John Robson: Intolerance Is the New Inclusion as We Forsake Our Heritage of Liberty

Quebec Premier Francois Legault speaks at a news conference at the legislature in Quebec City on June 9, 2023. Quebec Deputy premier and Transport Minister Genevieve Guilbault, behind, looks on. The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot

Commentary

To the slogans “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength,” one could now add “Hate is love” judging by how often social justice seems to be delivered via the policeman’s truncheon. Even in famously polite Canada.

Also “Censorship is free speech” and “Dissent is treason,” because a Christian group had to sue after its event permit was cancelled in Quebec City this summer because it was suspected of Thoughtcrime. And because of the brazenness of the rationale.

Quebec’s tourism minister said bluntly the event went “against the fundamental principles of Quebec.” Which apparently don’t include free speech. Instead her boss, Premier François Legault, growled, “We’re not going to allow anti-abortion groups to put on big shows in public places.” See, intolerance is the new inclusion.

It’s not obvious why Quebec, Canada, or any jurisdiction needs such a thing as a “tourism minister.” Either a place is worth visiting or it is not, and there’s no shortage of private tourism outfits, cultural societies, etc., devoted to making places worth visiting and spreading the word.

It’s also not obvious that governments that can’t balance budgets or even buy light rail trains that fit its light rails can convince people in Ecuador to come see our War Museum, let alone reform our shabby characters.

It’s not even obvious why the Centre des Congrès de Québec, or any such facility, would be a “state-led venue.” Unless it is believed Canadians can no longer build and rent a hall without Big Brother… or rent it to the right sort of people.

We have drifted far from our heritage of liberty. No really; as Bill Watson noted in the National Post, in the 1940s “legendary B.C. journalist Bruce Hutchison called Canadians North America’s ‘last surviving rugged individualists’” following American embrace of FDR’s New Deal. But as Watson also noted, that was then.

Our elites have since sold us a view of Canadians as born socialists, and brought in a vast array of government measures to support and shape us from cradle to grave. But as Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” warned, a state that assumes responsibility for your well-being, especially if moral as well as material, cannot allow old-fashioned notions and institutions of individual liberty to stand in its way.

To quote André Schutten and Michael Wagner, “ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” Including that one must conform to the tyranny of genuine or ersatz majority opinion as channelled by politicians who often did not secure a majority of the popular vote.

So this cancellation and its justification were no temporary lapse. In 2019 the same Premier Legault rebuked newly-elected Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s call for a cross-Canada pipeline with the ominous “There’s no social acceptability for an additional oil pipeline.” And Justin Trudeau, after long supporting the Energy East pipeline Kenney tried to resurrect in 2019, suddenly declared in 2015 that it hadn’t yet achieved “social licence.”

What, one wonders, is this famous “social licence”? Pipelines are certainly legal; Quebec is crisscrossed by a network bringing fossil fuels to consumers and businesses, over 10,000 kilometres for natural gas alone. But ignorance is strength and falsehood is truth.

Since Quebec is democratic, shouldn’t duly-created laws allowing pipelines convey “social licence”? If not, as I asked at the time about pipelines and a B.C. provincial regulatory ban on hunting grizzly bears as “no longer socially acceptable to the vast majority of British Columbians,” who issues these things and how do you get one?

Answer: Nobody, and you don’t. Instead, if you ask questions you are cast out of Robespierre’s popular will into enemy-of-the-Republic outer darkness and scrutinized by the Committee of Public Safety.

At one point Justin Trudeau said, “there is no support for a pipeline through Quebec.” None? Really? Even if it’s only, say, 2 percent, and they’re wrong, are they not human beings and citizens? Just like whatever minority of Quebecers oppose abortion?

Well, the same Justin Trudeau unleashed a two-minute hate on opponents of COVID vaccination as “extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?” (Original French version is, or was, here, starting at 3:23.)

Clearly not. Especially given his chilling “They take up space.” Which we need for… what? Lebensraum?

One should not invoke Orwell promiscuously, let alone Hitler. Especially since “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is, I believe, no longer taught in schools since ignorance is strength, particularly of ominous parallels between Mao-style “reeducation” and DEI initiatives like the one that drove progressive Toronto principal Richard Bilkzsto to suicide.

So I don’t want to seem rude. But hate is not love, intolerance is not inclusion, and censorship is un-Canadian.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.