There’s no ‘ but’ in free speech
‘We will always defend freedom of expression. But …” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t really need to go any further than that during his Friday press conference. No one ever does, if that’s their response to a question about a fundamental freedom. The “but” writes everything else out of existence.
A francophone reporter had asked Trudeau for his thoughts on the Oct. 16 public beheading of middle school teacher Samuel Paty near Paris — an act of vengeance by an Islamist freak who was angry Paty had shown his class some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that inspired the 2015 massacre of much of the satirical magazine’s staff, as well as a fatal attack on a kosher supermarket two days later. The topic of the class had been freedom of speech. Fourteen people recently went on trial for those attacks. Charlie Hebdo republished the contentious cartoons in their honour.
This is what Trudeau had to say about it: “Freedom of expression is not without limits. We do not have the right, for example, to shout ‘ fire!’ in a movie theatre crowded with people. There are always limits.”
And: “We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”
It’s a quintessentially Justin Trudeau response. And unlike, say, his vows to stand up to Chinese thuggery, it smacks of sincerity. But it’s an egregiously misguided response for the leader of any free country to proffer — and especially, I would argue, Canada.
First of all, by implying that rude drawings of Muhammad like Charlie Hebdo’s encroach upon legal limits to free speech, he is simply misleading the public. Last year’s conviction of James Sears and Leroy St. Germaine, publishers of the multifariously insane hate rag Your Ward News, was the first in a decade — and it published prima facie incitement to violence against women.
David Ahenakew, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told a reporter in 2002 that Jews were “a disease,” and that he understood why Hitler wanted to get rid of them: “They owned the banks, they owned the factories, they owned everything. They loaned money out to the peasants knowing damn well that they can’t pay it back so they took their land.”
“Revolting, disgusting, and untrue,” the Saskatchewan provincial court eventually concluded — but not “promoting hatred.”
Denying the Holocaust, on its own, is not illegal in Canada.
Drawing the prophet naked, or in a sloppy kiss with one of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists, is objectively not even in the same universe. The only hatred it’s inciting is, demonstrably, against the artists.
Of course it’s entirely possible to simultaneously defend Charlie Hebdo’s freedom of speech, deplore the violence done in opposition to it, and argue it’s unkind or reckless to publish cartoons that so offend people. You can do it consistently ( don’t offend anyone) or inconsistently ( don’t offend people if it might lead to violence). It’s a free country. Fill your boots. Pitch an op- ed. You could say something like, “we owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”
But none of that is OK if you’re the leader of a proudly free country being asked about people getting slaughtered over cartoons. In that case you just have to call it what it is: a barbaric reaction to a manifestation of free expression that you will unconditionally defend regardless of your opinion of it, which is irrelevant.
Trudeau’s “watch our tongues” advice isn’t just offensive from a civil libertarian standpoint, either. It implies there are people out there in Canada polishing their guns and sharpening their machetes, just waiting for someone to say the wrong thing — at which point they’ll go on the rampage. A good number of Canadians believe that’s true; most of them think the gun- polishers and machete- sharpeners are Muslim; and they tend to hate Justin Trudeau.
Certainly Canada has produced Islamic extremists. Most have been caught before they could inflict serious damage, through some combination of their own idiocy and good police and intelligence work. But I see no reason to believe the threat in Canada is even remotely comparable to the threat in France: the Charlie Hebdo cartoons have been published in this country, after all, including in this newspaper. Some publicly agreed and disagreed with the decision.
No doubt some people seethed privately. No one took up arms. And I don’t think that’s entirely a matter of luck. Canadians in general are remarkably welcoming and tolerant people.
Some complain we are asked too often to tolerate intolerance. But intolerance takes many forms in Canadians, both old stock and new.
Peaceful intolerance isn’t such a big deal so long as our leaders unconditionally defend our fundamental freedoms — which is precisely what Justin Trudeau isn’t doing.