Paying The Piper

Ezra Levant on the confused and confusing Cross-Country Checkup scattershot equivocation of Bill C-10 and the Human Rights Commissions, under the general question of whether freedom of speech is passing out of favour in Canada. One almost got the sense that C-10 was an excuse to also tackle the taboo subject of HRCs as censorship bodies in a "balanced" way -- as if the two issues shared any common elements at all. Not being given free government money to inflict your artistic vision on the rest of us is completely different from being threatened by the police for inflicting that vision. It's easy to be brave when criticizing Bush; the silence of the arts community about human rights commission censorship suggests the only thing they're really idealistic about is free money. Good on Rex Murphy for covering this issue and raising the obvious problems with government-as-editor in a gentle way with freedom-refractory guests; bad on Canadians for the shallowness of almost every caller.