The Thought Police on the Warpath in Trudeaupia

Alberta's Censorship Problem

Over the past month, Calgary publisher and media personality Ezra Levant has succeeded in attracting a great deal of national and international attention to the precarious state of freedom of expression in Canada. Two years ago, Mr. Levant's print magazine, the now-defunct Western Standard, reprinted a selection of the Danish newspaper cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad that had ignited violent protests throughout the Muslim world. Accused by a Calgary imam of fostering discrimination, the magazine became the object of an investigation by the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC). Mr. Levant took the extraordinary step of recording his Jan. 11 interrogation and posting it on the video-sharing site YouTube, where it quickly became a worldwide phenomenon and brought virtually unanimous derision down upon the Alberta government.

Mr. Levant's view is that the readers of his magazine were entitled to an objective report about printed material that was the subject of a major controversy, and that Western law dare not adopt and enforce Islamic rules forbidding the visual depiction and implied criticism of Muhammad. To allow the suppression of interfaith dialogue and debate, whether conducted by means of words or images, is to destroy the essence of religious and press freedom. The Western Standard's reporting, as both philosophical expression and news, was of the type that our justice system traditionally recognizes as entitled to the strongest possible state protections.

We agree with this stance. Hardly anybody on either side of the political spectrum seems to disagree with it, and those who do can offer only the lamest arguments for a wholly novel and sinister regime of state censorship. The AHRC's probe of Mr. Levant constitutes a patent insult to the fundamental freedoms listed in Section 2 of the Charter of Rights, and it can scarcely be the case that such an insult is permitted as essential to the functioning of a healthy liberal democracy. After all, we had just such a democracy for a good long time, or thought we did, long before the creation of a professional class of opinion-sniffers armed with police powers.

There is a danger that Mr. Levant's increasingly strident and aggressive personal critique of the interlocutors who bring him and others like him before the commission, however justifiable, will obscure the more essential issue. And that is the law itself. In Alberta, human rights law as currently structured not only impinges upon freedom of expression — as if that were not reason enough to require a change — but imposes no procedural costs upon a complainant while practically obliging a defendant to retain counsel at his own expense.

We have seen the original handwritten complaint launched against Mr. Levant — and it is something any adult could have scrawled out in an afternoon. After it was submitted, the imam went on his merry way while human rights mandarins conducted their fact-finding and interrogations with taxpayer dollars. Mr. Levant, meanwhile, being the one at risk, has been forced to spend thousands of dollars — not to mention hundreds of hours of his time (though, admittedly, in Mr. Levant's unusual case, he may well enjoy the exercise).

Moreover, as even human rights experts who support the aims of the statute have pointed out, Alberta is unique among Canadian jurisdictions in failing to have such cases resolved by an independent tribunal. The same commission effectively serves as cop, prosecutor and judge — a process whose unfairness a child could see through.

This house of cards has yet to be subjected to serious judicial review. And eventually, Mr. Levant — or someone else — will mount a successful court challenge to the more outrageous procedural and Charter aspects of Alberta's Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act. But why wait? The Alberta government could restore due process and introduce strong protections for press and religious freedom to the statute anytime it cared to. All it would take would be for Alberta voters to make their views known to their local candidates at the next election, which, by a happy confluence of circumstances, is likely to be called next week.

Such a move would unquestionably be popular with a conservative electorate, and the shaky cause of Ed Stelmach's Conservatives needs all the help it can get. It's true that when interviewed by the Family Life Committee of Alberta in 2006, while still a dark-horse candidate for the provincial Conservative leadership, Mr. Stelmach said that "legislation [protecting Section 2 rights] would drive wedges between groups" and that curtailing the power of the Human Rights Commission would "not get to first base" in his government.

In the interests of the Constitution, and of a free and robust marketplace of ideas, we are willing to forget this ill-considered statement if the Premier will agree to do the same.