When I arrived in Ottawa in 1989 to work for Newsworld, my default mental programming was still left-of-center. Though I was an evangelical Christian and asking a lot of questions and frankly dismayed by what I was seeing about "the ends justifies the means" behavior on the Left, I had little exposure to conservative points of view.
That's because there was little readily accessible in the Trudeaupia of 1989. Red Tory Hugh Segal was as far to the right as was acceptable in any debates I was assigned to book for CBC Newsworld.. I remember a CBC colleague of mine calling the Fraser Institute fascist. Anyone who was further to the right of Hugh Segal was automatically a racist or worse. There were only a handful of right-leaning columnists: George Jonas, Claire Hoy, Ted Byfield, Peter Stockland, and Michael Coren. That was about it. And they were universally panned and condemned. When they did get on TV, they ran the risk of being over-exposed because there were so few conservatives, especially social conservatives.
Then Preston Manning and the Reform Party came on the scene. Boy oh boy did they face attacks as racists and fascists. But they persisted, and soon, some of their ideas began to gain some respectability.
Then Premier Mike Harris and his Common Sense revolution shocked the pundits with its successful win. Who would have thunk that their ideas would appeal to anyone in Ontario because again, his ideas and his government were subjected to a constant diatribe of negative media. There were few places one could look for a good conservative apologetic, without having to subscribe to a lot of American magazines.
Meanwhile, the Internet was growing and some of the first conservative sources like TownHall.com began to circulate conservative columnists to people with an Internet connection.
But one of the biggest sea changes in Canada was Conrad Black's creation of the National Post and his makeover of all the Southam papers. Suddenly, there was a national newspaper that was exciting, and interesting, cheeky. Black's papers challenged head-on the prevailing increasing illiberal wisdom with the best writers and columnists and investigative journalists this country had to offer. It was fresh, zesty and surprising.
The Ottawa Citizen, which used to be so blandly unreadable, became a vital, fascinating read every morning under Neil Reynolds. David Warren, whose great magazine The Idler along with Ted Byfield's Report Magazines and little Catholic Insight were among the shining lights in the illiberal obscurity, got a spot as a columnist, but the paper had real debate, keeping left-leaning columnists like Susan Riley, too.
Manning, Harris and Black took that cramped political spectrum in Canada that was defined by Hugh Segal and Red Toryism on the right and blew it wide open. The conservative blogosphere has ensured that it will stay that way, despite the Ottawa-izing of politicians who still think the old illiberal regime rules.
This is all a long preamble to say that
what Ezra describes as happening in the early 1990s in the Taylor decision could probably not happen now. Except for that handful of conservative columnists and that small number of groups like REAL Women of Canada, people and groups that paid a huge price in terms of the smears and hatred heaped on them, most of us---me included, were asleep at the switch about what was happening to our country and to our precious rights and freedoms.
I was asleep probably because I had such pervasive left-leaning programming coupled with a deep aversion to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Maybe its because my mother, my aunt and my grandparents were stateless persons in France during World War II and could have ended up in Nazi concentration camps if they were not able to flee to America. Their refugee experience and the horrors of World War II is in my DNA.
Ezra Levant catalogues today some of the "received wisdom" surrounding the Taylor case, the Supreme Court decision that is so often cited by our "betters" at various human rights commissions when they seek to suppress freedom of speech. He writes:Taylor was the first Canadian convicted under the section 13 hate speech laws of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and he served nine months in jail for refusing to submit to it. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990, when Ross was 80 years old. This interview of him was when he was 55. It was filmed in his country home. Like everyone else in the segment, he was dressed formally.
I listened to his interview and found myself, again, laughing. His incoherent philosophy was such a mish-mash of ideas -- mainly fascism, but with splashes of everything including direct democracy thrown in -- that I couldn't imagine anyone taking him seriously, other than perhaps the 20-year-old kid on Yonge Street.
Taylor talked about sending the Jews to... Madagascar. He said we should model our political leadership after moose leadership. Yes, moose: that two bull moose meet, and the stronger one beats the weaker one, and that's how we should select Canada's leader. This laughable man -- who presented himself with the graveness of Winston Churchill -- was the threat in the face of which our freedom of speech was destroyed by the government. This man -- who, fifteen years later, was reduced to handing out pamphlets asking people to call his phone answering machine, to hear a "hate" message about Jews -- was sentenced to nine months in jail for his ideas.
His ideas are nuts. No-one was persuaded by them. But he was the bullet in the gun fired by the CBC, the CJC and the Canadian government.
The Taylor decision, as bad as it is, isn't anywhere near as bad as the Canadian Human Rights Act's Section 13 (1) and provincial equivalents, because it imposes some limits on what can be interpreted as hate speech. But when you look at what Ezra has uncovered, you realize there was something stark, raving nuts about the whole case. Had there been a National Post, had their been a conservative blogosphere, it might have been laughed out of court before it ever reached the highest court of the land.
Lots of damage has been done. Lots of power has been grabbed by government. It is going to be hard to take it back. But we must assert our God-given rights and start speaking up. But in the meantime, I do want to thank some of the pioneers who took so much of the heat years ago to open up the spectrum of debate.
Thank you, Preston Manning. Thank you, Mike Harris. And thank you especially, Conrad Black.
