Thus, replying to a query as to why she and her colleagues hadn’t sued me and Ezra Levant for making false and defamatory statements, she paused, smiled, and responded that “with a very broad mandate, with a lot of interesting, important and exciting work, we are leaders and catalysts in advancing equality in Canada and in fact internationally.” I believe that’s Form Response #29 (e). I suppose these soporific accumulations of modish banalities are intended to send the message: “Nothing to see here. All’s well. Celebrate diversity. Go back to sleep.” But the hogwash isn’t entirely benign:
“The challenge of ensuring the right to freedom of expression and the right to equality and dignity is not new . . . ”
Whoa, hold up there. “The right to dignity”? Where’d that come from? Unlike the first right, it isn’t one of Canada’s constitutionally enumerated “fundamental freedoms”: the word “dignity” doesn’t appear in the “Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” since even the authors of that comically worthless document felt unable to advance with a straight face the creepy concept of state-mandated “dignity.” True, as Commissar Lynch notes, the word appears in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but so do many others that Canada’s “human rights” regime consciously disregards—including the presumption of innocence, equality before the law, a fair and public hearing, and of course the “freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media.” At last count, Canada’s “human rights” racket is in breach of Articles 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18 and 19, so Commissar Lynch’s fondness for the “right to dignity” is highly selective to say the least.
But, having embraced this pseudo-right, she then claims no one right trumps any other and it is her job to “balance” competing rights. This “balancing act” is a favourite shtick of the thought enforcers. Haroon Siddiqui, a lonely defender of state-regulated speech even among his Toronto Star colleagues, was musing the other day about balancing “free speech vs. freedom from hate.”
One of those is a real right. The other is a statist con. As I said in my own testimony to Parliament:
“Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the CHRC, has declared that the commission is committed to the abolition of hatred—not hate crimes, not hate speech, but hate. Hate is a human emotion; it beats, to one degree or another, in every breast. It is part of what it means to be human . . . To hate is to be free, and when the alternative is a coercive government bureaucracy regulating what you can say, then as Michael Ignatieff would be the first to point out, you are no longer free. I am with Mr. Ignatieff on that.”
Yes, well. It’s not clear whether Mr. Ignatieff is still with Mr. Ignatieff on that, but that’s for him and his conscience to wrestle with. It’s tempting to give Messrs. Fine and Siddiqui a pass, and at least allow that “freedom from hate” is an understandably desirable goal. But it isn’t. It’s explicitly totalitarian. In Norfolk, England, the other day, the 67-year-old wife of a Baptist minister wrote a letter to her local council making some politely expressed objections to the (publicly funded) Gay Pride parade and in return was visited by two police officers who informed her that her letter “was thought to be an intention of hate.” An “intention” of hate? In 1956, Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi story “The Minority Report” introduced the dystopian notion of “pre-crime.” Half a century on, some of the oldest constitutional democracies on the planet are embracing the concept ever more openly. As Commissar Lynch primly notes, “This approach to creating a harmonious society is not ours alone.”
I don’t want to live in state-regulated “harmony.” Not just because I have a low opinion of Jennifer Lynch, Haroon Siddiqui et al., and thus have no intention of singing harmony to their turgid tune. I don’t think they should have to harmonize with mine, either. As that incident in Norfolk suggests, when the heavy hand of government enforcers starts regulating you into harmony, all you’re allowed to sing is a crappy medley of We Are the World and the Barney the Dinosaur song. Language itself dies, until public communication is reduced to Commissar Lynch’s insipid banalities and the Assistant Manager, Housekeeping’s therapeutic platitudes. With respect to the latter, it’s not a growth experience. It’s a shrivelling experience.
To advance such pseudo-rights as “freedom from hate,” the very language is being neutered into compliance. Commissar Lynch’s performance is a preview of a world in which public discourse is conducted only in fraudulent abstractions and euphemistic evasions. Don’t buy it. When a government apparatchik tells you she’s busy creating a “harmonious society,” she’s not playing your song.
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