ALBERS: Free speech with limits is no freedom at all

James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you cannot have missed the shocking news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Nothing in recent memory has so vividly sketched the line dividing right from left in Western society.On the right, Kirk was seen as a champion of free speech, pro-family values, pro-life convictions, and as an unapologetic Christian who believed his duty was to engage with college youth in frank, respectful, and open dialogue. Nothing was off limits; his famous invitation was, “Don’t agree with me? Please, come to the front of the line.” He tackled the hardest issues — abortion, sexuality, transgenderism, the rainbow coalition — with unflinching candour. Yet the trait that came to define him was his compassion for those who opposed him, coupled with the steadiness of his scriptural convictions..BARCLAY: The purge of right-wing politics in Canada.On the left, by contrast, he was cast as a purveyor of “hate.” Divisive, they said — though none could explain just how. His real offence was more obvious: he was devastatingly effective at dismantling bad arguments and, worse, exposing the soft underbelly of leftist dogma. His recent debate at Oxford was a case in point: not “hate speech,” but speech the left hated. There is a difference.The depth of that hatred was revealed this week in the most brutal fashion. A tragedy, yes — but also a moment of blinding clarity about the state of discourse in Western democracies. Germany, France, England, Canada — all show the same creeping pattern..It reminded me of that famous Munk Debate where Jordan Peterson asked: does the left even possess a definition of “too far”? For the right, it is easy to mark the line: violence, the silencing of free speech, the coercion of conscience. For the left? History’s ledger is grim — Russia, China, and elsewhere, where speech itself became a crime and dissent was met with prison, gulag, or the grave. In the debate, both sides agreed that violence was “too far,” yet each blamed the other for it.Here lies the divide. The right insists on free speech without caveat — because liberty lives or dies in the exchange of ideas. The left insists it believes in free speech “with limits.” And in that little phrase — “with limits” — lurks the seed of tyranny. For if words that challenge the orthodoxies of gender, race, or intersectionality are redefined as “violence,” then actual violence becomes the sanctioned reply..EDITORIAL: A pipeline-free future? Carney’s major projects list ignores Smith’s demands.This explains the pattern: when violence emerges from a leftist corner, the media muffles it, plays it down, or simply refuses to report. Why? Because in their eyes it is justified, self-evidently righteous.Examples abound. The young woman on a US subway, her throat slit as bystanders watched. The cluster of right-wing ADF candidates in Germany who turned up dead before an election — seven in all. In France, Macron cobbled together the entire left to fend off Marine Le Pen, then barred her from future contests. In England, Keir Starmer’s government pursues citizens not for crimes but for criticism: immigration policies may not be questioned, online dissent is policed, and even flying the national flag can be deemed hate..Canada, too, has joined this tragic chorus. The leader of the opposition is castigated as “too aggressive” merely for pointing out the ruinous effects of Liberal environmental policies or immigration dogma. Citizens are told not to resist home invaders — better to submit than risk charges. And in Alberta, when the NDP attempted to mimic Danielle Smith’s “Alberta Next” town halls, they managed the neat trick of hosting forums where no questions were allowed. That, apparently, is their definition of “listening.”No, Alberta must not march down this road. Others may choose to bury their freedoms in the shallow grave of leftist conformity, but we need not. Ours is still the soil of free men and women, and it is time we take stock of who we are, where we stand, and whether our place is truly within a Canada so hostile to its own founding liberties.As Thomas Jefferson reminded his young republic in 1787, in that famous letter to William Stephens Smith: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”.BYFIELD: Charlie Kirk, Mark Carney, and learning to love the least.Charlie Kirk was such a patriot. An American, yes, but also a voice whose lesson crosses borders and time zones. His life and his death carry a message that Albertans, with our own proud insistence on faith, family, and liberty, would do well to heed. For freedom, once neglected, once left to wither, does not spring back of its own accord. It must be nourished — by courage, by conviction, and, if history’s cruel ledger is to be believed, too often by sacrifice.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.