Andrew Lawton:

In our pluralistic society, it has become common to find some rights seemingly butt up against each other. Transgender rights and women’s rights, gay rights and religious freedoms, and so on.

As these conflicts fit into the ongoing culture wars, I take comfort in knowing the two most important rights, those to life and to free speech, are never in conflict with one another. A life without free speech is lacking, and free speech without life is irrelevant. 

It’s for this reason I remain unnerved, albeit not all that surprised, by the movement afoot to pretend free speech is a threat to liberty rather than a hallmark of it.

Two days after a horrific attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont., claimed four lives and orphaned a nine-year-old boy, politicians and activists descended on my hometown to pay their respects at a vigil.

What was supposed to be a vigil, rather. It didn’t take long to morph into a political rally, replete with overt calls for censorship.

One speaker was cheered by the audience after calling on the myriad politicians in attendance to take up the task of “criminalizing Islamophobia.”

Another speaker took explicit aim at those who vehemently defend free speech.

“To those who want to hold the constitution, to those who want to hide behind freedom of expression, I ask you a simple question,” he said. “What is the point of freedom of expression if a Canadian family does not have the freedom to walk on a sidewalk on this country without getting murdered?”

This proved to be a similarly popular line with the crowd, despite its incoherence. His remark suggested free speech was somehow responsible for the brutal slaying of the Afzaal family. It was not, and to say otherwise is disingenuous.

This would be news to Justin Trudeau, of course, who openly mused that online speech must have been responsible for the attack in the same breath he admitted not yet knowing anything about the killer’s motives.

“We don’t yet know all the causes or reasons but there is probably an element of online incitation to violence or access to things that we have to think about,” Trudeau said.

All of this is leading itself to supporting a long-promised Liberal government bill to regulate online speech. What form this will take still stands to be seen, but it’s always been a question of when, not if, such a bill will be tabled. As it’s been described in various interviews by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, the law will be a supercharged version of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – a repealed law allowing the government to prosecute people for speech branded as ‘hateful’ by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Among the more notable section 13 cases was the 2007 complaint against Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn, which was ultimately dismissed (though the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal tried – unsuccessfully – to pursue it as well).

The updated version of this would deputize social media companies to remove ‘hateful’ content from their platforms or face steep penalties. Such a regime is worse than government censorship because it is dispatched by private companies, and thus unlikely to be subject to the appeals and transparency direct government action (supposedly) carries.

All Canadians should be concerned at the expanding undercurrent of society that is all too willing to hand over speech rights to the government, though this should be particularly true for people of faith.

It is tempting for religious people to flirt with some of these so-called hate speech laws out of a sincere belief they will protect against blasphemy and other harmful words. The reality is these are matters for God, not government, to litigate. To the contrary, these laws are far more likely to be applied against those speaking from a position of conscience when those values contravene the prevailing Liberal orthodoxy.

There is a widespread effort to shrink the confines of civil discourse to exclude pro-life perspectives and views on the unmalleability of biological sex to give two examples. With municipalities trying to ban street preachers and bus shelter ads under the auspices of eliminating “harm,” it isn’t a far cry to imagine similar logic being applied by social media.

Socially conservative platforms like LifeSiteNews have already seen the heavy hand of Big Tech companies. The only thing that makes these companies more powerful is to have the backing of government, which they will if the Liberals get their way.