FREE SPEECH CANNOT BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED

Today's Waterloo Region Record carrys this Comment piece from Derek James From, a lawyer with the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The title above of this posting is part of his basic thesis. Overall he states that governments absolutely must not have a monopoly upon expression, artistic, political or otherwise. He advises that Alberta's Human Rights Commission for example should have offerred "...a fulsome defence of freedom of expression and the need for limitations on the government's authority to control artistic expression..." during a 2003 hearing regarding hate speech. They found in favour of a musical band on other weaker grounds rather than on the inherent rights of free speech.

Surprisingly Canada still has a blasphemy provision in the Criminal Code. While it has not been used for many years nevertheless it does give the government permission to jail Canadian citizens for two years for saying unsavoury things on religious topics. This again is unconscionable in a free society particularily including a secular one.

What Mr. From does not mention are Canada's archaic Libel laws. Yours truly went through nearly eight years of court dates, motions, trial and then including after the court decision by a biased and incompetent judge; the final out of court negotiations to reverse the idiot Judge's decision. It all ended up as a formal settlement and was filed with Superior Court in Kitchener, Ontario. My "sin" was in publicly advocating the removal of a teacher with a long history both in and out of the classroom of instability, mental health issues and conflicts with students resulting in their parents removing them from the classroom. My nine year old son was but one of the many adversely affected students. My free speech and human rights were attacked by vested and powerful interests and lobbys as well as by the personal wealth of one of the parties. Indeed Canada has no right to be haughty or arrogant on matters of free speech.