Barrel Strength

I took a course in communications law at the University of Ottawa last year. As is usual in such courses, we had to deliver a class on a topic of our choice. One young man in the class gave his lecture on “freedom of speech”, contrasting Canada and the United States. He dismissed it as “an American concept”, alien to the concept of controlled speech which we have in Canada. He cited leftist, feminist professors of law; he repeated their views in the communications law class. I questioned him. When it got down to it, he frankly admitted that he did not trust the people of Canada to defend the right values, he had more trust in the Supreme Court and the specialized institutions of human rights commissions and state-subsidized Court Challenges program than in the electoral process and in Parliament. I told him a brilliant future awaited him in the Liberal Party. I thought him a scoundrel, another fatuous leftist whose only virtue was fthe frankness with which he disdained elected governments. He considered himself a “progressive”.

So when Mark Steyn went on Steve Paikin’s show last night, I considered the nature of the three young Canadians who are arguing with him about their rights. They are all lawyers. They are all Muslims. They seemed, from how they argued and what they said, to have learned their law from the same sources as my classmate.

Steve Paikin had to maintain peace between Steyn and his young Muslim contenders, and at times the show descended into everyone shouting at once. What was clear to me, was that the kids – I am at the age I will call them that – were unpreprared to discuss the fundamentals. One of their arguments was that, since the Human Rights Commissions are not criminal in nature, Steyn mischaracterized them when he said he had been subject to “criminal” prosecution. As if going to jail, being forced to pay a fine, and enduring years of state subsidized prosecution is somehow made better because it is not “criminal”? Well, can we agree it is prosecution for heresy?

The basis of their objection to Steyn was that they had been offended, and wanted MacLean’s to give them a mutually agreeable amount and type of rejoinder. Steyn pointed out that they had had exposure in seven Canadian major newspapers to make their point.

Paikin finally asked the question of them: do you have a right not to be offended? And apparently all the young Muslim lawyers can think about is how offended they have a right to be. They have been educated in Supreme Court rulings that have sustained the Human Rights Commission’s prosecutions of neo-Nazis. For them, there is no cultural experience of the Human Rights Commissions and hate-speech prosecutions as an exceptional novelty. This is the Canada they grew up in. They have no recollection of the Canada that existed before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. When Steyn talks of Trudeaupia, he is referring to a reality that I perceived last night in the attitudes of these young Muslim lawyers. I found it deeply disturbing that they were incapable of discussing the real issues – objective facts about demographics – which lead to the apprehensions we all have about the future of western societies.

Does it matter whether the take-over is peaceful or violent, in the great scheme of things? Would it be better if it were peaceful? Would it make a difference? From what perspective? From whose? The debate was not engaged.

I saw three young Canadian lawyers, accidentally Muslims, and essentially people whose sense of entitlement is so vast they would crush free speech in this country and not even know what they were doing. I have seen too many young lawyers, white, brown, you-name-it, who have no idea whatever of our pre-Trudeau British constitutional freedoms and responsibilities, and no concern that they are so ignorant. All they want is a Supreme Court and Liberal government appointing the judges. Then they and their kind can rule us forever without interference from Parliamentary institutions. Our law schools are failing us. The Sock Puppets are altogether typical of what modern Canadian legal education is producing. Thank God for Steyn for bringing them up short.