Halifax conference on "the right to offend"

I am delighted to be one of the participants in the upcoming public conference on the media's "right to offend", being held on November 1st at University of King's College in Halifax. (I'll try to visit the world headquarters of Free Mark Steyn while I'm in the neighbourhood!)

Even more delightful is that the symposium is sponsored by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. The very first politician I ever met was Sheldon Chumir; he had donated a "lunch with Sheldon Chumir" to a charity auction that my father bought. Chumir took my sister and me to lunch, and we peppered him with so many questions that he hardly had time to eat a bite. Even back in high school, I knew I was a conservative, but I also knew that Chumir was my kind of Liberal -- he was a contrarian who deliberately chose to be a Liberal in Tory-blue Alberta, precisely so that he could be in opposition. That's not the usual reason most people get into politics. He was a civil libertarian, too, of course, which is why the foundation named after him is focusing so much on the threat posed to civil liberties by Canada's imposter "human rights commissions".

I'm excited that the keynote speaker of the conference is Margaret Wente. She has been one of the most effective journalists in the country at exposing the insanity of Canada's HRCs. Her column about the Ontario Human Rights Commission trial of a plastic surgeon who violated the "human right" of a male-to-female transexual who wanted, uh, intimate female surgery remains the most hilarious and outrageous editorial I've read on the subject.

Of course, there will be censors on the panel, too -- including John Miller, the journalism professor who tried (unsuccessfully) to intervene in the BC HRT kangaroo trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine. I'm looking forward to meeting Miller. I've never met a pro-censorship journalist before, but I'm just a small town boy.

I'm glad the symposium will be held in Halifax. Not only is it a gorgeous city, but it's also home to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, currently under siege by that province's HRC for daring to publish the cartoon to the left. They've been accused of violating human rights, too. I wonder if any folks from the paper will be in attendance (maybe) or the radical imam who filed the complaint (I'm thinking, probably not).

The title of the conference says it all: the right to offend. Free speech is meaningless if it applies only to inoffensive speech. The meaning of free speech is that it must be free from other things, including other admirable things, like good manners, political correctness, or the ideological fashions of the day. That's not to say there is no antidote to offensive speech. There are plenty, ranging from ignoring the offender, to rebutting him, to condeming him to socially ostracizing him. But none of those remedies involve the government and its unlimited power.

If I prepare my remarks in advance, I'll post them here on my blog. If you're in Nova Scotia, please stop by.