At Home in Hespeler

We sit here and pontificate on the Human Rights Commissions in this country,  fighting the forces of censorship, of state controlled speech, and some days,it feels like progress is being made. Ezra Levant goes off the deep end on Michael Coren, and we cheer. Mark Steyn fights with high profile and a high margin of victory, and hooray! Baby steps forward. But it is clear, the fight against censorship is being lost,and lost badly.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is calling for Parliament to force all Canadian magazines, newspapers and “media services” Web sites to join a national press council with the power to adjudicate breaches of professional standards and complaints of discrimination.

Barbara Hall, who claimed a lack of jurisdiction in the Steyn complaint last year and then pronounced on the complaint anyway, thinks all media, including blogs, should be subject to a national press council.

The implications for this are massive, and they affect every current event blogger. Doesn’t this mean that anonymous bloggers must register their blogs? Won’t they have to unanonymousize? What about reptilian kitten eaters? Must they register? Would a press council even allow us to call Gilligan that, or would we be forced to post, on our own blogs, paid for with real after tax day job dollars, an I’ve been a very naughty boy judgements against us?

No, we may be winning the debate, but we are losing the war. When the pimply minions of bureaucracy feel quite at liberty to make such suggestion, we not only aren’t making progress, we are going backwards.

And what Gilligan Kinsella and the rest of the apologists need to realize in a hurry is, either we all have free speech, or none of us do.

Brian Gardiner free speech, freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, human rights, Jacobian Piece of Impertinence, pimply minions of bureaucracy