Great stuff here, including a variation on my own advice to “live as though the revolution has already happened”:
Well the key item in the [Canadian] Constitution, the key value, is not actually liberty, it’s equality. Which sounds like a good thing, but what does equality really mean? If it means that all of us stand equal before the law, then most people are going to say that’s a good thing. But if it means that in the name of equality you can’t have an opinion that offends someone else because they claim that by expressing that opinion you are diminishing them as a person, well then of course it means something completely different, which we as liberty loving people don’t support.
(…)
Canada’s original free speech hero was Joseph Howe. He was a newspaper publisher who saw things that were wrong in government, published it, the government objected, they sued him for seditious libel, they told him that he was an irresponsible journalist for bringing this stuff up, because if you say bad things about the government well how can anybody ever respect the government. Nevertheless he faced them in court and a jury found him not guilty and ever since that time, which was 1835, if you’re a history buff, ever since that time Canadians have thought that they’ve had free speech. Now they didn’t always really have it, certainly the Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses have had their problems, trade unionists have had their problems with people trying to silence them. There’s a great Supreme Court of Canada case in 1877 where the Roman Catholic Church had to be told that they couldn’t recommend to their parishioners that they not vote for the Liberals because the Liberals were sinners. There have been lots of people who from time to time have had problems in the free speech area, but it’s always been against the backdrop that free speech is important, that the right to express your opinion is fundamental to democracy and that the right to free speech is not to protect the opinions that we all like and agree with, it is to protect the opinions that we hate. And that’s what we’re losing at the moment.
(…)
The fact is that this country, like a number of others, has a certain political culture and in that political culture disrespect of persons in form of satire or irony, disrespect in the form of political cartooning is all part of it. When a person comes from another country they should know to expect that. If they feel that that is something that they can’t tolerate and don’t want to live with, then there are other countries that you can emigrate to, I guess, and you won’t have the same problems.
Alas, Hannaford places far too much old fashioned importance on elected officials. Why do we allow MPs as well as unelected judges to determine our actions and moods? (I was kind of excited about the Supreme Court’s recent libel decision until I caught myself: why am I allowing these total strangers to determine my state of mind?)
Especially since a permanent unelected liberal bureaucracy actually runs Canada and the US. Better to act as though they — and politicians and judges — don’t exist.
It is the federal government and the provincial legislatures that can undo the bad things that they have done. You’re not going to do it by rioting in the streets. You’re not going to do it by refusing to pay your taxes or anything else like that.
But why not? That’s like saying “We can’t drill our way out of the problem” or “negative political ads turn voters off.” Show me. You can’t.
Mohawk Warriors and other armed Indians have gotten and are getting their way and then some as we speak. I think they’re scumbags who need to be locked up — but you can’t tell me they aren’t getting exactly what they’re asking for, either.
