A new front opens in the battle to maintain free expression in Canada

NDP MP's bill would criminalize "downplaying" and intimidate the nation's discourse

I am taking, as they say, a well-earned vacation. In my absence, I will be posting commentary that otherwise could have been accessed only through paywalls. This one seems particularly pertinent in light of last week’s renewed calls for the criminalization of speech. The Rewrite will return in its typical form in December

The Left has switched sides.

Many years ago, it fought on the campuses of North America to affirm society’s right to freedom of speech. Back then the left was all about individual liberty.

Its opponents were the conservatives in society who worked hard in the 1950s to suppress performers like Elvis Presley and create bodies such as the Georgia Literature Commission to help local prosecutors enforce obscenity laws and, once it gained more powers, censor hundreds of publications.

Most of that was gone by the early 1970s following the blossoming of the free speech movement on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley during the 1964–’65 academic year. It was the first—but certainly not the last—mass protest to appear on campuses in the 1960s. There was nothing conservative at all about the movement, which history remembers as very much a part of the New Left’s activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Half a century later, it is conservatives who are leading the fight for liberty and the left that is working, remorselessly, to crush it

The latest example landed in the House of Commons last week when Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Leah Gazan (pictured above) introduced Bill-413. The bill would change current hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code and make it illegal for anyone in Canada to make any remarks in public “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian Residential School system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.”

Those doing so would face up to two years in jail.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Gazan said her bill was necessary because: “At a time of increasing residential school denialism, including from some parliamentarians, I note that survivors, their families and communities need protection and a platform to share our history.”

“If passed, this bill would add to the Criminal Code the offence of wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada, calling irrefutable historical facts into question.”

Even more shocking, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree has indicated the government may be in alignment. In a tenuous minority Parliament, that means Gazan’s bill could pass.

One can have all the sympathy in the world for the plight of Canada’s indigenous people and still view this sort of legislation as unacceptable thuggery.

One can stand in residential school cemeteries, as I have, and mourn for the children who, far away from their loved ones, died of one of the many childhood diseases that swept through those schools and nevertheless view Gazan’s bill as pushing the nation across the line, from liberal democracy to institutional authoritarianism.

Chief Billy Diamond of the James Bay Cree was the first indigenous leader in Canada to negotiate a land claims settlement—the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement—and also founded Air Creebec.

He did not enjoy having his hair cut at the residential school he attended in Moose Factory, nor did he like being punished for speaking Cree. But he did excel academically and attended high school in Sault Ste. Marie before going on to make a significant contribution to society.

Len Marchand was the first Status Indian to be elected to the House of Commons, served as a cabinet minister under Pierre Trudeau and then as a senator for 14 years. His son, Leonard Marchand Jr., is the Chief Justice of British Columbia. Marchand the elder attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School, once the largest of its kind. It is also where, in 2021, it was announced that the site contained 200 possible unmarked graves, although no excavations have taken place to confirm that, and no bodies have been discovered.

I am aware that Diamond and Marchand may be exceptions, and I am not trying to argue that there probably shouldn’t have been better educational opportunities provided to them than the ones outlined above.

But I should be able to speak and write of them without fear that one of my fellow citizens will file a complaint with the police, who could then arrest me and have me jailed for “downplaying” the impact of residential schools on the many generations of indigenous children who were forced to attend them. A person should be able to write that without fear that another person will accuse them of trying to “justify” the Indian Residential School system.

But if Bill-413 makes it through Parliament, few will dare risk mentioning these facts, lest they offend the authorities.

If people are to speak freely in society, we have to be willing to be offended. In order to express ourselves through words, or art, we have to accept that some people will inevitably take offence. Sometimes, the truth hurts.

Both Gazan’s bill and the Liberal government’s Online Harms Act, currently in second reading in the House of Commons, essentially make causing offence liable to sanction by the courts and Human Rights Commission.

Neither has any place in a modern liberal democracy.

---

(This commentary originally appeared in Epoch Times Canada)

Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

---