Constitutions, even if carefully structured, are not self-enforcing. If the majority’s will is to violate a minority’s rights, eventually the mob will prevail. Herein lies the primary threat to free speech in Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms unequivocally proclaims a right to “expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” Little by little, however, we have witnessed the undermining of this freedom with the voting public’s tacit approval.

Free-speech curtailment has proceeded under such guises as “hate speech,” “discrimination,” and “misgendering.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission, for example, has tasked itself with defining “transgender” and educating us on “the importance of pronouns.” To refer to someone contrary to his self-identified gender is now “discrimination” and illegal in Ontario. Since 2016, Quebec comedian Mike Ward has been fighting a $42,000 fine for an insensitive joke mocking a young physically handicapped singer. As reported by the National Post, a judge ruled the joke violated the singer’s “right to dignity, honour, and reputation, as well as his right to equality and to be safe from discrimination.”

The legal action against Ward is but one of many sanctions imposed on those who violate opaque and evolving speech codes. Journalist Ezra Levant has long been the target of a lawfare campaign over his criticism of militant Islam. In 2017, then-Minister of Heritage Mélanie Joly dumped author Christine Douglass-Williams as a director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation after she condemned sharia law. Union members and feminists have shut down men’s-rights events, and so-called hate watchdogs have deplatformed and blocked funding for nationalist commentators and political provocateurs such as Gavin McInnes.

Meanwhile, approved media enterprises are getting more taxpayer subsidies – including a new $600 million federal injection over the next five years – which crowd out independent media and incentivize conformity with the Ottawa narrative. The annual $1 billion for the CBC is problematic enough, but a further $75 million goes to the Canada Periodical Fund and $350 million to the Canadian Media Fund. On January 30, the federal Liberal government announced $7 million for “civic-literacy programming to help Canadians make informed decisions” in the next election, part of a plan to protect voters from government-defined “fake news” during the campaign.

Be the silencing and manipulation juvenile or sophisticated, public or private, the outcome is the same: a cloud of intimidation and self-censorship, confined discourse, and the degradation of liberal democracy. A widely held expectation of retribution leads many to flee from the crossfire. This unwillingness to either speak our minds or be associated with those who push the boundaries ultimately suffocates public debate, from our legislatures to our pubs and dinner tables.

Michael Chong, a 2017 challenger for the Conservative Party leadership, has long argued that there are “too many restrictions on free speech in Canada.” He favours comprehensive repeal of hate-speech provisions, not just in administrative law such as human-rights codes, but even in the criminal law. In Chong’s view, shared via email, “they generally get free speech right south of the border.”

Data Tells the Tale

Surveys show Canadians either never had or have lost respect for free speech. According to the Canadian Constitution Foundation, 60 percent of us support bans on “hate speech.” That climbs to 72 percent for speech construed as praise for terrorists or terrorism. A Vanderbilt University poll found that fewer than one in five Canadians perceive too little freedom for expression and the press. Only half support the right to “say bad things about our form of government.” CCF Executive Director Howard Anglin doesn’t see “the lack of enthusiasm for free speech” in Canada as anything new. What has changed, he says, is that support for censorship now comes mainly “from the left rather than the right.” This shouldn’t be surprising, he feels, for “free speech is most valued by those whose speech is being suppressed.”

Another way to gauge values is to assess pushback against censorship: action rather than talk. If any social institution might be expected to defend intellectual freedom, surely it should be our universities. For almost a decade, however, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has monitored free speech on publicly funded university campuses and found blatant violations to be the rule rather than the exception. Only five of 60 assessed universities protect free speech, and the trend has worsened in recent years. Student unions have likewise become social-justice fiefdoms; not a single one received an A grade from the JCCF.

A handful of Canadian academics, including the University of Toronto’s Jordan Peterson and Wilfrid Laurier University’s Lindsay Shepherd, have garnered attention and disapproval for standing up for free expression, but the practical response from administrators has been little to nothing. The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship has documented how administrators push progressive agendas and stifle alternative views. Most campuses remain reflexively hostile to politically incorrect perspectives.

Of late there has been some political pushback. Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has threatened to tie federal post-secondary funding transfers to free-speech protections. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has actually done it, along with making student-union dues optional.

Wrecking-Ball Censors

“The radicals of the 1950s and 1960s became the tenured professors, journalists, judges, and politicians of the 1980s, and they have now educated two generations of students, written two generations of books and reportage, and passed two generations of laws,” says Anglin. “The old rebels now command the heights of our culture.”

Not only are free-speech opponents a dominant plurality, they include aggressive, militant factions that seek to destroy the livelihoods of dissenters. As noted by one of their victims, Rick Mehta, a fired professor from Acadia University, we are in a “culture war that is taking place in universities all over Canada and much of the Western world.” Faith Goldy – a former Rebel Media journalist and Toronto mayoral candidate – has been a favoured target of the social-justice mob. They succeeded in badgering the PayPal and Stripe platforms into barring her from receiving donations. Later, Goldy lost a court action against Bell Media for refusing to run her campaign ads and had to pay $43,000 in legal fees. Her opponents, including the Anti-Hate Network, delighted in adding insult to injury as they pressured GoFundMe to shut down her plea for support.

Culture, Technology Circumvent Intimidation

In a recent interview with Maclean’s magazine, Chong asserted that “we need to find our way back to a pluralistic politics that puts freedom at the center of our society.” Elaborating in an email to C2C, Chong said “the challenge to free speech in Canada stems from an overly expansive interpretation of the harm principle”, which he sees as manifested in protections against hurt feelings. Anglin advocates free speech as a “neutral principle.” Conservatives should “defend even radical progressive speech with which they disagree…pro-BDS and pro-sharia law speakers must be permitted, as well as Lindsay Shepherd and Faith Goldy.”