Justin Trudeau’s emotionalism

At the Auschwitz Museum last week, Justin Trudeau wrote the following in the book of remembrance: “Tolerance is never sufficient. Humanity must learn to love our differences.”

While the CBC reported that his visit to the evil center of the Holocaust operation was private, I assume his words were intended to contribute to our thinking about how to be more civilized.

They convey the same intimate, awkward portentousness of Neil Armstrong’s utterances when he stepped onto the moon. And that’s appropriate: the Holocaust continues to force us to think harder than any of the relics of the space race.

Trudeau’s gravitas isn’t my problem.

Now that I’ve had that recommended “consultation muffin,” my sugar count is as high as GQ’s regard for the virtues of our new prime minister. Still, while my timing is way ahead of the zeitgeist, I’d like to throw out a few teensy misgivings about what he wrote so carefully.

Justin Trudeau’s proposition that tolerance needs to be bolstered by “love for our differences” is just not smart. And the task of being smarter about humanity, to my mind, is the imperative of remembrance.  

Canadians quite openly believe that they are more tolerant than, well, all their neighbors. But we also agree that tolerance is not enough when thinking about the safety of minorities. So, yes, his first sentence can be endorsed by all of us.

However, long ago, certainly in the West, we accepted that “love” is not reliable; it’s not what drives powerful institutions, and it’s not the business of politics.

“Love” is hard to find, but cheap in public discourse. Remember, bishops instructed the faithful to love the heretics; they were burning on stakes in public squares.

“Black lives matter!” isn’t looking for love, but justice—equal treatment that can be seen, measured, and rigorously enforced in courts.

We can celebrate—and advertise—our diversity in Canada because minorities are safe here. They are safe because tolerance, consistent with universal liberal values, has been codified into our laws and enshrined in our Constitution.

It’s ironic that Justin Trudeau, proud spokesman for Charter Canadian liberalism, would invoke a sentiment to secure social justice.

His family and party get to brag about our enshrined Charter of Rights because Pierre Trudeau, and his indispensable conservative allies, rejected tradition and sentiment as adequate guarantors of minority rights in Canada.

Their opponents didn’t claim to be defending a less liberal society. They claimed that British Common Law and our liberal-minded self-regard, our love of our differences, was enough.

They lost the argument.

Partisan spite: why we don’t fix things any more.

Many good politicians retire without accomplishing anything very important. Often, in less fortunate countries, they fail because their voters are dangerously divided or because change would be too painful. Canadian legislators, however, can only blame themselves.

Take the unelected, unappreciated, unrepresentative, and unaccountable Canadian Senate.

A majority of Canadians, in every region, as well as the Harper majority government, think its 105 members should be elected by the people—or it should be abolished. Others, particularly elected politicians, regret it exists or claim to fear that it can’t be easily reformed.  

The country isn’t bitterly divided and no faction of elected politicians would squander their political capital to save the Senate from reform. Yet smart money insists that it will carry on long after Harper retires or is defeated.

It survives, in large part, because Canadian politicians dislike each other far more than they dislike the Senate. Their noisy animus and the Senate’s quiet ways keep things as they are. Only rarely do senators speak on its behalf; and when they do, they confirm the virtue of silence.

This week in a boastful column in the National Post, Liberal Senate Leader Senator James S. Cowan tackled democratic reformers directly:

“No democracy is completely run by elected officials. Every democracy has a place for elected representatives, and a place for appointed ones. Even in the United States, there is a place for appointed officials. Unlike in Canada, the American Cabinet is made up of unelected people chosen and appointed by the President. Does that mean the U.S. government is not democratic, or that its decisions are illegitimate? Absolutely not: Every successful democracy balances elected and unelected officials.”

This is not the sophistry of a stupid man. It’s simply the work of a man who answers to no one.

Appointed US officials don’t make laws, raise taxes, approve treaties, make war, or appoint themselves; only elected House of Representatives, senators, and presidents do. And none of the President’s appointees can stand in their way. Only the Supreme Court can obstruct the people’s representatives and, even then, only on behalf of a constitution that was fashioned by the people’s representatives.

Likely unimpressed himself, Cowan went on to trim his case:

“Should the Senate be elected? Perhaps; that is an issue that has been debated since before Confederation, and was a major option considered, and rejected, by the Fathers of Confederation in drafting what is now our Constitution. Personally, I am not opposed to Senate elections. But that is not my decision to make (nor is it an option for any particular government to impose unilaterally).”

“Personally” is the word a powerful person uses to disguise their power. “Frankly” is more widely used to dress up a lie.

In truth, the leader of the Liberal Party in the Senate and the leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons don’t favor an elected Senate and will do what they can to prevent it happening.

Harper was elected 3 times as a prime minister who wants the people, not his office, to appoint future senators. His government’s legislation to formalize province-wide Senate elections offends Senator Cowan not because it is unilateral, but because it’s liberal.

A Conservative would be making Canada more democratic. Not on his watch.

Of course, Justin Trudeau’s position is both ironic and unworthy.

His family name is still his biggest asset and that name was made by a prime minister who would have retired a failure if the conservative premiers of Ontario, Alberta, and New Brunswick had not backed his gamble to create a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

Poison Candy on Limiting Free Speech

“I would refer Mr. Coyne to the period in European history most notorious for its silencing of Jews, about six million of them in Germany from 1936-1945. The systematic murder of Jews--along with Communists, people of color, the mentally and physically challenged and homosexuals—began with a book, with pamphlets, with posters, which lead to actions, laws and concentration camps. The insidious nature of the enterprise began with words, which ‘range true’ in the minds of people who might not otherwise have begun to think in such ways.

“The through-line from hate speech to murder is not always as evident as the Nazis made it, but it’s there.”

—By Marc Cote, Toronto, in a letter replying to a column in the National Post by Andrew Coyne questioning a Supreme Court decision to further limit free speech in Canada.

Hell on earth began with a book?

Are we willing to risk the murder of millions merely to defend a liberal principle: the freedom to write, to publish, and to widely promote another very bad book? Fortunately, that historical proposition is dead wrong.

The terrible anomaly in Nazi Germany wasn’t the success of an especially nasty book by a popular politician. Europe was already awash with nasty books and pamphlets about Jews and other minorities, inspired, for instance, by the Christian Bible and Social Darwinism.
What was special about the 1930s was the early ability of one awesome national government to stop people from freely and persistently expressing their opposition—of rebutting, satirizing, and shaming a hateful book and its ridiculous author.  

Brain Candy on Free Speech in Canada

In Saturday’s National Post, George Jonas explained how Canada’s Supreme Court parsed the limits of free speech in the case of Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission v. Whatcott:

Q: Dear Supreme Court, is there free speech in Canada?

A: It’s not absolute, you know.

Q: Well, yes, we know that, but is there limited free speech?

A: There must be. The Charter says there is, and the Charter wouldn’t lie. We support the Charter.

Q: Spiffy. So can I go and say whatever I like?

A: Yes, of course. That’s what “free” means. Unless you cross a line. Like anti-gay activist Bill Whatcott. He said some nasty things, you know.

Q: Is that the line, saying nasty things?

A: Oh no, you can say nasty things. It’s a free country.

Q: So where is the line?

A: When you cross it, we’ll let you know.

Q: Does it have a name?

A: We call it hate speech.

Q: What is hate speech?

A: It’s speech we hate.

Q: But speech you don’t hate needs no Charter protection. What do you say to people who argue that unless the Charter protects speech you hate, it protects nothing?

A: Let them say it, we say. It’s a free country.

Not every Canadian accepts that their country’s reputation for civility is well served by how they treat the LGBT community.  Not every Canadian accepts that Canada’s high standing as a free society is also tested by how they treat those they think of as bigots and careless loudmouths.

Lack of unanimity on this point is impossible and, thankfully, unnecessary. After all, they wrote a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and set up an independent Supreme Court to restrain popular opinion when it takes offense.

Didn’t they?

In Canada today, according to the Supreme Court’s Whatcott judgment, you won’t get in trouble with the law for being rude and impolite. You might, however, if your utterances are hateful—if, potentially, they could interfere with the “self esteem” and “self-fulfillment” of their intended target. Constructive criticism is fine. However, even using bits of “truth” to serve hateful ends, sometimes, is not.

If you still know a Canadian who expresses ugly ideas, or invents jokes that aren’t very funny, or a coffee shop bore who asks rhetorical questions, you probably should ask whether he or she knows the co-ordinates of a good lawyer.

Socrates wouldn’t have to take poison for what he said in Canada. But he might get stuck with a criminal record if he set up his famous Q & A Show in a public space in downtown Toronto or Regina without a lawyer at his side.

The Canadian Supreme Court, however, is not only worried about how cranky people express themselves. They’re interested in what these people actually want to accomplish. Here their assault on free speech is radical.

Innumerable bloggers and some wonderful peace-loving polemicists actually get up in the morning to try to do real harm to the self-assurance and reputations of those who promote and follow ideas they don’t like. 

What would the Supreme Court have done if Christian fundamentalist Bill Whatcott had stood on a street corner proclaiming: “Gay activists expect taxpayers to fund their Porn Addiction” while Cambridge atheist Christopher Hitchens was still alive and standing opposite, waving his placard: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”? 

Would the judges want both of them charged? Would they tell Whatcott that he’d do less harm and better serve his own cause if he’d just ask Hitchens how to find a Canadian publisher? After hours, would any of the judges read Hitchens’s polemic “God Is not Great” or only his memoir?