I will be the first to admit that there must be limits on freedom of speech. A lot will depend on context as to what can be said. A lot will depend upon what one says and how one says it.
For example, if you are inciting a crowd to go to a person’s house and throw rocks through the victim’s windows or burn the house down, that is a speech that has gone way too far. Such incitements to violence are not on. Our society cannot survive with that level of violent rhetoric.
However, severe limits on speech must be at a minimum or else we cannot survive as a free and democratic society. Speech must not be so curtailed that a person is not permitted to voice an opposing opinion for fear that he or she will offend someone who has a different opinion.
Free speech is important, says Hannah Arendt, because it is the only way that we can truly understand the world. Arendt is someone whom we should pay attention to since she saw first-hand what happens when speech is taken to the extreme. A Jewish woman who had lived in the hateful atmosphere of Nazi Germany, she ultimately fled to the United States where she wrote at length on the rise of totalitarianism.
In her book “The Promise of Politics,” Arendt observes that “we know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it.”
In other words, to know what the world is really like we must be open to other perspectives. If we stay within our own bubble, we are an “idiot.” The English word “idiot” comes from the Greek word “idion” which means private, one’s own, peculiar. We are an idiot when we are not willing to see the world from another perspective. An idiot is totally private and is insensible to the need of engaging with the world civilly.
Arendt writes that “If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”
The freedom to engage in ongoing dialogue is crucial for us to understand the world in which we live, and it is the only way that our society can be free.
However, our current environment is not conducive to dialogue. Consider the way that technology has fundamentally altered the way we communicate. Social media reaches mass audiences, but it does little for dialogue. Instead, it is driven by the base desire for fame and fortune of the individual users. Create the social media message that gives the largest number of clicks, and you make money. There is no incentive for a meaningful conversation about the issues that matter. Meanwhile, the tech giants are the real winners as they manipulate the algorithms for their own benefit.
Freedom, as Arendt noted, requires an engagement with one another. “A life without speech and without action ... is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men,“ she wrote in ”The Human Condition.”
Unfortunately, the federal government’s Bill C-63, or the Online Harms Act, does not encourage dialogue. It does the opposite. On the one hand, the government talking point is that it allows, “Canadians to express their thoughts and opinions by creating a safer and more inclusive online space.”
But on the other hand, this act encourages those who are offended to report on anyone they deem dangerous even if the alleged perpetrator has not done anything but merely speaks an idea that is “likely” in the mind of another to cause hatred or “could cause a person to commit an act that could cause” violence; or “could cause a person to commit an act that could cause” extremism or terrorism.
This leaves the door wide open to subjectivity. There is a lot of room for differences of opinion over what speech is “likely” to cause hatred or “could cause” violence or extremism or terrorism.
Remember the rash of church burnings in the summer of 2021? Activists were motivated by the alleged claims that there were mass graves at the sites of former indigenous Residential Schools, and they went on a rampage of church burnings and vandalism. During that summer over 50 churches were affected.
During this mayhem, then-government official Gerald Butts said he thought it was “understandable.”
Meanwhile, an executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, tweeted, “Burn it all down.”
Some in the indigenous community argued that the social media post was not advocating arson, but was instead calling for “decolonization” of the “historic systemic inequities as a result of ongoing colonization and assimilation in Canada.”
Others in the indigenous community were against the burning of their churches, noting that such actions were not in solidarity with them.
Which was it?
How would the person behind that post have been dealt with if she were to have tweeted “Burn it all down” after the Online Harms Act was passed? Could it be said that her tweet “could cause” violence or extremism or terrorism, or “likely” to cause hatred.
I think it could. What about you?
Government has not given us a mechanism to encourage dialogue and debate. Instead, the government’s heavy hammer will come down on one side or the other. But how will that be determined?
Remember that the prime minister is already on record saying that he supports some protests that he agrees with and does not support those he does not agree with. Do you think the bureaucrats in the new Digital Safety Commission will also choose which to support and which to reject and punish based upon the accepted ideological position of the government?
Maybe they will support the burning of churches but will have zero tolerance for the burning of the bright-coloured flags of various identity groups. Who knows? That’s the problem—no one knows how this ill-conceived act will play out if it’s passed into law. That’s why it must be stopped.
