News Analysis
There’s a
video of media personality Ezra Levant being interviewed by an Alberta human rights tribunal investigator in 2008 on why he published the controversial Danish cartoons in the Western Standard magazine, of which he was publisher at the time.
In rejecting the premise of the investigation, prompted by complaints that the cartoons sparked hatred, Levant opened his arms wide and said, “I published those cartoons to use the maximum freedom allowed.”
True to his word, he and his team at Rebel Media haven’t been shy to test boundaries. And regardless of what one may think of their approach to journalism, they have had the impact of showing the public how the boundary has been changing over the years and what value system has been defining it.
Levant’s
arrest in Toronto last month—for not leaving an area of a Jewish neighbourhood that police had designated for protesters
glorifying a dead Hamas leader—was another episode that showed where the goalposts are, and how law enforcement is taking action in grey areas of civil liberties versus public safety. It’s an approach that perhaps reflects the broader value system of society’s key institutions.
Mark Milke, president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, says while one doesn’t want to “second-guess” the actions of law enforcement to maintain public peace in the heat of the moment, there has been a “pattern” emerging in Canada, where the Jewish community has been attacked without much intervention. And that factors into the debate of keeping the peace and making sure “the basic norms are respected,” he says.
“You can protest, but you shouldn’t protest in front of a Jewish hospital,” he said. Over the past year, advocacy
groups such as
B’nai Brith have been raising the alarm about protesting vandalizers targeting Jews at their places of business, homes, hospitals, and even shootings at schools, saying the authorities need to better protect the Jewish community.
In the case of Levant, his argument is that if people are free to go to where Jews live and
glorify the late Yayha Sinwar—mastermind of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of civilians in southern Israel—by holding signs praising the terrorist leader and re-enacting his final moments, then Levant also has a right to stand where he wants on those streets, especially as a Jew in a Jewish neighbourhood. The police haven’t commented on the incident.
There has been an abundance of
contrasting incidents in recent years where the actions of law enforcement, and what is deemed as acceptable belief systems in media coverage, have also reflected a prevalent value system of the country’s key institutions.
In 2020, when
Rebel News went to the grounds of city hall in downtown Toronto to interview protesters with the Afro-Indigenous Rising Collective, who had been camping there for weeks, some of the protesters hit the reporters and tried to knock equipment out of their hands. Police responded by expelling the Rebel reporters from the public property.
In contrast, a year later, a Peel Regional Police officer was
suspended for telling a Global News reporter to leave a group of anti-COVID lockdown protesters alone.
In 2022, there was no media backlash when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
cancelled a concert by a young Russian pianist after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In contrast, a Toronto restaurant in 2020 issued an apology after losing partnerships and getting negative publicity for selling Asian dishes such as bone broth and pho and labelling them “wellness products.” The restaurant had been
accused of “cultural appropriation.”
Philip Carl Salzman, professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, says what has been pushed in Canada as “moral virtue” in recent years is based on the neo-Marxist principle of dividing society into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes.
“It’s not an economic class struggle [as it would be in Marxism], but it’s neo-Marxist because it still erases all the relations in favour of a class struggle, in this case, between oppressed and oppressor,” he told The Epoch Times.
In this value system, Salzman says, “all minorities are good as long as they’re victims, but if they’re successful minorities, then they’re white-adjacent, or hyphen-white, as Asians and Jews have been characterized.”
He says part of the problem is how people are schooled in institutes of higher learning in Canada. They in turn go on to take up key positions in society, and the resulting culture can impact judgment decisions.
“Universities are no longer places where people search for truth through examining evidence and making arguments and developing theories,” he says. Instead, students are trained to be “activists and to advance social change in the direction of crushing the ‘oppressors’ and benefiting the ‘oppressed,’” Salzman says.
Founding Principles
The issue of Canada’s overarching value system is being impacted by messaging that separates Canada from its founding principles, Milke says.He referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s famous
comments in 2015 that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and that Canada is the first “postnational state,” defining Canada’s shared values as “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.”
Milke notes, however, that Canada does have its own founding principles, which came from an “amalgamation of French and English traditions” based on the rule of law. They include the English tradition of aversion to the concentration of power, he says, and the French ideals of liberty.
“Canada has now become kind of broken. It doesn’t have a unifying idea,” he adds.
“And this isn’t about immigration, because plenty of immigrants come here from around the world precisely because they want a safe, prosperous society, because they want to be seen as individuals. … But what you’ve seen now is, it’s become a free-for-all.”
With no prevailing messaging about Canada’s founding values, along with a lack of drive to integrate people, Milke says people’s inherent tribalism is allowed to run unchecked, which also manifests in scenes of protest in the streets. He adds, however, that tribalism doesn’t excuse failure to differentiate between right and wrong.
“My background is German. My grandparents [who immigrated to Canada] didn’t side with Adolf Hitler and they didn’t side with the Nazis. They knew who was to blame: It was Nazi Germany who was a threat to civilization. This is why, for example, Iranian dissidents don’t blame Israel. They blame the Iranian regime for pushing the region into conflict,” he said.
To be sure, Canada had its own share of issues with tribalism in its early days, whether between the English, the French, and indigenous peoples, or even in more extreme cases, such as when the Ku Klux Klan gained a foothold in
Saskatchewan in the 1920s. However, Milke says, the problem now is that there doesn’t appear to be even a desire to help people better understand or adopt the idea of Canadian values.
“There is something [to ponder] about: What is the goal of the society? And are you going to be integrating people into the goal of a free, flourishing society based on individual rights?”
