Peter Menzies: Bill That Aims to Control Speech Relating to Residential Schools Is Wrongheaded

The left has switched sides.
Many years ago, it fought on the campuses of North America to affirm society’s right to freedom of speech. Back then the left was all about individual liberty.
Most of that was gone by the early 1970s following the blossoming of the free speech movement on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley during the 1964–’65 academic year. It was the first—but certainly not the last—mass protest to appear on campuses in the 1960s. There was nothing conservative at all about the movement, which history remembers as very much a part of the New Left’s activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Half a century later, it is conservatives who are leading the fight for liberty and the left that is working, remorselessly, to crush it.
Those doing so would face up to two years in jail.
“If passed, this bill would add to the Criminal Code the offence of wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada, calling irrefutable historical facts into question.”
Even more shocking, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree has indicated the government may be in alignment. In a tenuous minority Parliament, that means Gazan’s bill could pass.
One can have all the sympathy in the world for the plight of Canada’s indigenous people and still view this sort of legislation as unacceptable thuggery.
One can stand in residential school cemeteries, as I have, and mourn for the children who, far away from their loved ones, died of one of the many childhood diseases that swept through those schools and nevertheless view Gazan’s bill as pushing the nation across the line, from liberal democracy to institutional authoritarianism.
He did not enjoy having his hair cut at the residential school he attended in Moose Factory, nor did he like being punished for speaking Cree. But he did excel academically and attended high school in Sault Ste. Marie before going on to make a significant contribution to society.
I am aware that Diamond and Marchand may be exceptions, and I am not trying to argue that there probably shouldn’t have been better educational opportunities provided to them than the ones outlined above.
But I should be able to speak and write of them without fear that one of my fellow citizens will file a complaint with the police, who could then arrest me and have me jailed for “downplaying” the impact of residential schools on the many generations of indigenous children who were forced to attend them. A person should be able to write that without fear that another person will accuse them of trying to “justify” the Indian Residential School system.
But if Bill-413 makes it through Parliament, few will dare risk mentioning these facts, lest they offend the authorities.
If people are to speak freely in society, we have to be willing to be offended. In order to express ourselves through words, or art, we have to accept that some people will inevitably take offence. Sometimes, the truth hurts.
Both Gazan’s bill and the Liberal government’s Online Harms Act, currently in second reading in the House of Commons, essentially make causing offence liable to sanction by the courts and Human Rights Commission.
Neither has any place in a modern liberal democracy.