The Charter Cult & the Nanaimo Debacle

Ezra Levant really made short work of the jabronis on Nanaimo City Council. But though the battle is won, no one should think the war is over. It's far from it.

By now this is a fairly well-travelled story: Nanaimo city council was upset that a local Christian group had rented out the Vancouver Island Convention Centre to host a webcast of a Christian leadership conference emanating from Atlanta. The conference was sponsored by Chik-Fil-A, whose COO apparently doesn't believe in same-sex marriage.

My disagreement with Dan Cathy (Chik-Fil-A's COO) aside, anyone attempting to boycott or sanction the company is essentially a corny motherfucker. And apparently being overrun by corny motherfuckers, Nanaimo city council voted 7-1 to not only pull the rug out from under the local organizers, but to preemptively ban any organization deemed to be "divisive."

"Divisive" is a new buzzword adopted by corny motherfuckers the world over. It's perhaps the most insipid jargon-ization of a formerly-meaningful word the self-appointed police of political correctness have ever adopted. Jesus, in the '90s Nintendo vs Sega was considered "divisive."

But shining like a beacon of corniness through the corniness of it all was councillor George Anderson. Of all the councillors to vote in favour of the ban-Christians motion he perhaps stood out as the most corny of all the corny motherfuckers. He allowed himself an almost self-congratulatory smirk as he lectured the rest of council about how the Charter allowed the council to ban the conference from using their facility because "hate speech is not allowed."

So you'd almost think that Anderson is really, really into the rights protected by the Charter.

That is until you actually start reading it. You get no further than section 2(a), freedom of conscience and religion, when you start thinking this guy just isn't on the level. Then you keep reading. Section 2(b), freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication. Or section 2(c) freedom of peaceful assembly. Or section 2(d): freedom of association.

So in other words: in Canada Dan Cathy actually has the right to not believe in same-sex marriage. He has the right to express that belief. The Nanaimo organizers of the leadership conference have the right to assemble in order to hear such opinions expressed, even if such opinions were going to be expressed at the conference. (Word is they weren't.) To top it off, the Nanaimo organizers actually have the right to associate, directly or indirectly, with Dan Cathy.

So in voting for this infamous motion, George Anderson -- who smugly invoked the Charter -- managed to trample every single right contained in section two of the Charter. All of them: bar none.

Earlier this year, Canada's left complained to anyone who would listen that the current federal government chose to allow the anniversary of the Charter coming into power to pass unmarked. These are the same people who, like Anderson, have tolerated and advocated for all sorts of abuses of Charter rights, including some -- such as the activities of Canada's oppressive quasi-judicial Human Rights Tribunals -- that cannot be justified in a free or democratic society.

So it turns out that a lot of Canadians who revere the Charter actually do not revere the rights the Charter purports to protect. And perhaps that's just as well: via section 33 of the Charter -- the infamous notwithstanding clause -- any right contained in the Charter can be summarily ignored by any government in Canada willing to do. The Charter is practically self-abrogating. For rights-trampling Charter cultists like George Anderson that's really convenient.

It's also ass-backwards. The Charter is really no stronger than the will of a tyrannical government -- such as, say, that of Pauline Marois, who declared she would invoke section 33 to protect her government's oppressive Quebec Values Charter from Charter scrutiny. (Thank God that was never passed.) So perhaps its just as well that people for whom, for the purpose of their political agenda, those freedoms are terribly inconvenient.

It's time for a new narrative on human rights in Canada. So long as, in the name of the Charter, the rights allegedly guaranteed by the Charter -- which are actually the basis of natural law -- can be summarily stripped away, then the Charter is not a good enough piece of human rights-protecting legislation.

In short: the Charter is not good enough for Canada, and it's the excesses of the Charter cultists that have shown us that. So thank you, George Anderson. You may be a corny motherfucker, and if the citizens of Nanaimo have any sense whatsoever they'll toss you out of their city council at their earliest opportunity. But you've managed to remind us just how hollow a document the Charter really is. You've reminded us that it's time to chop the Charter and rebuild it from the ground up, properly.

But I do wonder what you'll smirk about in future.

Ezra's Wrong: Low Voter Turnout Isn't a Good Thing

Ezra Levant should have stopped immediately after his critique of Elections Canada's get-out-the-vote ads.

He had Elections Canada on the ropes: their GOTV ads were in fact, excessively political. Encouraging youths to vote is one thing. To lead them to vote in any particular direction or another was not just plumbing the line, it was outright crossing it. In retrospect of this information, the limits the Fair Elections Act would place on Elections Canada's freedoms to publicize voting -- restricting it to information on when and where to vote -- becomes much more reasonable.

Then Levant went entirely off the tracks: low voting numbers are a good thing. What?

Well, Levant's argument isn't 100% unreasonable. One of the ideas he uses to justify the argument is that lower voter turnout reflects lower numbers of low- or no-information voters participating in the electoral process. That, he suggests, is a good thing. And about that he isn't wrong.

He's not right, either. The best solution to the problem posted by low-information voters is to inform them. Not all of them will accept this; many of them will wilfully reject it.

Where he is absolutely wrong is the idea that declining voting numbers reflect voter satisfaction. The right to vote, Levant insisted, is not an obligation to vote, especially if they're satisfied with their political representation.

Yet nothing is more dangerous to democracy than complacency. Complacency is ultimately how democracies are lost. Complacency is the weakness that crooks and despots exploit in order to subvert or replace democracy. (On the other hand, the dangers of complacency are also present in the matter of voter ID -- are we really so complacent that we're content to let someone who may well be a non-citizen or non-resident vote on someone else's mere say-so?)

Low voter turnout isn't a good thing; it's a bad thing. It's a signal of a wavering of the relevance of democracy: the only political system under which freedom and justice have flourished; perhaps the only political system under which they can.

Orwell, Thy Name is Siddiqui

If anyone thought the battle for free speech in Canada had been won when section 13 of the Human Rights Act was repealed, they may have been mistaken; some of the most avid anti-free speech-ers are apparently far from content to give up the fight.

Among them, apparently, is Haroon Siddiqui who has penned an op/ed in the Toronto Star that is nothing short of Orwellian, in the worst way.

The essential theme of Siddiqui's screed is this: that since section 13, one of the premiere weapons of lawfair in Canada, has been taken away Muslims allegedly have it really bad; that not only has virtually every vulnerable group in Canada benefited from protection from hatespeech while Muslims allegedly have not, but the free speech of Muslims has been unfairly impugned.

And if you actually believe this tripe, you simply haven't been paying attention.

This Orwellian tirade comes mere days after Ontario Attorney General John Gerretsen decided that Elias Hazineh, formerly President of Palestine House, won't face criminal charges for a speech made at a 2013 al-Qud's Day rally in which he openly incited violence against Israelis. Hazineh also happens to have rather deep Liberal ties, so it certainly couldn't have hurt his case in the eyes of a Liberal Attorney General.

Nor were any charges laid stemming from an incident in which Jewish protesters were assailed with Holocaust-themed taunts by frequenters of, of all places, Palestine House.

There's more that Siddiqui omits, and it happens to pertain to who is really attempting to curb free speech, and for whom: the utterly astounding length of time Ezra Levant spent being prosecuted -- many would rightly say persecuted -- by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal for daring to publish the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad which, at about the time he published them, just happened to be at the centre of one of the most compelling news stories of the day. Levant was targeted by known radical Muslims -- some would call them "Islamists" -- who have publicly made statements that could have also been considered for prosecution under hate crime law. Again, charges were never laid.

And that's just in Alberta. At the United Nations, a collective effort by various Islamic theocracies has resulted in the adoption of draconian anti-blasphemy resolutions at the committee level of the UN -- efforts to push such resolutions through the General Assembly have, to date, fortunately been unsuccessful.

Frankly, it's unthinkable that Siddiqui wouldn't be aware of any or all of this. Likewise, all of this is beside the fact that Siddiqui offers no evidence to support his absurd claims.

Make no mistake about it: his omission of the facts that reveal who has really held the upper hand via section 13, and who is out to milk it for all its worth, was quite deliberate. That Toronto Star publishers allowed this screed to be published while omitting those very important facts reveal in stark terms precisely where they stand on the issue of freedom of speech; it's the last place a newspaper should be caught standing.

Kai Nagata, The Tyee & the Far-left's Ethical Oil Strawman

There was once a time when the left despised McCarthyism.

But as I consider the left's most recent anti-oilsands talking point -- raising the spectre of Chinese communism vis a vis Sinopec's interests in the Alberta oil sands -- it becomes impossible to believe that's still true.

It seems that the left actually loves McCarthyism -- when it's baselessly turned against their opponents.

In a recent YouTube video, produced by far-left propaganda rag The Tyee and uploaded to YouTube by none other than Kai Nagata -- who left a cushy job at CTV because it simply wasn't left-wing enough for him -- two Muppet-esque puppets, K Mart and Ezy E, rap about their dedication to the oilsands.

The video is actually everything you've come to expect from the far-left, a near-three minute mashup of ad hominem attacks on Ezra Levant and Kathryn Marshall. But it concludes with what is actually the most intellectually dishonest argument anti-oilsands argument the left has offered yet: that anyone supporting the oilsands and the Keystone XL pipeline have become handpuppets for Mao Zedong.

Ignore the obvious (that Zedong has been dead since 1976) and the even more obvious (that China is no longer actually a communist state in anything but name) and perhaps this seems like a devastating argument. But considering that the logical and factual shortcomings of the argument are so purely evident, and that individuals like Kagata continue to use it, and a simple, undeniable fact emerges:

These are people who just don't respect the intelligence of Canadians.

Even if China were a communist state, this would also a drastic about-face on the approach the left demanded be taken toward communist states since the 1960s, when the left insisted that the way to approach communist states was to engage with them, not attempt to isolate them. Isolating communist countries, they insisted, would only cause them to re-trench.

Not to mention a policy of isolation is just exceedingly poor geo-politics.

Simply put, China is not a country that will simply consent to being isolated, politically or economically. An inability to import oil from the oilsands won't reduce the Chinese economy's demand for oil one iota. Instead, China will seek to satisfy that demand by purchasing even more oil from places like Saudia Arabia, Iran, and the Sudan.

Whether Nagata and the rest of the far-left like this fact or not, that one's inescapable.

So it's a very simple question of whether these people think Chinese funds would be better spent purchasing the most ethical oil on the planet from Canada, or purchasing conflict oil from the Sudan, or oppression oil from Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Regardless of how they may try to squirm out of answering this question, it's predicated on an inescapable fact: China will import oil. Knowing that, it's a question of where they will import that oil from.

And where has their inability to answer this very simple question taken them? Into the dark realm of McCarthyism. One they used to hate, but now they indulge themselves in.

All the ad hominem attacks and McCarthyite strawmen in the world will not change this one inescapable fact, and it will not make this one inescapable question go away.