National Post (National Edition)
Libraries feel heat on free speech
How long until unsavoury books are banned?
The Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ position paper on intellectual freedom clearly lays out libraries’ “core responsibilities.” One is “to safeguard and facilitate access to constitutionally protected expressions of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, including those which some individuals and groups consider unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable.” Another is to “make available their public spaces and services to individuals and groups without discrimination.”
In an era when free speech scrambles for purchase on university campuses, one wonders how long it will last in libraries.
In June, Toronto’s excellent public library system came under heavy fire for a paid room-booking that turned out to be a memorial event for Barbara Kulaszka, a lawyer best known for representing alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada and their supporters, notably Ernst Zundel.
An awful gang of bigots showed up, notably Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm. And while a library employee monitored the proceedings and apparently detected nothing untoward, the outrage came thick and fast. “It is truly shocking that individuals who spread hatred, deny the Holocaust and have ties to neo-Nazi groups are being provided a permit by the Toronto Public Library,” said Toronto City Councillor James Pasternak. “If (Fromm’s and Lemire’s histories are) not good enough for the Toronto Public Library to say ‘No thanks’ then what could be?” asked Ottawa human rights lawyer Richard Warman.
Mayor John Tory asked the library to consider cancelling the event and, when it said it couldn’t, to reexamine its policies for future bookings.
It is doing just that. In the meantime, while affirming its ostensible commitment to free speech, the library workers’ union has thrown its weight behind the censorship effort. Union president Maureen O’Reilly didn’t respond to interview requests on Tuesday. But speaking to the labour magazine Our Times last month, she laid out her case. It rests on a very tenuous and almost certainly impracticable distinction: “Certainly there is free speech, but this is hate speech,” she told Haseena Manek, the article’s author, “and people have to stand up and call it for what it is.”
“Humouring the question of free speech when the real issue at hand is hate speech will only enable those with hateful agendas,” wrote Manek, paraphrasing O’Reilly. “The space was conceivably going to be used by those known to espouse hate speech, and definitely rented for the purposes of honouring someone who defended their alleged right to do so.” Where to begin? “This is hate speech”? What speech are we talking about? The event hadn’t happened yet; it seems no “hate speech” occurred when it did happen. The goal seems to be a policy that would have allowed the library to scan the participants’ pasts for disqualifying speech. But if a library is to claim any coherent defence of free speech, that’s a tall order.
In the activist vocabulary, “hate speech” can mean almost anything. It’s routinely thrown around with respect to University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson’s views on transgenderism, for example, which don’t remotely approach any threshold for government sanction. But if a public library is going to enact a policy of prior restraint for people who have previously expressed “hate speech,” it’s going to have to define it.
Criminal convictions might do the trick, but they’re pretty rare. Lemire was convicted under Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, but civil libertarians including (ahem) PEN Canada deplored that legislation, and it has since been repealed. Fromm has never been charged or convicted of hate speech. Kulaszka is dead, and she didn’t so much defend people’s “alleged right” to “espouse hate speech” as “vindicate their right to express what other people think is hate speech.”
A policy allowing the library simply to use its discretion might have prevented Kulaszka’s memorial from going ahead. But it doesn’t take heroic powers of foresight to see what lies down that road: groups on all sides of the political spectrum would demand the cancellation of library events they didn’t like. If only to save themselves the stress, librarians ought to oppose this idea.
O’Reilly speaks of events like the Kulaszka memorial “condoning” or “legitimizing” the views of their participants. It’s a strange argument, considering what’s in the Toronto Public Library’s stacks: roughly 100 copies of books by Ann Coulter, whom the University of Ottawa famously warned against espousing hate speech in Canada; 25 copies of Mark Steyn’s America Alone, an excerpt of which got Maclean’s magazine dragged through kangaroo human rights courts; The Black Candle, Emily Murphy’s flamboyantly anti-Chinese account of drug abuse in early 20th century Canada. There are currently 11 outstanding holds on the library system’s seven copies of Mein Kampf.
Nobody thinks the library or its librarians “condone” these books. Nobody with half a brain thinks they “condone” Fromm’s and Lemire’s views. The main thing this ongoing controversy seems to have done is give those views far more oxygen than they would have received had the library simply stuck fast to its proper position on free speech and let this blow over. Both practically and philosophically, they had it right the first time.