Marni Soupcoff hits the nail on the head with this observation:
Do Canadians understand freedom of expression? For several years, I’ve been arguing that the majority of them don’t — that despite freedom of speech’s prominent place in the Charter, they think it means the ability to say critical things provided these things don’t offend or upset anybody. Protest away, as long as you don’t actually rock the boat.
It’s part of that notorious “Canadian nice” thing: we’re so terribly afraid of offending someone that we’ve empowered the state to monitor and “correct” our speech and behaviour. We like the idea of free speech, but we also undercut the spirit by carving out exceptions to ensure that free speech is not free to offend or insult or demean the listener (or bystanders, or people totally unconnected to the conversation).
This is the genesis of our “hate speech” legislation, which legally defines certain kinds of speech as being so harmful that the use must be proscribed. We appear to fear the use of certain words and phrases as much as if they were literal clubs or bludgeons or some other kind of blunt instrument. In other words, we think it worse to hear offensive speech than to be physically threatened with bodily harm.
This is why the University of Ottawa’s François Houle not only felt it necessary to warn Ann Coulter about our draconian speech laws, but almost certainly felt that without such a warning, those laws were likely to be put into motion. The unspoken but hardly concealed subtext is that we recognize that Americans are more mature than Canadians: they can hear those horrible, horrible words without taking damage or harm.
What initially sounds like another example of Canadian smugness turns out to be an example of Canadian inferiority. Again.
