980’s, the Canadian media stopped doing serious reporting on cases like this. The men who had fought against the oppression of “hate speech” laws from the very beginning, men like Doug Collins who was a columnist for the North Shore News in BC (7), Doug Christie who was the lawyer for Keegstra and Zündel and a number of other people who fell victim to these kind of laws (8), and Paul Fromm the founder and director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression (9), were villainized by the mainstream press and would have to pay a tremendous cost for standing up for those whom nobody else would stand up for.

Why is Harper Adding to the Problem?

The reason why the Pearson/Trudeau Liberals brought in these laws is fairly simple. Apart from demands from certain organizations that wanted hate propaganda laws for their own interests, and demands from prosecutors like Callaghan, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau had a vision for Canada. They wanted to get rid of traditional English Canada, with its British loyalties, symbols, and royalism. They also didn’t think much of traditional French Canada with its ultra-conservative Roman Catholicism. They wished to replace both with a new Canada that would exist in a new, closer relationship with the United States of America. They wanted to create a new Canadian identity that would be able to survive in this new alignment. They believed that identity would have to transcend traditional English and French Canada. They wanted a unified Canada, that was not divided into English and French, but was both English and French at the same time.

They had a unique opportunity in that WWII had brought about the collapse of British power and the rise of American power, which weakened traditional English Canada considerably. Quebec was entering the “Quiet Revolution” that would weaken the hold of Catholicism on the province. Hence they stripped Canada of as many of its traditional symbols as possible replacing them with new ones, falsifying the history of the country in the process, and brought in new official doctrines of “bilingualism” and “multiculturalism”. They also started bringing in immigrants from non-traditional source countries by the thousands in order to break up the established communities and cultures of English and French Canada.

Now, most people in English and French Canada did not want this. They opposed the mass immigration. They did not want to give up their traditional identities. By accusing their critics of racism, and then passing laws which made racism potentially subject to severe punishment, the Liberals were able to intimidate many of their critics.

So why is Stephen Harper going along with it? Why is he seeking to pass legislation which will punish you, not just for what you say, but for what other people say as well?

I don’t have an answer to that question although I certainly wish I did. I do know that Harper and his Immigration Minister Jason Kenney have shown little interest in free speech over the years.

A couple of years ago they banned UK Labour Minister George Galloway from entering the country. The reason they gave was that he was supposedly connected to terrorists. That reason was absurd however. They based it upon a humanitarian trip he had made to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. It is an insult to Canadians intelligence to try and tell us that a man is a threat to national security because he delivered medical supplies to suffering people in a region governed by Hamas.

Then earlier this year Kenney’s ministry barred Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from Canada when he had been invited to speak in BC. A Bosnian Muslim organization had complained, and again Kenney came up with an absurd-on-the-face trumped up excuse for banning him from the country.

Neither speaker posed a threat to the security of Canada. Both had people here who wanted to hear them speak. They were controversial speakers, however, albeit from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Both had groups that wished to prevent them from speaking and Harper and Kenney have shown themselves to be all too willing to accommodate such groups.

Now that Harper has a majority government will any of his MPs finally stand up and confront him on this, and demand that the government restore freedom of speech in Canada, rather than doing more to take it away?

Let us hope and pray that they will.

(1) It would sidetrack this essay too much to fully discuss these subjects here. I refer you to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet: Islam - History, Theology, Impact on the World (Regina Orthodox Press: Boston, MA, 2002) for an excellent discussion of these matters.

(2) Much important information about the behavior of the human rights tribunals in Canada is to be found in Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto, 2009). I don’t care much for the subtitle – it is “liberty” not “democracy” we should be worried about – but the book itself is vitally important.

(3) This expression means different things to different people. Some people use it to describe themselves. Others use it as a derogatory term for people they don’t like. Those who use it in the latter sense generally use it as a synonym for “neo-nazi”. Those who describe themselves by the label would probably be comfortable with a definition that goes something like this: “someone who takes a stand for the identity and interests of white people”. Within the category of self-described “white nationalists” there are those whose views could be crudely be summarized as “Hitler was right”. Such people see racial conflict and violence as a basic reality of life that should be embraced, with the intention of seeing one’s own race win, and would regard Jews the way Hitler regarded them, as a racial enemy within the ranks of one’s own race. Other self-described “white nationalists” do not hold to such views.

(4) The speech quoted is entitled “Towards a False Republic” and is chapter 4 of John G. Diefenbaker, Those Things We Treasure, (MacMillan of Canada; Toronto, 1972). The quotation can be found on page 55.

(5) Auberon Waugh, “Che Guevara in the West Midlands”, originally published in July 7, 1976 issue of The Spectator, reprinted in Brideshead Benighted (Little, Brown and Company: Boston and Toronto, 1986) pp. 153-156. The quote can be found on page 154.

(6) These are the main claims made by the holocaust revisionists. It would take up too much space to give the reasons they present for believing these things or the reasons why most historians reject their claims. A person should not have to agree with these people in order to defend their right to hold and express their views without harassment from others. Nor should a person be required to denounce and demonize these people before he can speak out against their persecution. There is sometimes a big difference, however, between what “should be” and what “is”. People who support the persecution of holocaust revisionists maintain that revisionist views can only ever arise out of anti-Semitism and sympathy for the Third Reich. This is demonstrably not the case. The first known holocaust revisionist was Paul Rassinier. He was a French Communist who was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, who was captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald himself. It hardly makes sense to attribute his post-war writings to sympathy with the regime he resisted and which persecuted him. The man who translated his writings into English and arranged for their publication in North America was Harry Elmer Barnes, a historian who taught at Columbia University. Dr. Barnes was a Germanophile but he was hardly sympathetic to the views of Hitler and his party. One journalist, the late John Sack, himself a Jewish liberal, who attended a holocaust revisionist convention eleven years ago and wrote an essay about it for the February 2001 issue of Esquire, said that among the people he met there, including Zündel, he could not detect any anti-Semitism. The common factor that appears to draw people to holocaust revisionist views is not anti-Semitism but German ethnicity and/or Germanophilia. Common sense alone should tell people that attempts to minimize the crimes Hitler committed in the name of Germany in WWII are far more likely to arise out of love for and sympathy with the German people than out of hatred for the Jews. Persecuting the holocaust revisionists, however, is the way to go about it if for some perverse reason you want to generate anti-Semitism.

(7) Collins was born in England. He fought for the British in WWII, and was captured by the Nazis a number of times. He moved to Canada after the war and became a journalist. He held conservative political views and took much delight in poking fun at the left-wing secular orthodoxy often called “political correctness” that politicians, teachers, media commentators and many clergy sought, far too often with success, to impose upon Canadians after WWII. His favorite targets included liberal immigration (about which he wrote a book), official bilingualism and multiculturalism, the self-righteous international crusade against South Africa and Rhodesia, and hate speech laws. He himself fell victim to the latter when a complaint was filed against him and his employer the North Shore News with the BC Human Rights Commission.

(8) Doug Christie, who lives in British Columbia, is noted for two things. His leadership in the Western separatist movement and his championing, as a lawyer, freedom of thought and freedom of speech against “hate speech” laws. Nobody would ever accuse a defence attorney specializing in murder cases of harboring a sympathy for homicide. Christie, however, has been routinely abused by the Canadian media for his defence of Keegstra, Zündel, etc.

(9) Paul Fromm, who lives in Ontario, was a school teacher by profession. He has also been a conservative political activist for decades, beginning in his student days in the University of Toronto. He is the founder and director of a number of small-c conservative, single issue organizations, including C-FAR (Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform), the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, and CAFÉ (Canadian Association for Free Expression). He is an outspoken advocate for the interests of white people as well as an outspoken believer in personal liberty and freedom of thought. He was fired from his job as an English teacher because of his political associations and political views expressed on his own time, off of campus. Eventually, he was stripped of his teacher’s certificate as well.