My wife calls me an idealogue thinking I always side with the Conservative Party of Canada. Today however, I am upset at two items on the agenda.
1) The expansion of funding to the CBC. James Moore (as pointed out by Ezra Levant) is being mocked by the brass at CBC and being effectively called a lapdog now that they have funding increases coming. This is NOT what most conservatives feel should be happening and I join in the chorus of those who think the budget of the CBC should either be slowly trimmed back $100M a year for 11 years until they have learned to swim on their own or simply cut it all at once and let them sink or swim on the merits of their work.
And more importantly,
2) As pointed out by Mark Steyn, the new criminal omnibus bill has a clause that will make it a two year prison term to link to a website spewing hate speech. The vagueness of this or the risk of errant links is too great. But the reality is that hate speech is free speech. At the Conservative policy convention in Winnipeg, the party unanimously voted to scrap section 13 on hate speech. So why are we reinforcing it? I was in Winnipeg. The support was incredible to move towards free speech above all.
Some have labelled Steyn’s site a hate speech site. Well I link there and am proud to say I link there. I guess I’ll wait for the internet cops to track me down and toss me in jail for 2 years.
So I am bringing both of these points directly to my MP and letting him know that I am not happy about this. When we won a majority, I thought we would be leaning further right, but it seems that on these issues we are just riding up the middle of the road just like our predecessors.
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Do you have a link for the CBC funding?
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My sources tell me Moore was “freelancing” with his CBC announcement and that it did not come from the PM or PMO. It will be interesting to see what the new cabinet looks like.
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There’s a significant difference between “hate speech” as defined in the criminal code and “hate speech” defined under human rights law, not to mention the lack of proper standards for procedure, evidence, precedence and burden of proof. So no, “hate speech” (under the criminal code) is not free speech although the stuff covered by human right most obviously is.
That being said, criminalizing the act of linking to a web site might be a bit much. Then again, what about a site that provides links to kiddie porn? To defamatory material? To a sex video of YOU that was taken illegally? My guess is that they want to go after people within Canada when they can’t get at web sites located in anarchic jurisdictions.