Some political leaders maintain Canada’s free speech rights are in jeopardy. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has proposed having a “Free Speech Guardian” on university campuses. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has created a new position—parliamentary secretary for civil liberties—for a similar purpose.
Free speech advocates, too, have said speech rights and free expression are being infringed upon in Canada, particularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
Freedom Convoy protest last winter, and in light of upcoming government legislation that aims to regulate the internet.
The Epoch Times asked experts on free speech to assess the health of this charter right in Canada. Two of them independently said the 2021 case of a Montreal comedian is a good indicator.
“The most significant free speech case in the past year or so is probably the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Ward v Human Rights Tribunal of Quebec,” Bruce Pardy, a Queen’s University law professor and executive director of the think tank Rights Probe, said in an email.
Dax D’Orazio, a research affiliate for the University of Alberta’s Centre for Constitutional Studies, also brought up this case as the most significant. He said free speech ultimately won, but “only narrowly,” and the close brush highlights concerns.A Serious Joking Matter
In the fall of 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec comedian Mike Ward’s jokes about a well-known disabled teen singer did not amount to discrimination under Quebec’s rights charter. The case is significant for a few reasons, D’Orazio said. First, it pitted provincial human rights legislation against the constitutional right of free expression. Second, it’s one of only a few Canadian legal cases that consider artistic freedom. Third, the judgment “only narrowly” favoured the free expression argument.
Provincial human rights legislation came close to expanding into “terrain that should enjoy some of the most robust expressive protection: artistic and comedic spaces,” D’Orazio said. The case has “undoubtedly cast a chill on Canadian comedy,” he said, which “is already quite bland and risk-averse.”
Pardy said that in addition to the Ward case, “the witch hunt at the Ontario College of Psychologists against Jordan Peterson, and other similar situations,” are also significant as Canada negotiates the boundaries of free speech.
Peterson, a well-known psychologist and thinker, was disciplined by his professional college for social media posts on a variety of politically charged topics. Many other Canadian professionals have faced similar censure by their professional regulators in recent years, including doctors, nurses, and teachers.‘Boundaries’
“We might be seeing a renegotiation of the reasonable boundaries for free expression in liberal democracies,” D’Orazio said.
One of the “boundaries” that hasn’t been discussed enough is “how we conceptualize harm,” he said, adding that deeming certain speech to be “harmful” is most often used to justify limits on free speech.
D’Orazio notes that the potential harms of, for example, doxing or hate speech “have never been more obvious, [yet] it simply can’t be the case that any invocation of harm automatically leads to expressive restrictions.”
“There are a variety of forms of expression that may be harmful, but ought not attract the coercive power of the state,” he said.
The history of censorship shows that “pushing potentially harmful ideas to the margins of public discourse doesn’t mean they simply disappear," D'Orazio said. Sometimes that instead gives those ideas more power, he said.
People don’t realize that censorship in Canada could have an effect beyond our borders, D'Orazio said.
“When democracies renege upon some of their core democratic commitments (like free expression), even when it’s good-intentioned and solely aimed at mitigating harm (hate speech, etc.), non- or even anti-liberal regimes (Russia, China, and Iran are probably the best examples) use these departures as alleged proof of hypocrisy and reframe them as justification for their own authoritarian tendencies,” he said.
Academic Freedom
Mark Mercer, a philosophy professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, highlighted a significant free speech case in academia.While there are many recent cases of professors being disciplined for speaking on a variety of matters, Mercer said, the 2020
case of Tomas Hudlicky stands out. Hudlicky, who has since died, was an organic chemist at Brock University who criticized “preferential” hiring in the name of equity.
His advocacy for merit-based hiring was a small part of a paper he published in a peer-reviewed journal exploring 30 years of progress in organic chemistry research.
An uproar ensued, Hudlicky’s paper was retracted, and he was chastised for advocating a “master-apprentice” relationship between professors and students, as he had said most students are not willing to engage because it takes too much hard work. Brock’s provost and VP said at the time that this description connotes “disrespect and subservience.”
“Sometimes professors are criticized by their universities or called to discipline in ways out of proportion to the offense, but there was an offense," Mercer told The Epoch Times via email.
He said in Hudlicky’s case, however, “there was no offense. … [He] did absolutely nothing wrong and yet was subject to a mobbing.”
Mercer himself was
disciplined for saying academics should be free to say the N-word in academic contexts. He was defending Verushka Lieutenant-Duvall at the University of Ottawa who had been disciplined for inviting students to debate the use of the word.
“The sad state of expression on Canadian university campuses has been under-reported, at least by the mainstream and legacy media outlets,” he said.
What’s Ahead
Pardy and D’Orazio both highlighted the pending legislation related to internet content as the biggest concern ahead for free expression in Canada.“The most significant things to watch out for in 2023 are the legislative plans of the federal government, including Bill C-11, now at third reading in the Senate, and Bill C-18, now at second reading in the House of Commons, and their promise to prohibit ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ online,” Pardy said.
D’Orazio said, “The advent of the Internet has unleashed new expressive harms that we ought not diminish, but … if liberal democratic countries become much more restrictive in the way they police digital spheres, we may see other countries antithetical to liberal democracy weaponize this phenomenon for much different purposes.”
