Time Immortal

This one is a re-run: Richard Warman and Warren Kinsella have filed suit against Free Dominion.

Didn’t we see this episode last season?

I wrote about PEN Canada previously, noting that:

PENCanada — a Canadian non-profit organization that lobbies on behalf of writers, internationally, who have been forcibly silenced or imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression — defines freedom of expression thusly:

What do we mean by “freedom of expression?” Many definitions are out there. However, although the wording varies, the substance is the same. In its essence, freedom of expression is the right to say freely what you please, as well as the related right to hear what others have stated. This includes the freedom to create and distribute written works, movies, pictures, songs, dances and all other forms of expressive communication.

And on their list of obstacles to freedom of expression, the fourth item (after assault, threats, and murder) is:

Censorship (State or otherwise imposed)

Canadians lobby — and in many cases risk their freedom or their lives — on behalf of writers world-wide who have been denied what even the UN recognizes as a basic human right. Will these same Canadians now lobby on behalf of their fellow countrymen, who are being subjected to what amounts to state censorship?

It turns out that they will. It seems that PEN Canada has put forth a statement calling for both the removal of Section 13 from the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA), and for the dismissal of the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s. They also decry the complaints filed against Ezra Levant.

PEN Canada calls for changes to human rights commission legislation February 4, 2008 — PEN Canada calls on the federal and provincial governments to change human rights commission legislation to ensure commissions can no longer be used to attempt to restrict freedom of expression in Canada.

Recent complaints in Alberta against journalist Ezra Levant and in Ontario against Maclean’s magazine and its writer Mark Steyn raise disturbing questions about the degree to which human rights commissions have taken it upon themselves to become arbiters of what constitutes free speech.

PEN Canada believes this is not the role of human rights commissions and that governments across the country need to make that clear both to their commissions and to Canadians.

Neither Mr. Levant nor Maclean’s magazine and Mr Steyn published anything that incited violence against the Muslim community although both have been subject of complaints to commissions. Nor did their comments violate anyone’s human rights.

…

Neither complaints should ever have been accepted by a human rights commission and both should be immediately dismissed.

To ensure there is no repetition of such attempts to constrain freedom of expression through the guise of human rights legislation, PEN supports calls for removal of subsection 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act which states that it is discriminatory when individual or groups say or write anything that is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

Similar wording in provincial human rights statutes should likewise be removed.

When I wrote the previous article, it was my hope that this group of Canadian intellectuals and lobbyists would not do the “typical” thing and demand freedoms for people in foreign nations whilst simultaneously ignoring affronts to those same freedoms within Canada.

And fortunately, they have proven consistent in their beliefs. PEN Canada is to be applauded for issuing this statement and for adding their voices to the increasingly lengthy list of people speaking out against state-sponsored censorship as enacted by human rights commissions.

What’s truly impressive, though, is the list of names attached to the statement: John Ralston Saul, Edmontonian Todd Babiak, David Cronenberg, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and more besides. Big names all — it’s a powerful thing that all of these people (many of them hard leftists, to be sure!) have spoken out in defense of freedom of speech in Canada.

It kind of makes the other side look pitiful by comparison — the best supporters they can muster are a group of anti-Semites, a misogynistic imam and a terrorism supporter. Oh, and Warren Kinsella.

Blazing Cat Fur writes in a brief note regarding this post and Warren Kinsella’s response to the article I quote therein.

I see Kinsella tried to debunk the citizen article

I think the operative word, O Reader, is “tried” — you can read Kinsella’s piece for yourself, but here are the meaty and relevant parts, I think.

Gardner’s column is worth reading, but - in my world - quantitative data will always trump a census statistic and a few anecdotes. If it wasn’t out of print, then, I would recommend that you all pick up a copy of Hate on Trial: the Zundel Affair, the Media, and Public Opinion in Canada, published in 1986 by my friend Professor Conrad Winn. Conrad, who is a polling expert at Carleton University, sampled public opinion during the 1985 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. He found the trial not only alerted people to the fact of the Holocaust, it turned them against Zundel in droves.

In a poll of 1,054 respondents taken right after Zundel’s trial, Canadians proved the media libertarians wrong, as they often do. Half (47 per cent) said their feelings toward Jews were unchanged by the trial, while one quarter (24 per cent) said they became more sympathetic toward Jews, and only 2 per cent reported less sympathy.

Kinsella would seem to be attempting to state, based on the above, that it was because Ernst Zundel was tried that public opinion shifted still further against his anti-Semitic rantings. This is a dangerous conclusion to draw, because it can lead one to think, erroneously, that it is through acts of censorship perpetrated by government agencies and courts that “the people” can be made to think “correctly.” And indeed, that would seem to be the conclusion that Kinsella, a self-confessed censor and an advocate for the existence of the HRCs, draws.

That would mean, O Reader, that Canadians either did not change their opinion of Jews or became more sympathetic toward Jews out of fear of government reprisal.

This would seem, then, to fly in the face of Dan Gardener’s observations about how allowing Fred Phelps to speak his hate openly has, in the end, only served to inspire Kansans (not exactly known for being of a progressive bent) to side not with Phelps, but with those Phelps denigrates.

But in fact, Kinsella’s story does not quite mean what he thinks it means, nor does it actually fly in the face of what Dan Gardener says — in fact, it affirms it. Zundel was a nobody with a small audience to begin with — few Canadians had even heard of him, and hardly anyone gave him the time of day. When he was put on trial, more and more people were able to become aware of his views. And in an analog to the case of Phelps and Westboro in Kansas, it was in hearing discussion about Zundel’s opinions that inspired nearly 25% of Canadians to become even more sympathetic to persons of Jewish descent than they already were. The fact that it took a trial for Zundel to gain a wide enough audience is an interesting little factoid of history, but also irrelevant.

The Zundel trial and its ouctomes, at least as regards public opinion toward Jews, proves the freespeecher arguments valid — given the chance, Canadians will tend to make the right decisions when they hear someone uttering hateful speech. So why not give people the opportunity to be as open in their hatred as they can possibly be? As was the case with Zundel, many of the haters won’t even find a wide enough audience to have any impact on public opinion (and thus will not be a threat). And the ones that do will, for the most part, either make people shrug their shoulders in dismissal or inspire people to move their own opinions away from those of the haters.

That’s the beauty of the “marketplace of ideas.”

I wonder how Kinsella missed that? And I wonder if it was his intent to argue in favour of government coercion of citizen opinion?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Opponents of true freedom of expression in Canada sometimes use the excuse that there are certain forms of speech which are universally unacceptable and must be censored/restricted/punished by law. The freespeecher response to that is that evil withers in the light of the day: give even hateful opinions their moment in the Sun, and average Canadians will make their own decisions about who is speaking the truth and who is talking a line of bull. The haters will be ignored, pushed to the sidelines, and marginalized.

Who is right, then?

Well, the proof is, as they say, in the pudding:

Here’s a fascinating statistic: In Kansas, the number of same-sex couples willing to identify themselves as such in the American census has risen rapidly. In 2000, it was 3,973. In 2005, it was 6,663.

Now, some readers may not share my enthusiasm for this statistic. The number of self-declared same-sex couples in Kansas? For Canadians, the relevance of this data may not be immediately apparent.

…

Why Kansas? Why gay couples? Because the fiercest, loudest, most energetic anti-gay bigot on the planet lives in Kansas. His name is Fred Phelps.

…

Fred Phelps is on a holy crusade against homosexuality and the main weapon in that war is the picket. “God hates fags” is Phelps’s signature sign, but they have many others. All drip with hate.

…that makes Kansas a natural experiment in the effects of hate speech.

Has Phelps generated support? Did he poison the climate? Are gays worse off now than before he launched his campaign?

The answer to all these questions is no. Kansas is rock-ribbed conservative country but Kansans despise Fred Phelps. He has virtually no support. He has no converts to show for all his effort and today, as always, his congregation almost exclusively consists of his extended family. Phelps happily acknowledged this to me. “Blessed are you when all men shall revile you and say all manner of evil falsely,” he said with a smile.

That’s not to say Phelps’s hate hasn’t had any effect. It certainly has.

The people of Topeka rallied. They organized. They raised awareness. Bigotry toward gays was exposed and talked about for the first time and even conservative Christian churches stepped up to denounce it. Fourteen years after Phelps started his crusade, a lesbian activist personally targeted by Phelps was appointed to fill a vacant seat on Topeka city council.

…

“If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity to exchange error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit - the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” — J.S. Mill

Underpinning the anti-free-speech rhetoric is the assumption, by the Warren Kinsellas and Richard Warmans out there, that they, the enlightened few are the sole guardians of proper thought and reasonable speech in Canada — all the rest of us rubes have no idea what’s good for us, and need our perpetual nanny (the state and its censorship commissions) to constantly help us discern between what is and is not proper to say. Ordinary, individual Canadians are not to be trusted with the role of forming their own opinions.

Most Canadians view neo-Nazis and bigots like Phelps as minor and rather pathetic figures, Kinsella sees them everywhere, threatening the good consciousness of our happy land. If something is bad, goes the liberal theory of society and human nature, then ban it. The central conceit of modern liberalism is that the average person is incapable of governing their own affairs…The Human Rights Tribunals are the culmination of the liberal conceit. If you can’t be trusted to save for your retirement, or educate your children, how can the average citizen be expected to think for themselves?

Canadians do not need their “betters” to think for them, nor do we need the government to operate human rights commissions in order to keep us from having the harsh words of bad men and women reach our virgin ears. We’re made of sterner stuff than that. We can — and must — think for ourselves, choosing to ignore the hateful bigots in our midst…but always giving them the right to speak, so that we can know their hateful bile for what it is and reject it as such. Or, better still, we can follow the example of Kansas, and turn our actions, creatively, toward those things which not only reject the viewpoints of the bigots, but fly openly in their face.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: SDA)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Ezra Levant’s proposed new initiative:

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on my personal blog about the need for Canadian bloggers to form a mutual aid society to protect themselves from unwarranted attacks on their freedoms.

I have recently experienced one form of those attacks — an out-of-control government ‘human rights commission’ grinding me through a punitive, costly and arbitrary process for two years because I published cartoons that allegedly hurt someone’s feelings. And I’ve observed the other form, much more frequently: in the past few weeks alone, I’ve seen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 baseless threats of defamation against Canadian bloggers (plus 6, 7 against me), none of which have real merit, but all of which are designed to frighten bloggers (usually conservatives) into censoring themselves.

The common thread amongst all of these threats is that they’re not legitimate legal actions to remedy a real tort committed by bloggers. The blog posts in question all contain true facts and fair comments; no real defamation action lies against any of them. These threats are intimidation tactics — bullying — dressed up in legal robes.

And, unfortunately, they often work. Not because bloggers make a thoughtful decision, with competent legal advice, that they ought to retract a truly false and defamatory statement, but because bloggers make a panicked decision, without legal advice, in fear of the cost and hassle of a lawsuit, and in the hopes of appeasing the threatener. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about this sort of thing.

He’s even got his first case, before the Union has been formalized.

One one hand, it’s sad that something like this has to be announced and advanced. Not that it’s without its reasons or justifications, of course, and certainly in Canada bloggers like myself have more than ample reason to fear the possibility of frivolous legal action. More importantly, bloggers like myself are, for the most part, not legal experts, and won’t be well-equipped (as a general rule) if in fact someone like Warren Kinsella or Richard Warman files a suit (or a human rights complaint) against us. In that regard, at least, the need not only for a legal defence fund, but for legal advice, is obvious.

On the other hand, though, something like this could also serve as a focal point for the /HRC issue in Canada for as long as it takes to resolve the manner in the only acceptable way (i.e. the complete dissolution of HRCs in Canada, and the removal of Section 13 from the Canadian Human Rights Act). Disparate blogs commenting on the issue are all well and good, but a concrete organization devoted to freedom of expression is even better.