Getting the Bureaucrat's Permission to Speak
Ezra Levant has posted YouTube videos of his interrogation by an oily little Canadian bureaucrat called "a human rights officer." He has done it in a series of post, so go to his site and keep scrolling. Apparently, in Canada, free speech is not a human right but "freedom from criticism" is, at least for certain politically connected groups (threatening violence at the drop of a hat also seems to help gain one this "freedom from criticism" right. Levant is being hauled in by the government for publication of those Danish cartoons that barely register at 0.1 on a criticism meter that goes to 10.
This exchange really resonated with me:
Officer McGovern said "you're entitled to your opinions, that's for sure."
Well, actually, I'm not, am I? That's the reason I was sitting
there. I don't have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.
For all of you who left the US for Canada for more freedom from Bush and the Iraq war, have at it. Because Bush will be gone and we will be out of Iraq long before Canada (as well as Europe) catch up to the US in terms of its protection of [most] individual rights, like free speech.
via Maggies Farm
Update, from Mark Steyn:
Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example
of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over
the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of
Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim
rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them,
and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them.
Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an
explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the
introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the
purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any
actual backlash against anybody else.
