Watch out for free speech police
Arare loss for the safety police: At a roundtable discussion in Brampton last month, Ontario Premier Doug Ford promised to exempt observant turban-wearing Sikhs from a 50-year-old law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets — “in recognition of (their) civil rights and religious expression,” according to a spokesperson.
“Make it easy, before Christmas,” Ford reportedly said. “I’m keeping my promise.”
Taking him at his word, Ontario’s PC government will become the fourth in Canada to provide this exemption — and the first non-NDP government. Exemptions in British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba were all introduced by Team Orange, and the idea was most recently championed in the Ontario legislature at Queen’s Park by Jagmeet Singh, who now ostensibly leads the federal NDP.
I’d call that a coincidence. There’s nothing about this idea that’s intuitively more NDP or Liberal or Conservative. It’s the sort of thing any party might promise any group to curry or keep favour. It is, however, totally incoherent.
If logic doesn’t tell you there is no civil right to ride a motorcycle, two Ontario judges ruled as much in the matter of Baljinder Badesha, a Sikh motorcyclist who fought the helmet law on constitutional grounds and lost both at trial (in 2008) and on appeal (in 2011) — despite interventions by the World Sikh Organization and the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Badesha never claimed riding a motorcycle was a form of “religious expression,” in the way wearing a kirpan or the turban itself is for many Sikh men. He was asking to be excused from the inconvenience of having to access public motorways by car, and the courts quite rightly deferred to the legislation’s safety-related goals.
On its own, this is no big deal. But it’s a good example of just how capricious, selfserving and addle-pated governments often are when dealing with rights. Which brings us to Ontario’s new free-speech requirements for its universities and colleges. By Jan. 1, 2019, they must have policies in place affirming they are “places for open discussion and free inquiry” that do not “shield students from ideas or opinions that they disagree with or find offensive,” and that will not tolerate community members “obstruct(ing) or interfer(ing) with the freedom of others to express their views” — the latter being a particular concern among many conservatives.
I got a bad feeling about this right off the bat: knowing how governments treat our freedoms, it’s madness to assume they can usefully correct faltering universities. The feeling has only gotten worse. Many Canadians on the left clearly already see the classical liberal idea of free speech as a conservative notion, not as a key block in Western society’s foundation. This only further cements that idea. And I don’t trust this government not to make it worse.
Doug Ford is, after all, the guy who promised to ban Al Quds Day celebrations, where anti-Semitic speakers have been known to flirt with Canada’s hate speech laws.
“Blatantly racist or antiSemitic ideology should never be permitted on the grounds of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, or anywhere else in our province,” Ford tweeted. But neither racism nor anti-Semitism is remotely illegal. And crucially, in Canada, we punish speech after it happens, and only if it meets a high bar in the Criminal Code. We don’t ban free speech in advance because we’re afraid of it; that’s precisely what Ford’s government claims to want to prevent on campuses. If his government intends to micromanage this file, I can easily see the whole thing melting down into a hot mess of vexatious complaints and political stunts that leaves everyone worse off.
Worryingly, to my mind, Ontario’s universities seem happy to play ball. “We welcome further discussion with the government on how freedom of expression may continue to be protected,” Daniel Woolf, president of Queen’s University, wrote on behalf of the Council of Ontario Universities, of which he is chair.
In an interview, University of Toronto president Meric Gertler dismissed the idea that this weakens institutional independence; indeed, he doesn’t think the university’s long-existing policies are perfectly in compliance with the new directive. “Freedom of expression does not include a right to disrupt others who are assembled freely for their own purposes,” stipulates the university’s freedom of expression policy, dated 2006.
On occasion students have succeeded in shutting down controversial speakers, Gertler conceded, but he calls those “teachable moments.”
“We have to work doubly hard to ensure that we provide an environment in which no one feels prevented from or discouraged from expressing views, no matter how unpopular or disturbing they may be so long as they stay on the right side of the law,” he said.
That sounds heartening, but his view is by no means universally appreciated. And I suspect Queen’s Park has made it harder to defend, rather than easier.