{"id":19303,"date":"2013-03-06T15:25:32","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T20:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19303"},"modified":"2013-03-06T15:26:38","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T20:26:38","slug":"colby-cosh-one-sees-what-fine-jokes-result-when-the-state-tries-to-make-one-plus-one-equal-fried-chicken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/06\/colby-cosh-one-sees-what-fine-jokes-result-when-the-state-tries-to-make-one-plus-one-equal-fried-chicken\/","title":{"rendered":"Colby Cosh: &#8220;One sees what fine jokes result when the state tries to make one plus one equal fried chicken&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>Maclean&#8217;s<\/em>, staff optimist and all-around-softy <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2013\/03\/06\/was-free-speech-in-canada-in-good-shape-before-the-whatcott-ruling\/\" target=\"_blank\">Colby Cosh<\/a> tries to make lemonade out of the sour Whatcott ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt \u201chate speech.\u201d The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially \u201chateful,\u201d conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions\u2019 targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.<\/p>\n<p>But since we columnists are in the business of telling truth, whatever a court thinks, it ought to be admitted that, dead or alive, free speech in Canada was never in such good shape. The Supreme Court\u2019s decision is an elaborate partial rescue of standing precedent; the constitutionality of hate policing by provincial commissions was established many years ago, and the unpleasant surprise is only that it wasn\u2019t killed on this occasion.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>For those of us who make a living in creative or intellectual expression, it is worth something to have the laws limiting it defined as clearly as possible while being compacted into a minimum volume. The Supreme Court has made the rules clearer, and this is not to be sneered at, even if its logic sometimes is \u2014 especially since the overall authority of human rights commissions has undergone net diminution in the process. It is just possible the chief justice wasn\u2019t entirely asleep at the switch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Maclean&#8217;s, staff optimist and all-around-softy Colby Cosh tries to make lemonade out of the sour Whatcott ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada: The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt \u201chate speech.\u201d The court [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,10,28],"tags":[459,186,46,753,752],"class_list":["post-19303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","category-liberty","category-media","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-hrcs","tag-saskatchewan","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-51l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19305,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19303\/revisions\/19305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}