Considering her own experiences with censors, Blatchford’s suckiness smacks of wanting to still sit at the cool kids’ table. I’ve lost a lot of respect for her — it’s hard to believe she’s the same woman who wrote Helpless.
[Christie Blatchford] nevertheless is both falling for and peddling a sentimentalized Hollywooden version of what’s really going on and what’s really at stake. Her enthusiasm for the Ontario Press Council is perplexing. (…)
Maclean’s is a privately owned magazine. Demanding “reasonable access” to it is like a burglar demanding reasonable access to Christie Blatchford’s home. Yet the Canadian state, in its various federal and provincial manifestations, went quite a long way toward entertaining this vile proposition. (…)
In British Columbia, had we been found guilty, the statutory penalty under the law would have been a lifetime publication ban on me, preventing Maclean’s and by extension anybody else in Canada from publishing anything by me on Islam, demography, multiculturalism, Europe, terrorism or anything this side of ballet criticism and gardening tips ever again.
This is not a small thing, and it is nothing to do with youth or idealism but with opportunism and muscle. I’m glad I won, and Christie should be, too – because the eunuch media with which Canada would have been left had the “idealists” prevailed is not one any self-respecting writer would want anything to do with. But it is disturbing to me, five years on and with Section 13 repealed, how many old friends like Christie, Jonathan Kay and others do not quite grasp the scale of what Khurrum Awan and Mohammed Elmasry were attempting to do in 2008.
