in today’s Toronto Star:
It is my hope that giving the Saul Hayes Award to [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper – who has publicly criticized human rights commissions and their censorship as “egregious” and “abusive” – will remind the CJC of Hayes’ commitment to free speech, and perhaps lead the CJC back to his good example.
Frankly, the award itself needs Harper’s rehabilitation. The last recipient was Richard Warman, the former human rights investigator who was recently found by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to have published many vicious anti-Semitic comments on neo-Nazi websites in a misguided attempt to entrap other “haters.”
Hayes would be beside himself.
PLUS: Ezra Levant has a new post, mocking B’nai Brith’s (deeply offensive, paternalistic) assertion that without censorship, we would have “anarchy”.
I rather like the idea of living in a country with intellectual anarchy. And, given the fact that you are reading this on the Internet, I get the feeling that you do, too. The Internet is about as lawless a frontier as it gets, when it comes to ideas and information. You will read offensive things on the Internet. But you’re a grown-up. So you can handle it.