Like some Star readers, I too, at times, can become annoyed, enraged, shocked and appalled on reading some of the words and ideas of Star columnists.

Columnists — the best of them — are meant to be thought-provoking and button-pressing. That is the basic job description. They are paid to express their personal opinions in their own tone and styles. Some more outrageously than others. It should go without saying that we will not all always agree with all of their perspectives or the manner they choose to express them.

One of the most frequent issues I am called on to explain to readers is the freedom news organizations give their columnists to express views that some may find outrageous and even offensive. Rarely a week goes by that some readers do not make clear how shocked and appalled they are at some view some columnist expressed in the Star.

Recent months have brought a marked increase in such complaints with various columns that expressed strong views on issues regarding Alberta, the People’s Party of Canada, electoral reform, bicyclists in Toronto, Sean Spicer’s run on “Dancing with the Stars” and even the “bland sludge” of Tim Hortons coffee all evoking substantial and emotional reader response from all sides of the ideological spectrum.

“Whoever wrote this needs to be immediately fired,” said one irate reader offended by one such column. I am not being specific about which one because this tends to be a rather generic response to encountering an “inappropriate” view that causes offence. These days, someone always wants someone fired for speaking their mind. Cancel that columnist, censor that opinion, critics cry.

But “cancel culture” cannot take hold in newsrooms committed to the core democratic principle of freedom of expression and to providing for “the expression of disparate and conflicting views,” as stated in Torstar’s Statement of Principles.

The fact is it would be an outrage if any columnist was fired for expressing disagreeable opinions. As I have tried to explain to many readers over the past 12 years, all Star columnists have wide latitude to express their own views and, whatever my own views, I must defend their freedom to offend.

As I have also said repeatedly: The opinions they express are very often not the views of this institution, as expressed in the Star’s editorials.

This has proved to be a difficult principle for many readers to comprehend, understandably so. Not surprisingly, when I tell enraged readers that the column in question does not represent the Star’s view — only the columnist’s — they want to know why then, did the Star publish this piece? Doesn’t publishing itself denote the Star’s implicit agreement with the views expressed?

In fact, no. Many in the newsroom and elsewhere in the Star may too disagree with some views expressed by columnists. But we agree on their right to express those views, however disagreeable we may personally view them.

This is rooted in this news organization’s commitment to the core Canadian right guaranteed by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms: freedom of expression. This is the foundation for columnists’ freedom to express their own views in the Star.

To me, this principle always seems best expressed by Justice Ian Binnie in the 2008 Supreme Court of Canada ruling on “fair comment”: “We live in a free country where people have as much right to express outrageous and ridiculous opinions as moderate ones. ... Public controversy can be a rough trade and the law needs to accommodate its requirements.”

The Star grants its columnists this right of fair comment. Once granted what is undoubtedly the privileged perch of columnist status, columnists are relatively free from interference. They can write what they think and believe subject to editorial oversight regarding accuracy of the facts at hand, standards of taste — always a subjective judgment call — and laws regarding hate speech and libel.

In practice this means columnists have freedom to choose the subjects they want to write about and wide latitude to take positions they believe and express them accordingly without concern for fairness to all sides.

Columns — clearly labelled as “Opinion” —can be “unfair” to some sides of any argument but still be “fair comment” given that opinion journalists stake out a position and aim to present convincing arguments to support their perspective.

Agree or disagree, the fact is the best columnists may indeed raise our ire now and again.