In Ottawa on Monday, I kept getting asked—including by three stray passersby on Wellington Street—what Beatles song Michael Ignatieff should sing. Oh, come on, you don’t really need a professional for this, do you? Help! Yesterday (All my troubles seemed so far away). The Fool On The Hill. Hello, Goodbye. Get Back (to Harvard and a little light BBC hosting) . . .
I wasn’t really in the mood to pile on Iggy, poor chap. I was in town to testify to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Human Rights about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s assault on individual liberty and freedom of expression. And, mainly because I’ve been yakking about this subject for a couple of years now and have pretty much exhausted my stock of free-speech quotations from Milton to Salman Rushdie, just for variety’s sake I decided to cite Michael Ignatieff to the committee. I was talking about the assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch that, Canada’s constitution notwithstanding, there is “no hierarchy of rights,” only a “matrix” in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish group rights and collective rights. And I responded with a blast of Professor Ignatieff:
“Collective rights without individual ones end up in tyranny. Moreover, rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights . . . The right to freedom of speech is not, as the Marxist tradition maintained, a lapidary bourgeois luxury, but the precondition for having any other rights at all.”
Bingo! In my battles with the “human rights” enforcers, I am an Ignatieffite—okay, that’s a bit unwieldy, but I’m certainly an Iggybopper. As I told the Select Committee, I support the Ignatieff position—on freedom of speech, on individual vs. collective rights, and on the way “rights inflation” damages the core of real rights.
Until a recent mid-life career change, Ignatieff used to say stuff like that all the time. Now, not so much. At least not to the point of joining his fellow Liberal Keith Martin in calling for the repeal of Section 13, the appallingly drafted “hate speech” law even more appallingly interpreted by the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. But throughout the ’80s and ’90s you could switch on the BBC almost any night of the week and find a dark-shirted tie-less Ignatieff deep in furrowed-brow conversation about freedom of speech with some novelist or philosopher. I well remember him discussing a play he found morally repellent, but declaring nevertheless: “Nothing should be beyond speaking about.”
One day, and perhaps sooner than he thinks, he’ll be back at an Ivy League college or a public broadcasting sinecure and free to start saying and writing stuff like that all over again. But for now he’s the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Not that I’ve got anything against the Liberals. In the spirit of my free speech comrade Ezra Levant, who’s developing a nice line in Mister Bipartisan shtick, I was pleasantly surprised by the opposition questions from the committee. The Liberal members retreated immediately to a discussion of the Criminal Code provisions. The Bloquistes, who seemed hitherto unaware of the issues, had some sharp procedural and constitutional questions. The Dipper, after listening to our revelations of Canada’s “human rights” enforcers joining Nazi organizations, attempting to hold secret trials and imposing lifetime speech bans, asked to be sent the underlying documentation and enquired if we could make ourselves available for further testimony. Not one member attempted to make a principled case for Section 13—or even a low, unprincipled, sneeringly political case. Whatever its formal fate, nobody is prepared to say a good word for this law in public.
Nonetheless, I would love to have heard somebody other than yours truly deliver the Ignatieff line: the right to freedom of speech is the precondition for having any other rights at all. That’s a classically small-l liberal position, so it would be nice to hear a big-L Liberal take it. My only contact with the Leader of the Opposition was a long ago dinner party, but I would bet deep down in the darkest recesses of his soul where the spinners and managers don’t penetrate, he feels exactly the same way on free speech and human rights that he always did.
He just can’t say it. Which is kind of a sad comment on Michael Ignatieff’s own freedom of speech, and the shrivelling of Canadian political discourse.
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