spiked
Published 5 Aug 2022The spiked team discusses the rise of Britain’s thoughtpolice, Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and Beyoncé’s act of self-censorship.
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August 6, 2022
Britain’s woke Stasi | The spiked podcast
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July 30, 2022
Alexis de Tocqueville
In The Critic, Paul Sagar reviews a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz:
Alexis de Tocqueville came perilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared.
Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the first work of political science, a founding text of sociological analysis, and a landmark in the history of political philosophy.
It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand both democracy and the United States, as well as post-Revolutionary France (Tocqueville’s animating point of comparison). His later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) attempted to locate the long-term causes of the events of 1789, and inaugurated a school of French Revolution historiography that remains alive and influential to this day.
He also enjoyed a moderately successful career as a practising politician, directly involved in France’s tumultuous political upheavals from the 1830s to the early 1850s. Constitutionally frail, and wracked by tuberculosis for the final nine years of his life before dying at just 54, he nonetheless packed a lot in.
As a narrative biography, Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy succeeds tremendously. The details of Tocqueville’s life — and the events he lived through — are rendered with engaging clarity. The detailed reconstruction of Tocqueville’s nine-month trip to America in 1831–32 is especially valuable, shedding a great deal of light on what Tocqueville saw and, crucially, who he spoke to and took his lead from. Zunz does not shy away from dissolving the myth to reveal the man. Sometimes treated as though he were a gimlet-eyed sage who saw through to the very soul of the fledgling United States, Zunz shows instead the extent to which Tocqueville tended to take too much at face value, especially regarding what he was told by less than impartial interlocutors, frequently failing to scratch below the surface on his whirlwind tour.
Thus, for example, he went on to write in Democracy in America that the liberty of the United States meant that secret societies were unknown there, entirely failing to recognise not only the extent of Masonic influence in local politics, but also how objections to Masonic influence were a core feature of contestation. A young man, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of the New World, he tended to see what he wanted to see — or what others hoped he would.
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July 26, 2022
Is Trudeau channelling Caligula? – “Let them hate me as long as they fear me”
Spencer Fernando, writing for the National Citizens Coalition:
When trying to ascertain where the Trudeau Liberals are trying to take the country, it’s important to look at the foundations of Justin Trudeau’s worldview.
Clearly, he was heavily influenced by his father, someone who continuously expanded the power of the state.
Justin Trudeau’s father was well known as a Communist-sympathizer, being a big fan of both Fidel Castro and Communist China.
Note, the version of the CCP that existed in Pierre Trudeau’s era was even more brutal than the CCP as it exists today. At the time, it was not far removed from the time of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a government-imposed “reshaping of society” that led to roughly 45 million deaths.
To look at that, and still be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party, is to show a deep ideological commitment to authoritarian socialism and a deep aversion to human freedom.
The apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as Justin Trudeau praised China’s “basic dictatorship” (AKA the centralized power structure that enables horrific crimes).
Trudeau also sought to move Canada closer to China’s orbit, only giving up on that when public opinion – and a subtle revolt among some backbench Liberals – rendered it politically unfeasible.
We can see how the authoritarian socialism that Trudeau praised in China (and let’s not forget his fawning eulogy for Fidel Castro), lines up with the fear and contempt he and the Liberals have for many Canadians.
Now, let’s also note this essential point:
The Liberals continuously target the same individuals that authoritarian socialists and communists have targeted:
Rural Conservatives.
Private Enterprise.
Religious Groups.
Freethinkers.
Individualists.
Private Farmers.
Rural Gun Owners.
Independent Press Outlets.
Historically, those are all groups that the far-left has targeted when given the opportunity.
We only need to look at how the Liberal approach to Covid was modelled after the approach taken by Communist China, and how both the Liberals and the CCP have been largely unwilling to move on.
While the Liberals are more constrained than the CCP by the fact that Canada maintains some freedoms, do we have any doubt that they would be far more severe if they could get away with it?
Remember, the moment he feared losing the 2021 election, Justin Trudeau used very divisive and disturbing rhetoric (especially disturbing when seen in a historical context), and purposely sought to direct hatred and blame towards those who resisted draconian state orders.
Since then, the Trudeau Liberals – even in the face of criticism by a few courageous Liberal MPs who were quickly “put back in their place” – have almost gleefully abused their power, purposely creating an “Us vs Them” narrative designed to pit Canadians against each other.
At the same time, they’ve continued their efforts to gain control over social media, silence dissenting views, and turn the establishment media into an extension of the state propaganda apparatus.
This is all being done because they fear those who have the intelligence and strength of character to see through their agenda.
They fear you, and have contempt for you.
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July 22, 2022
Sexual liberation to sexual revolution to … today’s sexual desert
Chris Bray thinks that the sexual revolution “missed a turn, somewhere out in the desert”:
The discussion of what we didn’t mean to do is becoming an interesting one:
After decades of sexual liberation — Mattachine, Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Second Wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, and whatever else I’m missing in there (and I’m not sure Roe belongs on the list, but maybe) — we somehow arrive at a moment in which we merge a sexualized display of childhood and a relentless media-driven commodification of sexuality with the very clear reality that nobody’s having any sex:
One of the most comprehensive sex studies to date — the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior — found evidence of declines in all types of partnered sexual activity in the U.S. Over the course of the study from 2009 to 2018, those surveyed reported declines in penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation …
Over the last 22 years, Herbenick has co-authored several studies about our sexual activity. Her most recent research finds that all of us, regardless of age, are having less sex, with the most dramatic decline among teenagers.
At the start of the study in 2009, 79% of those ages 14 to 17, revealed they were not having sex. By 2018, that number rose to 89%.
Liberation stabbed pleasure in the heart; we emptied sex. Hypersexualization turns out to be desexualization. The unrelenting joylessness and death odor of contemporary sexual culture emerges from seventy years of growing openness and freedom. How?
There’s no way to fully cover a question of that scope in a single post — but I refer, as a start, to the earlier posts I wrote about the sexualization of childhood and the way Jim Jones used sex as a weapon. Breaking barriers and repressive anchors broke connections and reference points: Yes, some people were trapped in oppressive societal norms, and it’s not at all my view that all the sexual liberation in our past wasn’t really liberating. But we broke marriage to set people free, and whoops. Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family.
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July 6, 2022
“The Great Charter of the Liberties” was signed on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede
Ed West on the connections between England’s Magna Carta and the American system (at least before the “Imperial Presidency” and the modern administrative state overwhelmed the Republic’s traditional division of powers):
King John signs Magna Carta on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede; coloured wood engraving, 19th century.
Original artist unknown, held by the Granger Collection, New York. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
England does not really go in for national monuments, and when it does they are often eccentric. There is no great shrine to Alfred the Great, for example, the great founder of our nation, but we do have, right in the middle of London, a large marble memorial to the animals that gave their lives in the fight against fascism. And Runnymede, which you could say is the birthplace of English liberty, would be a deserted lay-by were it not for the Americans.
Beside the Thames, some 10 miles outside London’s western suburbs, this place “between Windsor and Staines”, as it is called in the original document, is a rather subdued spot, with the sound of constant traffic close by. Once there you might not know it was such a momentous place were it not for an enclosure with a small Romanesque circus, paid for by the American Association of Lawyers in 1957.
American lawyers are possibly not the most beloved group on earth, but it would be an awful world without them, and for that we must thank the men who on June 15, 1215 forced the king of England to agree to a document, “The Great Charter of the Liberties”.
Although John went back on the agreement almost immediately, and the country fell into civil war, by the end of the century Magna Carta had been written into English law; today, 800 years later, it is considered the most important legal document in history. As the great 18th-century statesman William Pitt the Elder put it, Magna Carta is “the Bible of the English Constitution”.
It was also, perhaps more importantly to the world, a huge influence on the United States. That is why today the doors to America’s Supreme Court feature eight panels showing great moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron in 1215.
Magna Carta failed as a peace treaty, but after John’s death in 1216 the charter was reissued the following year, an act of desperation by the guardians of the new boy king Henry III. In 1300 his son Edward I reconfirmed the Charter when there was further discontent among the aristocracy; the monarch may have been lying to everyone in doing so, but he at least helped establish the precedent that kings were supposed to pretend to be bound by rules.
From then on Parliament often reaffirmed Magna Carta to the monarch, with 40 such announcements by 1400. Clause 39 heavily influenced the so-called “six statutes” of Edward III, which declared, among other things, that “no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be … could be dispossessed, imprisoned, or executed without due process of law”, the first time that phrase was used.
Magna Carta was last issued in 1423 and then barely referenced in the later 15th or 16th centuries, with the country going through periods of dynastic fighting followed by Tudor despotism and religious conflict. By Elizabeth I’s time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that Shakespeare’s play King John didn’t even mention it.
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July 5, 2022
QotD: The Great Enrichment
The explanation of the Great Enrichment is people. Paul Romer says so, as do a few others, among whom are some students I did not teach price theory to at the University of Chicago. On the other hand, Paul sets it down to economies of scale, which mysteriously drop down on England in the 18th century and gradually on us all. Yet China had peace, science, and enormous cities when Europeans were huddled in small groups inside town walls, or isolated villae.
In particular, it is ideas that people have for commercially tested betterment that matter. Consider alternating-current electricity, cardboard boxes, the little black dress, The Pill, cheap food, literacy, antibiotics, airplanes, steam engines, screw-making machines, railways, universities, cheap steel, sewers, plate glass, forward markets, universal literacy, running water, science, reinforced concrete, secret voting, bicycles, automobiles, limited access highways, free speech, washing machines, detergents, air conditioning, containerization, free trade, computers, the cloud, smart phones, and Bob Gordon’s favorite, window screens. …
And the Great Enrichment depended on the less famous [but] crucial multitudes of free lunches prepared by the alert worker and the liberated shopkeeper rushing about, each with her own little project for profit and pleasure. Sometimes, unexpectedly, the little projects became big projects, such as John Mackey’s one Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas resulting in 479 stores in the U.S. and the U.K., or Jim Walton’s one Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas resulting in 11,718 stores worldwide.
Letting people “have a go” to implement such ideas for commercially tested betterment is the crux. It comes, in turn, from liberalism, Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”, “the liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice”. Liberalism permitted, encouraged, honored an ideology of “innovism” — a word preferable to the highly misleading word “capitalism,” with its erroneous suggestion that the modern world was and is initiated by piling up bricks and bachelors’ degrees.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
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June 24, 2022
The Guardians of Free Speech
ReasonTV
Published 23 Jun 2022Because of the social media circus surrounding the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial, it was easy to overlook one of the principal — yet least likely — actors in the courtroom drama: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ghostwrote and placed the 2018 Washington Post op-ed by Heard about surviving domestic abuse that was the basis of the trial.
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It’s only the latest example of how the group has in recent years strayed from its original mission of defending speech, no matter how vile. Awash with money after former President Donald Trump was elected, the ACLU transformed into an organization that championed progressive causes, undermining the principled neutrality that helped make it a powerful advocate for the rights of clients ranging from Nazis to socialists.
It questioned the due process rights of college students accused of sexual assault and harassment under Title IX rules. It ran partisan ads against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a move that current Executive Director Anthony Romero told The New York Times was a mistake. The ACLU also called for the federal government to forgive $50,000 per borrower in student loans.
As the ACLU recedes from its mission, enter another free speech organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, FIRE is expanding to go well beyond the university and changing its name to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The group has raised $29 million toward a three-year “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”
“I think there have been better moments for freedom of speech when it comes to the culture,” says FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff. “When it comes to the law, the law is about as good as it’s ever been. But when it comes to the culture, our argument is that it’s gotten a lot worse and that we don’t have to accept it.”
Lukianoff tells Reason that FIRE’s new initiatives have been in the works for years, but gained urgency during the COVID lockdowns. “Pretty much from day one, people have been asking us to take our advocacy off campus to an extent nationally,” he says. “But 2020 was such a scarily bad year for freedom of speech on campus and off, we decided to accelerate that process.” Despite 80 percent of campuses being closed and doing instruction remotely, Lukianoff says that FIRE received 50 percent more requests for help from college students and faculty. He also points to The New York Times‘ editorial page editor, James Bennet, getting squeezed out after running an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and high-profile journalists such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Yglesias “stepping away from [their publications], saying that the environment was too intolerant.”
FIRE is also expanding its efforts beyond legal advocacy and into promoting what Lukianoff calls “the culture of free speech.” As Politico reports, it will spend $10 million “in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech.”
He says that people in their 40s and 50s grew up in a country where the culture of free speech was embedded in colloquial sayings and common attitudes. “Things like everyone’s entitled to their opinion, which is something you heard all the time when we were kids. It’s a free country, to each their own, statements of deep pluralism, like the idea that [you should] walk a mile in a man’s shoes,” he explains. “All of these things are great principles for taking advantage of pluralism, but they’ve largely sort of fallen out of usage due to a growing skepticism about freedom of speech, particularly on campus, that’s been about 40 years in the making.”
Lukianoff has nothing negative to say about the ACLU (in fact, he used to work there) and stresses that FIRE has worked with the organization since “day one” and continues to do so. But unlike the ACLU, FIRE isn’t at risk of turning into a progressive advocacy organization, partly because its staff is truly bipartisan.
That pluralistic pride extends to the groups funding FIRE, too. Lukianoff thinks that despite the rise of cancel culture, most Americans still understand the value of free speech, but they need to be encouraged to stand up for it. FIRE’s polling, he says, reveals that “it’s really a pretty small minority, particularly pronounced on Twitter, that is anti-free-speech philosophically and thinks that people should shut up and conform.”
For that reason, he’s upbeat that FIRE will succeed in helping to restore belief in the value and function of free speech.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.
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June 23, 2022
The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”
Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?
Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.
You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.
And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible — like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies — results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think that’d be worth a think.
But you’d be wrong.
[…]
But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy — one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.
He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” — a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.
Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who — as reasonable people often will — disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses — including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott — are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.
And we are all liars.
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June 19, 2022
Why Hate Speech Laws Backfire
ReasonTV
Published 26 Feb 2022Here’s a brutal irony about regulating hate speech: Such laws often end up hurting the very people they are supposed to protect.
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That’s one of the central lessons in Jacob Mchangama’s important new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Mchangama heads up the Danish think tank Justitia. He’s worried about a proposal that would make hate speech a crime under European Union (EU) law and give bureaucrats in Brussels sweeping powers to prosecute people spewing venom at religious and ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT+ community, women, and others.Europe’s history with such laws argues against them. In the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic strictly regulated the press and invoked emergency powers to crack down on Nazi speech. It censored and prosecuted the editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi paper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, who used his trial as a platform for spreading his views and his imprisonment as a way of turning himself into a martyr and his cause into a crusade. When the Nazis took power in the early ’30s, Mchangama stresses, they expanded existing laws and precedents to shut down dissent and freedom of assembly.
Contemporary scholarship suggests that there can be a “backlash effect” when governments shut down speech, leading otherwise moderate people to embrace fringe beliefs. Mchangama points to a 2017 study published in the European Journal of Political Research that concluded extremism in Western Europe was fueled in part by “extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions.”
In 1965, the United Kingdom passed a law banning “incitement to racial hatred,” but one of the very first people prosecuted under it was a black Briton who called whites “vicious and nasty people” in a speech. More recently, Mchangama notes that radical feminists in England “have been charged with offending LGBT+ people because they insist there are biological differences between the sexes. In France, ‘an LGBT+ rights organization was fined for calling an opponent of same-sex marriage a ‘homophobe.'”
“Once the principle of free speech is abandoned,” warns Mchangama, “any minority can end up being targeted rather than protected by laws against hatred and offense.”
That’s what happened in Canada in the 1990s after the Supreme Court there ruled that words and images that “degrade” women should be banned. The decision was based in part on the legal theories of feminist author Andrea Dworkin, whose books on why pornography should be banned were briefly seized by Canadian customs agents under the laws she helped to inspire.
First Amendment rights are still popular in the United States, with 91 percent of us in a recent survey agreeing that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy.” But 60 percent of us also said that the government should prohibit people from sharing a racist or bigoted idea.
Hearing hateful words and ideas outrages and discomforts most of us, but Mchangama’s history of free speech underscores that state suppression can grant those words and ideas more power and influence. And that the best antidote to hate in a free and open society is not to hide from it but to openly—and persuasively—confront it.
Listen to my Reason Interview podcast with Jacob Mchangama at https://reason.com/podcast/2022/02/16….
Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.
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June 15, 2022
“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government
Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:
Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.
The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.
Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.
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June 13, 2022
Justin Trudeau’s sadism is visible at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport
It’s been more than a decade since the last time I had to travel by air … and even then it was still a far worse experience than it was before 9/11. Canada is among the last few countries to loosen Wuhan Coronavirus restrictions on international travel — along with two of Justin Trudeau’s favourite nations, the cuddly North Korean sole proprietorship and the “admirable” “basic dictatorship” in China. In the free-to-cheapskates weekly round-up of The Line, the editors have recent travel experiences at Canadian airports to discuss:
CBC News report on delays at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, 9 June, 2022.
Screencap from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkgmWWY2SDc
… Why couldn’t your Line editor browse the aisle? Well, because duty free is only for international travellers, and hanging around was forbidden due to “COVID protocols,” the clerk explained.
Now, was your Line editor going to stand around and pick a fight with some underpaid store clerk who was just following the rules? Absolutely not.
But she thought about it.
Look, we understand that not being able to browse is, on the list of first-world problems, really far down, but we had to admit that this stupid little non-incident made us angry. Just stupid, irrationally, bug-eyed angry for a solid minute or two.
Why? Because our entire lives have been eaten by a compounding collection of nonsensical COVID rules and restrictions that have added up to make everybody crazy and miserable, and this was just another. Everyone we know now has a story of peaking on COVID hysteria; experiencing a moment so surreal, inhumane and paranoid that it had the effect of fundamentally breaking trust in the judgement of public health and in broader institutional authority. Whether it was the moment they covered the outdoor playgrounds with police tape; the librarian who refused to let the potty-training toddler use the bathroom; the umpteenth school closure; the triple-masked mom screaming hysterically at her ward for touching other kids; to stories of being trapped for hours on end in airplanes or terminals. There was a moment when nearly all of us broke and took someone else’s head off. When we stopped clapping for health-care workers and instead grew quietly resentful, or found ways to silently flout COVID protocols — or abandoned the mainstream altogether and lost ourselves to fringe politics and conspiracy theories.
Upon arrival at one airport, one of your Line editors spotted a kids’ play area containing nothing more than a cartoonish carpet depicting a fun little airport runway. It was still closed. It is, apparently, still too dangerous to let kids burn off steam by pretending to be airplanes for a few minutes.
Even the Liberal backbench has been reported to be demanding that Justin Trudeau make some vague gestures to reduce the arbitrary and unscientific civil liberty restrictions we’ve been living under for what seems like forever … but he seems to like making Canadians miserable where and when he can.
Keeping up unnecessary mandates is not a cost-free political solution. You are teaching your population to distrust you. Yeah, we mean that quite literally: you, Liberals, are also responsible for the declining social cohesion and failing institutional trust that is fuelling populist movements across the country.
We realize that the mandates are small potatoes. But in a way, they’re also really not. Keeping up historic restrictions on Canadians movement, slowing a desperately desired return to normal, purely for political reasons, is only further corroding the social contract between electorate and government. Further, you’re falling into exactly the same trap as the Conservatives — you’re riding the dragon that will eat you, allowing your loudest, fringiest members to dictate policy.
The Liberals seem to be getting this, at least a little bit. Probably because they perceive the political threat this presents to them. On Friday, they announced that random COVID-19 testing of certain arrivals would be suspended, temporarily, until the end of the month. This is intended to reduce backlogs and crowding at our arrival gates, particularly in Toronto. We’ll see how much it helps, but as a political decision, it’s revealing: the Liberals are now alarmed enough to do something, but not to actually just scrap the screening, at least not yet. For now, it’s just a pause.
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June 8, 2022
With the ACLU no longer fit for purpose, FIRE steps up to protect freedom of speech on and off the campus
Matt Taibbi talks to Nico Perrino about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) moving beyond protecting free speech for university students to protecting those rights for all Americans:
After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans”.
FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.
To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal'”, as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children”.
The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values”.
As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail …
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June 6, 2022
Very convenient – “Only the cabinet can invoke the Emergencies Act, and if only the cabinet can be privy to the information that informs that decision, only the cabinet can judge whether the cabinet got it right”
In the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors discuss the lack of evidence that the federal government was actually justified in its invokation of the Emergencies Act in February to break up the Freedom Convoy 2022 protests in Ottawa:
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Your Line editors always understood that the situation in Ottawa (and at the borders) was indeed a crisis. We never doubted that. It was a very serious challenge that required a very serious response. But we have never seen the case for invoking the Emergencies Act. Under the law, which is very clear, a public-order emergency can only be invoked when the emergency cannot be met under existing laws. We really don’t know what, if anything, convinced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet that we had reached that point.
We have always been reasonable about this. The government may well be in possession of classified information that is not publicly known that convinced them, in good faith, that that condition had been met.
The problem is, they’re asking us to take it on their say-so. The position of the federal government thus far, as regards the inquiries and parliamentary reviews that are automatically triggered by invoking the act, is that they will not necessarily disclose all of the information that was known to the cabinet, and they may treat internal discussions as protected by cabinet confidentiality. This is setting up a perfect little loop of zero accountability. Only the cabinet can invoke the Emergencies Act, and if only the cabinet can be privy to the information that informs that decision, only the cabinet can judge whether the cabinet got it right.
You see the problem, right? As noted above, maybe they know something we don’t, and acted reasonably. Or maybe, under enormous political pressure, the PM whipped out the Emergencies Act to show us how big it is. That would be entirely within his character.
Do we think that’s what happened? We don’t know. Can we rule it out? No.
One of the only things the feds have yet said about their decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was that they did it because the police said it was necessary. But [former Ottawa Police Chief Peter] Sloly now says he never asked for it. The interim chief who succeeded him has said the same. The RCMP has said they did not ask for it. Who does that leave?
Maybe it was the OPP. Maybe it was one of the police agencies that patrols parliament itself. We don’t know. They just want us to take their word for it.
We’re sorry, but we don’t. The Emergencies Act is far too powerful to ever be invoked by a government on the basis of, “Trust us”. That’s not how things work in a democracy. And it should alarm all Canadians that the Liberals seem not to realize this, or are at least hoping that you don’t.
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May 25, 2022
“What is a reasonable general concern?”
In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:
“Canadian Border Sign” by jimmywayne is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
What is a reasonable general concern?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.
And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.
Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.
Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.
It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.
A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.
But a general concern? A general preoccupation?
That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.
It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.
How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.
Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.
The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.
That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.
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May 21, 2022
Despite government denials, CRTC will have the power to censor YouTube videos confirms CRTC Chair
It’s long since got to the point that you never can take a Liberal cabinet minister’s word without verifying it for yourself. Today’s example is the constant denial from the government that their Bill C-11 would enable censorship of things like YouTube videos by the CRTC. In a Senate appearance on Wednesday, the head of the CRTC agreed that such censorship is allowed under the proposed legislation:
CRTC Chair Ian Scott appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday and Bill C-11 proved to be a popular topic of discussion. The exchanges got testy at times as Scott seemingly stepped outside of his role as an independent regulatory by regularly defending government legislation, even veering into commenting on newspapers, which clearly falls outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction. With respect to Bill C-11, most newsworthy were two comments regarding the regulation of user content and the timelines for implementing the bill if it receives royal assent.
First, Scott was asked about the regulation of user content, confirming what has been obvious for months despite denials from Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. The following exchange with Conservative MP Rachael Thomas got Scott on the record:
Thomas: Bill C-11 does in fact leave it open to user generated content being regulated by the CRTC. I recognize that there have been arguments against this, however, Dr. Michael Geist has said “the indisputable reality is that the net result of those provisions is that user generated content is in the bill.” Jeanette Patel from Youtube Canada said “the draft law’s wording gives the broadcast regulator” – in other words you – “scope to oversee everyday videos posted for other users to watch.” Scott Benzie from Digital First Canada has also said that “while the government says the legislation will not capture digital first creators, the bill clearly does capture them.”
So all these individuals are individual users creating content. It would appear that the bill does, or could in fact, capture them, correct?
Scott: As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.
While Scott continued by arguing that the Commission already has equivalent regulatory powers and is not interested in regulating user content, the confirmation that Bill C-11 currently does cover user generated content should put an end to the government’s gaslighting that it does not.
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