Authorities snatching dissidents in broad daylight, then prosecuting them interminably until they are inexplicably tossed back, is among the familiar state habits that mark totalitarian-authoritarian life.
Writers such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel sought to show as equally remarkable, precisely because it goes so unnoticed, the blinding effect such state conduct has on the wider population. Injustice afflicting individuals is shrugged off because the collective is conditioned to live life with heads down.
The curiously Canadian version of this phenomenon is to stand the normal course of cause and effect on its head. We do not live in an authoritarian, much less totalitarian, state. Yet despite the abundant means of democratic resistance available, we live much of our collective life with our heads down as if we wish to condition the state to become the authoritarian Leviathan that, so far, it is not.
No explanation was offered as to what aspect of “the public interest” had changed since Fr. Van Hee was scooped up by Ottawa police mere metres from Parliament Hill, arrested, and charged. His alleged offence? Protesting inside the 50-metre “bubble zone” around the Morgentaler abortion clinic on downtown Bank Street in the nation’s capital. Then aged 83, the Jesuit who protested peacefully almost daily on Parliament Hill for nearly three decades, was charged with intimidating or attempting to intimidate a person.
Now, it must be made immediately clear following the two preceding sentences that Fr. Van Hee was not, that day, protesting abortion. He was protesting the Ontario government’s “bubble zone” law itself.
His dissent was that the 2017 legislation passed by then Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government violated charter-protected free speech. Nothing on his signage remotely referred to abortion as good, bad, or indifferent. Its most prominent language extolled the charter as an anti-authoritarian bulwark by claiming: “Without free speech, the state is a corpse.” The corpses of the aborted unborn were not, on that day at least, the issue on his mind or sign.
Whether we are pro-choice, pro-life, or just pro calling the whole thing off, what happened to Fr. Van Hee on Oct. 24, 2018, and took until Oct. 28, 2022, for the “public interest” to kick the charges to the curb, is an absolute scandal. His legal team, including Toronto’s Phil Horgan and Albertos Polizogopoulos in Ottawa, is pressing ahead with a constitutional challenge to the bubble zone law to make sure no one, ever again, endures such an abuse of justice. This is also a case that should have, from the moment Ottawa arrested the dissident priest on a public sidewalk, prompted Canadians to flood their medium of choice with denunciations of such a proto-authoritarian state action.
But no. As of this writing, there has not been even a murmur of criticism that after the snatching of Fr. Van Hee, State authorities took four years to discover that the “public interest” never required the charges in the first place. Heads down, Canadians seem abjectly oblivious to the case’s signal that it is in our public interest to fend off early and always such authoritarian state inclinations.
The heart of such a protective response is recognizing our obligation to lift our heads and speak out even when the snatching afflicts those with whom we disagree politically. Scratch that. Especially when it affects those with whom we disagree.
I disagree, for example, with the main methods and some of the politics of the truckers’ protest convoy in Ottawa in February. I have written in these pages that I think they largely undermined a laudable cause with conduct that was foolish gusting to self-destructive. But I stand foursquare behind Barry Bussey’s recent Epoch Times column denouncing the scurrilous denial of bail, and then cruel release conditions, for convoy organizer Tamara Lich. As Bussey wrote eloquently, “Basic humanity demands justice for one who has more than paid her dues for the cause of free speech, which she is now denied. It is far past time to end the tyranny of Tamara.”
A collective, peaceful, public slapdown of those who turned the legal system into a political weapon against Tamara Lich is vital to avert conditioning the state into habits of creeping tyranny. So, likewise, is it essential in the case of Fr. Tony Van Hee. We need only lift our heads and give notice.
