Canada’s charter does, on the other hand, establish some pretty explicit protections for free speech. But what happens if you ask for protection from authorities when someone is infringing on your right to speak at a public forum?
Not much it seems.
In a real country, with real rights, and real journalists, this letter would provoke a national media scandal and formal investigation – but it won’t, for all of the reasons stated above.
More from Shaidle;
When I gave a speech about free speech earlier this year, there was a lot of tisking at my jab at the cops.
Now do you still trust them to protect you? If so, why?
Given that Anne Coulter is well known satirist of Islamist terrorists, having the police refuse to protect her in the event
of criminal/terrorist violence, and also promise to prosecute those who would, one’s suspicions naturally arise as to the loyalty of the police involved.
If they refuse to protect a famous entertainer and invited guest speaker at a university from potential criminal/terrorist attack, what makes you think they will protect you and I from the same?
Curious minds would like to know?
Reading the comments just makes me shake my head in disbelief. Have we come to the same shameful point as the USA where the left just hurls insults and decries the rights that would make us free? I am ashamed by the lack of action of the Calgary Police Service and all those who would limit our rights in the name of political correctness. Watch out for the Conservative “hidden agenda”. Are we lesser citizens because of our point of view being different from the political class? What have they ever given us. Seems to me it was a Conservative that gave us the Bill of Rights. That’s some hidden agenda.
This additude of the progressive left in Canada makes me angry. For pete sake, we offer more protection to the flipping gray/stanley cups than a visiting person in Canada.
This is what I emailed th PMSH and my MP last night.
Dear Mr. Prime Minister Harper
Is this how we treat our guests and ourselves? With what has happened in Ottawa and if this has happened in Calgary, our country is going to hell in a handbasket Very Quickly.
I for one have been a supporter of this government and will be for now, BUT And I mean BUT ,This country has to get it’s act together. The general mindset of this politically correct society is going to break the backs of a lot of angry average Canadians who will not take much more of this Crap. I am angry at the way the minority progressive left of this County is dictating policies that go against human nature.
I know you have been keeping up on the Canadian lack of human rights racket, and now protection under the law. This has become simply pathetic.
If the libertarians of Canada were to force themselves in protest against a progressive speaker, I know the rules would be different and that is what is so unbelieveably WRONG. It goes right to the gutts of everyone that loves freedom and this county. I feel physically ill when I read something like this, it makes me hurt for the things we as Canadians have lost.
No wonder there is no respect from our young people when our country has no respect for us! Have the rules of common scene been lost, I hope not. STAND UP FOR CANADA! Canada.
Mayor Daley’s verbal fumble gets truer every day since 1968:
“The police are not there to create disorder. The police are there to preserve disorder.’
Well, now I know that there is no point in asking a policeman in Calgary for assistance if I need it. They are apparently just supposed to observe until someone gives them an order to interfere.
I read this last night, and again this morning, and I am just disgusted.
Well ya gotta remember this is an entrenched “progressive” element in Calgary it self…..Federally and Provincially PC governments.
It is one thing to not interveen but to threaten criminal charges for resisting assault takes this to another level.
This calls for a judicial review.
I recall a Police Constable getting severely reprimanded for successfully disabling a car by discharging his firearm. The impared driver was intent on running over the other constable.
It’s like the municiple government of Calgary has a GTA attitude.
As we have on SDA there are the same posters from the left that always post on NP. It simply doesn’t matter how often they are corrected by facts or their writings are threatening our basic freedoms they continue in the same vein.
It is pointless and frustrating to read their idiotic ramblings, which in my view, is not just baiting but what these people really believe. We see the physical results of their actions in the real world when they are allowed to shut down speeches by others that don’t reflect their opinions.
It is incredible and frightening to see our police and security personnel supported by politicians at the highest level condoning and supporting this anarchistic slide of our freedoms.
Let’s not forget that for the past 4 years residents of Caledonia ON have had the police refuse to protect their rights to free speech in protesting the illegal native occupation and lawlessness. Police routinely fail to prtect non native protests from attack by extremist-criminal elements. In some cases police assisted natives in an illegal occupation protest.
Caledonia is a monument to corrupt governments corrupting police policy. 2 tiered or double standard policing is a Canadian invention that we must bear the same for.
http://tinyurl.com/ya5nv6b
http://tinyurl.com/y8vxrkw
I remember a comment by a friend in Brooklyn, NY. The phrase “drop a dime” on someone meant call the cops on the person (yes young folks, before cell phones there was a thing called “pay phones” where the caller deposited a 10 cent piece or”dime” to place a local telephone call). The Brooklyner’s mantra re calling the cops: Save a dime, don’t waste your time.
At best, the police are a high paid clean up crew.
Let’s enjoy this again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CWNKp0Uyyw
Staff Sgt. Hugh Stewart, we miss you.
Call the cops?
Round up the usual suspects?
Al Gore’s Weather (AGW): Mah Police gonna get ya.
Imagine Taliban Jack LaytoNDP as Gauleiter/Commissar of TO; Suzuki Vancouver; Hedy Fry in Ottawa; Lizard May/DoorKnob Easter in PEI, ……
…-
“Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/11/climate-craziness-of-the-week-british-campaigner-urges-un-to-accept-ecocide-as-international-crime-proposal-to-declare-mass-destruction-of-ecosystems-a-crime-on-a-par-with-genocide/#comments
We should all be squawking loud and long about our lack of Property Rights in the Constitution. I know that most of the Conservatives, including the PM, are on the right side in this issue. We should make Property Rights a main issue in the next election.
Ah yes, police behavior. Always a popular misconception what cops are -for- in this country.
In Canada, cops exist to “keep the peace”. That’s the “peace” in “Peace, Order and Good Government”. That’s their charter, what they are constituted to do.
Meaning, if you pursuing your personal business becomes a “peace disruption” problem, they will stop you doing it. If your exercise of free speech is attracting too much evil attention, they will let your opponents beat and possibly kill you because its easier that way.
Of late, it has been decided at the very tippy tip-top levels of government that personal injury and property damage are not a problem when perpetrated by certain groups.
Indians for example are right now, today, flouting gun regulations, cigarette sale regulations, are illegally squatting on provincial property, and are smuggling with almost perfect immunity from prosecution. Other groups whose members average a lower surface albedo than pasty white enjoy similar privilege.
Lest anyone think this is a racial thing, note that members of CUPE, CUPW, and a few more union outfits enjoy the same level of immunity. Also, apparently, leftist radical university students.
Conversely, it has been decided that pictures of people from these protected groups getting their @sses kicked by either police or the above mentioned pasty white high-albedo types ARE a problem. Important distinction, its the pictures that are the problem, not the @ss-kicking.
Therefore we see plenty of examples where police are standing with their backs to armed, violent protesters who are actively attacking people (and police too), while facing toward a much larger crowd of unarmed non-protesters who are doing -nothing-. Happens every Sunday in Caledonia, but you can see it at every demonstration by a protected group. Group gets violent, anyone trying to defend their own property or person from the violent group gets arrested and dragged off while the violence moves on.
Conservatives of course are on a different list. They are on the Do Not Protect (DNP) list. That’s why counter-protesters at Anti-Israel events get ignored or moved along by police. The cops have specific instructions to not-protect them, and get rid of them if at all possible. Kathy Shaidle and Ezra Levant are on the DNP list, they’ll tell you all about it.
Anne Coulter may well have advanced from DNP to “actively harass”. No doubt she will find her papers are not in order the next time she crosses the Canadian border.
The cops are not there to protect you. They are there to keep your ignorant, stupid, peasant backside in line and make sure you pay your taxes. Everything else they do is public relations or more tax collection.
Incidentally the Army is also not there to protect you. Their two primary missions are protecting the country from foreign threats, and to restore “order” if the cops fail to keep the “peace”. Restoring order historically has meant shooting anybody who sticks their head up and jailing anybody who doesn’t. Ask an old Japanese/Canadian person about that.
Tax cut now, please.
I knew it was the end of a real Police force in this Country when they made sensitivity training mandatory.
We now have a political police force run by Marxists. With no stomach to protect or defend.
I figure if they can’t do the job fire them & hire real protection.
The cities have done their job as well. Making the police their tax collectors.
JMO
Phantom, agree with your assessment of what the police are doing in Canada 100%. However, there is a way around the problem and that is black shoe polish, a dreadlock wig and a good stout length of 2×4. To stay in character I suggest some intense study of portions of Silver streak where Richard Pryor shows Gene Wilder how to pass as black.
Kate, please forgive this overly-long comment:
You cannot read Libin’s piece nor Benoit’s letter/report, nor observe the recent troubled history of speech in Canada without concluding that our politicians, officials and citizens alike do not know what the right of free speech is, do not know why we have it, and do not know what its scope and limitations are, nor why it is so vitally important to both our public and private lives. Either that is true, or they simply do not care enough about it to take steps to prevent its further erosion. That we the people have allowed our public servants to erode the very basis of democracy—that we are complacent in the face of those erosions—suggests that we ourselves don’t care much for self government. That complacency only encourages the erosion. Down that easy road lies tyranny. And it will be a tyranny of the mediocre.
Nowhere in the commentary on Coulter’s recent visit to Canadian university campuses, nor the visits of other controversial speakers, such as Netanyahu and Michael Coren, whose speaking events have been disrupted or prevented entirely by protesters, has the right of Canadians to hear the speech of someone they deem worth listening to been mentioned. That right is not another right in addition to the right of free speech. Its the same right, justified by the same arguments: that the citizens of a democracy cannot fulfill their role as sovereign if they alienate their rights to read, listen to and discuss ideas, in the interest of determining what they ought to think and do. As a possible corrective to the misapprehension, I suggest we change the name of the right from “the right to free speech” to “the right to information”. Wouldn’t that send a shiver down the spines of our secretive politicians and managers?
Ann Coulter’s right to speak was violated in Ottawa. That was bad enough. But the rights of hundreds of Canadian citizens to hear her speak were also violated. That was much worse. Worse still, those rights were violated without commentary, let alone condemnation, by our politicians, our courts and our media. Most despicably, a “leading academic” at the University of Ottawa—at least, I think it’s still a university—endeavored to prevent the invited speaker—yes, a speaker invited by Canadian citizens so that they could hear her—from speaking at all by threatening to arrest her if she didn’t play nice, by his rules.
Defenders of the protesters pretend that the protests that prevent speech are themselves speech and therefore protected by the right of free speech. That’s false. If you are not sure why its false, just imagine what would happen were you to stand up at a meeting of, say, city council, or a police board, or Parliament, and speak without first being recognized by the chair, and speaking to the item on the agenda. You would be prevented from speaking. Would this violate your right to free speech? No, because that right does not extend to your saying anything, anywhere, anytime (You can’t falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, and all that). Nor should or could it. If it did, the practice of speech itself—that institution—would perish. If free speech were understood to mean speech unrestricted in any way, that would thwart the very purpose of having the right to free speech in the first place, which is, I suggest, to maximize the amount of information we citizens have so that we can make the best judgements of which we are capable. And information is just as important to our living good private lives as it is our living good public lives. If so, the civil libertarians who argue that only political speech is protected by the right are wrong.
Every generation, it seems, must learn anew why speech is protected in a democracy. They have to learn whether that right is absolute, or whether it has limits, and what those limits are and why. And every generation must teach its politicians and public officials those same lessons. If we fail to do so, we will lose our democracy.
Our trouble is that nowhere in public discourse, with the notable exception of our best citizen bloggers (present company especially), are these vital issues regularly and carefully discussed: not in our schools, not in our universities—hotbeds of speech codes and oppression of dissenting opinion—not in our legislatures nor in our media. Why? Because ideas you disagree with are trouble. They require a response, maybe even an argument, and that just takes time away from your having your own way. So rather than promoting the values of the free and rational exchange of ideas, we live in a culture that expressly denies those values. We teach our children that opinions needn’t be justified by argument at all; that the only “justification” your ideas need is that you really, really believe them. And what better proof that you really, really believe something than the volume with which you shout down those you disagree with? It is much better, because more expedient, to simply prevent speech we, the loud, do not like. Welcome to the postmodern age, where power—raw, brutal, irrational power, not reason—rules. Congratulations Canada. We’ve allowed these corrosive forces to distort our most important institutions, and now we have to live with the results. We are reaping the postmodern whirlwind.
Aside: Isn’t the basis for the police monopoly on force in a democracy that they can and will secure safety and peace? If they’ve voluntarily given up on that job, the least they could do is let us know so that we can take measures to secure our own safety and peace. Will the same members of the police forces concede this point the next time we engage them in a discussion about the rights of citizens to own guns? No, I don’t think so either.
Here’s another tid bit on how the New police
are handling the border problems in the US.
Sheriff To Texas Border Town: ‘Arm Yourselves’
by John Burnett
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125737965&sc=fb&cc=fp
Has an audio element
The problem with not relying on the police to protect you and your family from attack and taking matters into your own hand is that, as is so often the case, the victim is charged if they don’t use the “minimum force” necessary. Pretty hard to guage the amount of force your assailant might use on you is a problem. The country seems pretty much screwed up to me. If you watch the dismal events happening in Great Britain, it seems to me that we are seeing a preview of things to come here.
Amazing how the Pee-Cee crowd has infected our lives isn’t it?
File this under “Know Your Enemy”
Rick Benoit meet Gary McHale.
Rick should read CaledoniaWakeupCall.ca more, he would not have been surprised by political interference in policing and cowardice of beat cops on the ground.
It started in Ipperwash and is continuing in Caledonia.
Canada is a laughing stock of the world indeed. Gutless, spineless, racist (towards the whites) and reactionary (towards the right). The longer I live here, the more I am horrified that I arrived from Russia, but not to Canada – to another USSR, but 50 years ago.