In the aftermath of the massacre of six Muslims in Quebec City, Mississauga-Erin Mills Liberal MP Iqra Khalid tabled Motion 103 calling on the government to condemn Islamophobia. Now keep in mind, this is just a motion, not a bill. It’s just an MP using the democratic process to express an opinion. Nevertheless, it has become a leitmotif where debate about free speech is concerned in Canada. It’s worth questioning its tenets as well as the Prime Minister’s subsequent comments. If anything, it highlights why it’s rarely a good idea to formulate laws after a tragedy when emotions run higher than reason leaving itself vulnerable to unintended consequences and that protecting free speech demands eternal vigilance.

Following her motion, Khalid unfortunately received her fair share of hate mail that would seem to confirm her position. However, if anything, it only highlights the need to protect free speech, not curb it. The messages still don’t rise for the need of such a proposal, in my view.

Specifically the motion stipulates:

-Recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear.
-Request the heritage committee study how the government could develop a government-wide approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia.
-Collect data to contextualize hate crime reports and to conduct needs assessments for impacted communities and present findings within 240 calendar days.

It would be helpful if she’d clarify a couple of things. For example, how does she define ‘climate of hate and fear’?  Who will be charged with doing all this ‘contextualizing’? What’s ‘Islamophobia’ exactly? Who will guard the contextualizers?

If the premise leading this motion into a potential Bill is clunky, what the heck does one think will happen once it’s law?

As if this problematic (if not silly) proposal isn’t enough to send shivers down our spines, Justin Trudeau offered these illuminating words exposing his awesome dedication to free speech. CBC reports:

“In a seven-minute response, Trudeau said fundamental rights and freedoms are enshrined in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but that individual rights must be balanced with others in our society. Determining the parameters is an ongoing discussion in a dynamic, successful society like ours, he said.

Trudeau said the motion aims to address the fact there is a community that is “particularly vulnerable these days to intolerance and discrimination.”

“You’re not allowed to call ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theatre and call that free speech,” Trudeau said.

“That endangers our community. And as we saw 10 days ago in Quebec City, there are other things that can endanger our communities. And we need to stand strongly and firmly against that.”

A little precautionary principle here, a little “save free speech from itself” there, and a dab of “protecting the vulnerable” here, and presto! Civil Nirvana!

I’m no longer surprised – numb perhaps but not shocked – that this pretty much summarizes the general Canadian outlook on free speech. Canadians weren’t basted in notions of the First Amendment as their American cousins were in school or even afterward. If free speech is regarded as ‘quaint,’ imagine the perception of the Second Amendment.

It just doesn’t compute. Hence, flippant musings on free speech passed off as progressive enlightened perspectives; there’s a general misguided belief we can “balance” free speech without any opportunity costs. ‘Hey, man! I didn’t mean my speech! I meant HIS speech!”

It’s even more so with Trudeau, given his father wasn’t exactly a card carrying classical liberal. This sort of sophomoric approach to free speech, when exposed on a bigger stage than Canada, can really look, erm, second-rate at best.

What Canadians don’t fundamentally understand is that free speech is a virtue and not a vice.

You remove it or try to tinker with it and you’re left with the loss of individual sovereignty. Nothing more. Shutting down speech to any degree presupposes we have the answers; it suppresses self-doubt and increases misplaced self-esteem.

It leads to assertions of it all being ‘settled’ – to borrow a flatulent term from the system, ahem, climate change crowd – so to speak. There is not a better example of a movement that has foregone tolerance and patience in the interest and spirit of debate. Does it make sense to you to hand over all your inquisitive impulses and skeptical empiricism to…Bill Nye? Are we not free to debate anything however vacuous so long as it doesn’t infringe on the civil liberty of another? It takes patience and tolerance because it’s humbling if someone challenges a prevailing world view

It is completely alien to me how anyone would consent to allowing the government the kind of power to ‘watch over’ free speech. It’s also lazy. Rather than confront a person’s opinion by the power of argument, we ask the government merely shut down the parts we can’t be bothered to argue. After all, if the starting point is  ‘we know the truth,’ there’s no need to confront and debate. Lazy.

What is overlooked is that being exposed to bad arguments or ideas actually enhances and strengthens our critical thinking prowess and intellectualism.

Shutting down opinion under the threat of imprisonment, in short, isn’t liberal.

It’s illiberal.

It’s reactionary.

Moving on to the specifics of his comments: there’s little evidence Muslims are facing a significant backlash – despite the tragic outlier incident witnessed in Quebec City, the hate mail received by Khalid and a recent uptick in attacks usually coming after an Islamic terrorist attack- to justify such draconian actions. Call me when things reach a ‘pogrom’ level. In fact, Jews indeed continue to be the most targeted group.

Second, the idea that free speech can be balanced by curtailing it is an act of deception, if not outright hubris. To think we can ‘balance’ something as immeasurable as speech is just that: arrogance. Either free speech exists or it doesn’t. It should give pause that the Prime Minster basically said, ‘the feelings of a victim group comes before individual civil liberties no matter what the Charter says.’

So why have a Charter if you plan to wipe your ass with it, I wonder?

Does Canada have principles or not? Will it stand for freedom of expression at all cost or not? If it chooses the route (and quite frankly, it already has by the back door through the Human Rights Commission and Quebec’s language laws), then it abandons all pretences of being a nation that values freedom of speech and expression. Welcome to Canada where we cherish free speech but…

It would be foolish, furthermore, to think this is not an example of a slippery slope. There are plenty of examples (just go to Campus Reform) to see the hideousness of what can happen if free speech isn’t vigorously defended. The natural default position of man, after all, is tyranny. Next thing you know, comedians in Germany and Canada are taken to court. Such progress we’ve made!

It’s not like we haven’t seen how grotesque it is to take someone to court over an opinion as the cases involving Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn reveal.

The process, as we know, is enough punishment and I can’t but think about the poor sucker who doesn’t have the kind of pull Steyn or Levant may have will see their life upended because of it.

Count me in as one of those ‘extremists’ who doesn’t feel it’s legally, intellectually or even morally justified to destroy a person’s life for proclaiming, say, ‘Keep ’em fucken Mooslims outta m’backyird! That is, the government should not be in the business of criminalizing people for their opinions through onerous and obscene censorship laws.

It’s bad enough that Levant – here have a look for yourself at what 1984 in 2017 looks like –  has to beg before an unelected ‘contextualizer‘ at the HRC, right? Now imagine where this can go with Motion 103 becoming law.

And given the zeitgeist we’re experiencing in North America (if not the West as a whole), the last thing we should be doing is enabling or giving people incentives to snitch and/or lob lawsuits against one another for words.

Next up, thought control.

Finally, Trudeau is misinformed about not being able to yell Fire! in a theatre. In a nutshell, it’s not illegal to do so in the United States. The history of this famous analogy drawn by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is not what people think it is. In fact, the case whence it was born had nothing to do with fires; but it did have something to do with freedom of speech and expression.

Though not binding, the courts got it wrong and it was eventually overturned 40 years ago but not before this trivial tripe has become a calcified Top 10 ‘go-to’ favorite tattooed into the progressive mindset. Ultimately manifesting itself along the lines of ‘You can’t yell fire in a theatre ergo you can’t make fun of Mohammed! Duh.’

But. Bashing whites and Christians and causing property damage and violence for stuff they disagree with in general is fair game in their distorted civil order.

Put more eloquently in The Atlantic:

“Today, despite the “crowded theater” quote’s legal irrelevance, advocates of censorship have not stopped trotting it out as the final word on the lawful limits of the First Amendment. As Rottman wrote, for this reason, it’s “worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech. When used metaphorically, it can be deployed against any unpopular speech.” Worse, its advocates are tacitly endorsing one of the broadest censorship decisions ever brought down by the Court. It is quite simply, as Ken White calls it, “the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.”

Sounds like you’d get just as far singing the song Fire in a theatre.

In any event, would it have been too much to ask if Trudeau be at least up to speed on American law and legal history? It displays a rather unbecoming shallow grasp of American history if you ask me. I mean, if you can’t SJW like its the current year with up to date vapid slogans, why bother? Have some pride in your intellectual acumen, man!

Kill Motion 103. Nothing good can come of it.

A war on speech is doomed – condemned – to end up like the war on poverty and drugs where the families and communities are fractured to the point of dysfunction. A war on speech will eliminate good ideas and elevate bad ones leaving it exclusively in power. A war on speech is a free ticket to ‘Pass Go’ and straight into a Dark Age where the meek and weak intellectuals prevail.

All this to bring me back to Ms. Khalid’s motion. The moment more hate speech is introduced, the more you drive it underground. Is it not better to monitor it above board? Free speech, I argue, is the best ally any person or group will ever have.

My sister met Justin Trudeau a few years back. In a conversation over dinner she said, ‘He really is a nice person. You can tell he means well’.

That’s the problem.

In Justin Trudeau what we have is a walking ‘the road to hell is paved…’

I forget the rest.