Beverley McLachlin, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, recently wrote a Globe and Mail article headlined “The Ottawa truck convoy has revealed the ugly side of freedom.”.Its purpose is unclear. It was published two days before Prime Minister Trudeau revoked his declaration of emergency, so Justice McLachlin might have been trying to signal that if she had been called upon to adjudicate on the validity of invoking the Emergencies Act, she would have upheld it. Maybe she was hinting that other judges should uphold it. However, the article never actually refers to the Emergencies Act. .It contains one or two obvious truths. For instance: “… You can’t use your freedoms in a way that unreasonably conflicts with or affects the freedoms of other people. The freedoms guaranteed by the Charter stop where they harm others.”.However, her examples of “ugly” freedoms that the convoy truckers allegedly tried to exercise strike me as peculiar: “…the right to hold Ottawa’s downtown residents and businesses hostage; the right to malign public officials and call for the Prime Minister’s death; the right to shout epithets at people of colour.”.Whatever news sources Justice McLachlin was relying upon, it seems that she must have forgotten the famous legal maxim Audi alteram partem (“Hear the other side.”) If she had read my previous article here on Western Standard, she’d know numerous Ottawa residents had sworn affidavits for the honking injunction application attesting to the fact that the streets were never blocked (except by police), that people felt safe walking through downtown Ottawa, and that abundant parking was available. Justice Hugh Maclean, who actually did hear both sides of that lawsuit, accepted this evidence as persuasive and ruled that the protest could continue, just without the honking..I watched extensive video coverage of the Ottawa protests from a variety of news sources, but never saw a single one of these “ugly” things happening. Instead, I saw videos of several non-white truckers participating enthusiastically in the protest to preserve their freedom from coercive vaccination. Certainly not shouting any “epithets at people of colour.”.However, if any of the alleged “ugly” events did happen, there are two important points to remember..First, we already had laws on the books to deal with acts like these, without denying freedom of assembly or freedom of expression. We can separate illegal acts such as death threats from legitimate protests against mandatory injections. If public officials were defamed in any significant way that actually caused them harm, they can bring civil suits against the people who defamed them. If someone threatened the prime minister’s life, the police can charge that person under the Criminal Code. If anyone really was held hostage, the Criminal Code deals with that too..Secondly, you don’t tar thousands of people with the brush of lawlessness and restrain them from exercising their common-law and Charter rights in order to target a small number of people who may have misbehaved..The most telling sentence in Justice McLachlin’s article is this one: “Freedom, misconstrued as license to do and say whatever one wants, is dangerous.”.This is a far cry from the paean to freedom of expression that Justice McLachlin wrote as a newbie to the Supreme Court of Canada back in 1990. In two cases called Taylor and Keegstra, she wrote eloquent dissenting opinions for herself and Justices La Forest and Sopinka, recounting the historical value of freedom of expression as (a) “an essential precondition of the search for truth”, (b) a promoter of the “marketplace of ideas” and (c) “an end in itself, a value essential to the sort of society we wish to preserve.”.In 1990, she warned about the vagueness and subjectivity of laws forbidding expressions of “hatred” and “contempt.” Her concern was that such words, lacking objective interpretation, would open the doors to forbidding mere expressions of dislike on the part of whoever was tasked with enforcing those laws..She even said this: “As this Court has repeatedly affirmed, the content of a statement cannot deprive it of the protection accorded by s. 2(b) [of the Charter], no matter how offensive it may be.” .And she quoted a famous US case which said that in cases of falsehoods and fallacies, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”.In short, Justice McLachlin warned Canada 32 years ago that prohibiting speech is a slippery slope. We have now slid so far down that slope that even she seems incapable of recognizing the dangers anymore..I frequently publish videos and commentary on social media platforms such as Bitchute and Gab that rigorously respect freedom of expression, no matter how offensive. People occasionally publish anti-Semitic or misogynistic comments in response, but I simply apply traditional free speech principles in dealing with them. Sometimes I respond with more speech, correcting their errors if their ramblings are historically inaccurate. Often, I simply ignore them if they’re being boorish but not stating falsehoods..This is what we said as children in the 1950s: Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Each of us can choose how we react to bigoted comments. People who proclaim they’re hurt by such comments are disclosing that on some level, they are accepting the bigot’s evaluation there is something wrong with them. My reaction is the opposite: I conclude that there’s something wrong with the bigot. However, I don’t make it my problem. Frankly, I’m glad whenever they identify themselves so that I don’t make the mistake of interacting with them again..Karen Selick is a columnist for the Western Standard
