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Barbara Hall, Chief Commissar of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission, is now calling for a Canada-wide "press council" that would have statutory powers over all newspapers, magazines, and websites, too. As Ezra Levant puts it:
In healthy democracies, the media is a watchdog over the government.
In the soft tyranny of Canada's human rights commissions, the government is the watchdog over the media.
The Closet Conservative adds:
I am surprised that there is so little outcry from the organized mainstream media about this.
I'm not. It became very clear to me and Maclean's early on in this battle that, for members of a profession that brags about its "courage" incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content - as I said at the Ontario parliament - to be the eunuchs in the Trudeaupian sultanate. With the exception of some prominent independent columnists (Margaret Wente, David Warren, Rex Murphy, George Jonas and a few others) many "media workers" see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every fortnight and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there's hardly anything left that isn't on the state pogey to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought - churches, private schools, literature, the arts, and yes, the media - have either an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. In the decayed Dominion, "intellectual freedom" means Cinedole Canada or whatever it's called gives you a check to enable you to continue making "bold, brave" films that discombobulate state power not a whit. In outing himself, predictably enough, as just another statist shilling for the faceless control freaks, Professor Richard Moon revealed himself to be an all too typical member of the modern academy.
One of the interesting aspects of my day at Queen's Park was how little ammunition the big guns of the Liberal and New Democratic parties could actually muster. They fired two blanks that barely sputtered. The nice lady Dipper dredged up the "No Irish May Apply" signs - rarer than unicorns even in their alleged heyday - and the Grit guy was even lazier and relied on Oliver Wendell Holmes' clapped out "shouting fire in a theatre" drivel. Why a progressive Canadian Liberal can find no better argument than that of a eugenicist kook swatting down the anti-war protesters of his day is a mystery to me.
But the point is: That's all the argument they need. The default assumption of my all-white liberal-left interrogators was that, if it weren't for Ontario's "human rights" regime, the citizenry would revert to their ugliest knuckledragging inclinations. At one level, this is perplexing. If the natural condition of an Ontarian is to be a racist sexist hatemonger, how have all these nice progressive members of parliament somehow managed to rise above such genetic predispositions? Why are they so uniquely equipped to keep the rest of the citizenry in check?
Well, of course, they're not. But a contempt for the citizenry at large is necessary to justify their and Commissar Hall's sinecures. And in a sense it's entirely understandable. Once you accept the degree of state management that the citizens of modern social-welfare democracies now take for granted, why be surprised that your rulers are no longer prepared to treat you as "citizens"? America is now catching up to the happy condition of Canada and Europe - the Big Nanny security state in which you're relieved of every adult responsibility - to provide your own health care, to look after your family, to work to support them. Why then be surprised that Ontario's Liberal and NDP members assume you can't be entrusted to think for yourself? Or that President Obama talks of his fellow citizens as if they're lame pets and feeble-minded urchins? It may yet prove the case that the Big Government security-blanket state can co-exist with a lively level of individual liberty, free speech and intellectual inquiry, but the results from the heart of the free world are not encouraging.
After my testimony, I went to see one of the members at Queen's Park, and got lost en route to his office. I found myself in a rather plush corner room with portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and what looked like a couple of thrones, and realized I'd wandered into the Lieutenant-Governor's suite. Retracing my steps I walked back down the corridor past a long line of viceregal portraits of the fellows for whom the province's towns (Sir Isaac Brock) and lakes (John Graves Simcoe) are named. Most of these long-forgotten men (colonial administrators with a far lighter touch than the Barbara Halls of this world) would be astonished at the assumptions about the role of the state made in the hearing room downstairs. But that's where we're at: The battles hard won two and three centuries ago are having to be re-fought in some of the oldest settled democracies on the planet.
There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, health care go away. Canada is at Stage Two: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone Quebec friends used to complain about the lack of English signs in Townships hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they're allowed to decide the language they'll give it you in? But that's true in a broader sense. If, in the interests of "cultural protection", the state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign bookstore owners, foreign TV operators out of Canada, why be surprised that, in return, it assumes the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?
As for Stage Three, Sean Gabb writes from Britain:
The highly selective use of speech codes and hate speech laws has nothing really to do with politeness. It is about power. The British ruling class may talk the language of love and diversity and inclusiveness. What it obviously wants is the unlimited power to plunder and enslave us, while scaring us into the appearance of gratitude for our dispossession. Because the tyrannised are always the majority in a tyranny, they must be somehow prevented from combining. The soviet socialists and the national socialists kept control by the arbitrary arrest and torture or murder of suspected opponents. That is not presently acceptable in England or in the English world. Control here is kept by defining all opposition as 'hatred' – and by defining all acts or attitudes that might enable opposition as 'hatred'.
Eventually, despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked. Undercover constables dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor racist remarks by customers. A Telegraph columnist is taken to a police station and questioned over a joke at a rally. A Dutch Member of Parliament is banned from entering the country.
America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They're the three anglophone members of the G7. They're three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great existential conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government absurdly dignified as "stimulus" (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo a few years down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't nannytollahs like Barbara Hall tell you what you're allowed to think?
And then comes Stage Three, when the enforcers no longer need even to keep up the pretense...
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