Toronto literati: 100% against section 13 "hate speech" law

I just finished a vigorous panel at the Magazines Canada conference in Toronto. It was chaired by author Noah Richler, and besides me, there was Shelly Ambrose, publisher of The Walrus, Derek Webster, founder and editor of Maisonneuve magazine, and the Literary Review of Canada's editor, Bronwyn Drainie. In other words, other than my somewhat inexplicable presence, it was the height of magazine literati. The panel drew a full room at the conference.

Half way through the proceedings, Noah asked me to talk about various "chills" on speech -- namely defamation and human rights commissions.

I said that I don't think that libel chill is a particular trouble to Canadian journalism, since truth is a defence, and fair comment covers much of the rest. It's good for journalists to have a distant worry about defamation in the back of their minds when attacking someone's reputation -- and accurate reporting is the only defence necessary.

How different that is from Canada's absurd "hate speech" laws, for which truth and fair comment are no defence, damages need not be proved, etc.

I talked a bit about the section 13 hate speech law, reading out its key sentence. And Noah took a poll of the room: did they support the law, or want to see it abolished? 100% were on the side of freedom. I was impressed -- these were, in the main, fancy downtown Toronto culturati. They get it.

On the way to catch a cab back to the airport, who did I bump into but Lewis Lapham, a guest speaker at the same conference. Lapham, of course, was the longtime editor of the exquisitely liberal Harpers magazine. We said hello to each other. I mentioned to him that I was being hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission because the Western Standard published the Danish cartoons two years ago. He stopped me, telling me he knew all about it, and he reminded me, in fact, that he had written sympathetically about our very case in 2006!

I was already in a great mood after Noah's panel; but to leave Toronto with the imprimatur of Lewis Lapham, dean of liberal literati, solidified my growing confidence that freedom of speech, opposition to jihadist fatwas and the abolition of Canada's illiberal "human rights" commissions is no longer the preserve of "conservatives", or any other fraction of the intellectual world. It is a cause that every genuine intellectual, anywhere on the spectrum of ideas, can naturally understand.

We're winning.