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The True Northerners Strong and Free

Posted: Monday, March 29, 2010 by CM Sapper in
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The basis of Canada's laws on freedom of expression are appropriate for the Canadian context. While our southern neighbors don't seem to approve of these, we should only continue to push for what has worked for us all along as Canadians.

The issue of free speech between Canada and the United States caught the media's full attention on both sides early last week, when Ann Coulter visited a number of Canadian university campuses. Prior to her entry to Canada and throughout her visit, she did not seem to get it. The poor lady thought, just like many Americans do, that Canada's law is a typical copy of America's.

Newsflash, things are much more mature up here! According to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there are legal penalties against "the wilful promotion of hatred". Fortunately for Ann Coulter and the rest of her friends, such well-needed limits do not seem to exist in America's "all you can eat" culture, when at no point you're obligated to stop.

While our government hasn't shown any interest or lack thereof in the whole matter, we all need to understand why things run the way they do here. After all, it is us who primarily get affected by these regulations. Lets first agree that the main reason these limits exist to begin with is to avoid hate violence or even violence in general, whether such violence is direct or triggered. To analyse this further, we need to make a simple comparison between violent hate crimes in Canada vs those in the US. Few hundred such crimes were reported in 2004 in Canada*, while a number in the high thousands was reported in the US. This makes Canada's rate of hate violence per unit of population well below that in States**. From this, it is very clear that people are more motivated to commit such violence in racially-tense environments like many areas in the States, where hate is fed to the public by those who intend to cause racial and cultural stirs, and believe me those people do exist, as individuals and groups too; and yes, Coulter is only one of them.

In Canada's ideology, at least up to this point, free expression is valued but strong communities and cultural harmony are even more important qualities that we care about. After all, we always want our true north to stay "strong and free" and not just free without the strong diverse cultural base that makes up the fabric of our society.

Finally, while changing our political culture and principles will make us like the rest, I don't see it helping our diversity or our environment of mutual respect and tolerance. Also, while our free expression laws do keep things subjective for the time being on what is or isn't allowed, the least we can do at the moment is support the foundation of these laws, while still keeping an eye on the decisions our federal government and its immigration officials are taking, at least until these laws get more clearly defined or become more objective by handing such matters to independent agencies.

References:
*Canada Hate Crime Records: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85f0033m/85f0033m2008017-eng.pdf. The definition of hate crimes in Canada includes hate speech.
** US FBI Hate Crime Records: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/hate_crime/index.html#table2_32. US definition of hate crimes does not include hate speech.

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