Free Expression

Kevin Steel has a good rundown of the insanity of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial counterparts. In our ironically-named “Human Rights Tribunals”, the notion of free expression has for some time been subordinated to the sacred cow of political correctness. Prohibitions against “hate speech” and the like tend inevitably to the loss of individual liberty; the rationale always begins with neo-nazis and their ilk, but the urge to stifle never ends there. The purpose of our human rights commissions now seems to be to prevent over-sensitive Canadians from being offended, and to punish the insufficiently sensitive people who offend them. The CHRC needs to be put out of business, and soon.

This paragraph is particularly telling:

On August 16, the online publication WorldNetDaily quoted CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, whose actions dictate whether a complaint goes to a tribunal, stating how the CHRC approaches the liberty to speak freely. "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value," he quipped to a lawyer representing a website. Apparently, Steacy has never heard of John Milton or Martin Luther, and with that kind of ignorance at the CHRC, it should be obvious the commissions can't be reined in soon enough.

Steacy’s comment is, of course, nonsense. Yet Martin Luther, fascinating chap that he was, should not be misconstrued as a defender of free speech. Luther was a proponent of a particular interpretation of Christian revelation; his advocacy of freedom of worship for the Reformers and their followers should not be confused with a kind of 16th century proto-liberalism. He was certainly not an advocate of freedom for the Jewish people, to take an obvious example. One might get the impression of Luther as a kind of romantic revolutionary leader who merely by coincidence stands for the same ideals as modern Americans from watching the Ralph Fiennes movie Luther. That film stands in the tradition of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (though it is not nearly as well-made): it is intriguing but largely historically bogus.

If Steel wanted examples of non-American defenders of free expression, he might have looked up J.S. Mill, who advocated broad free speech against the many dangers of censorship. He might have also have brought in Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), another philosopher of note. Given our current cramped political climate, one hopes that Canadian thinkers will begin speaking out in favour of free expression, without which a free society is not possible.

Wasted Energy

Colby Cosh has hit on the one factor which is constantly ignored in discussions of child poverty:

Meanwhile, Losing Ground highlights alarming, nationally uniform growth in the fraction of families with minor children headed by a single parent — a social indicator that welfare reforms in the United States have succeeded in changing for the better in recent years. From 1990 to 2005, single-parent families increased from 21.4% of all families in Canada to 25.5%. In Toronto, the figure jumped from 24.0% to 30.4%. On neither scale does it show any recent signs of slowing. Anything our policy-makers do to “fight child poverty” while such a major cause of it spreads unchecked is likely to represent wasted energy in the long run.

The assumption, made so often pundits, is that if we just pour enough money into various social programs, we can very easily “end child poverty.” But it is an error to treat poverty as something which can be easily swept away by the state. Recall Paul Martin’s pledge as finance minister to eliminate child poverty in Canada within 10 years. 10 years later he was still the finance minister, but the rate child poverty had gone up.

And yet we still hear pundits complaining that the government is not spending enough to “fight” the problem, and the “problem” is always a lack of spending on social programs. A less simplistic analysis would look at the homes in which these children are being raised. Consider these numbers:

In 2005, the median household income for two-parent families in Canada was $67,600. For lone-parent families it was $30,000 — meaning half of all single-parent families were bringing in less than that amount annually.

Is it too much to suggest that no-fault divorce and the breakdown of the family are having deleterious effects on the social fabric? It is high time we shift the debate surrounding poverty away from dollar amounts spend on ineffective programs, and begin to look seriously at the health of the family.