Canada: The Spanish Inquisition Makes a Comeback

by Douglas Murray • September 15, 2015 at 5:00 am

Some readers will remember the disputes during the last decade when the journalists were hauled before the farcical "Human Rights Commissions" of Canada and asked to explain why they had ever said anything that the state commissars did not agree with. Best of all is that the members of the Commission do not have to wait for anybody to complain to them before they act.
The Commission is allowed to head out all by itself and search for things that are offensive. One must wonder whether it may just – wholly unforeseeably – be a government department which continuously finds work to justify its existence?
The Tribunal is planning to keep a publicly available list of people found guilty of "hate speech" — like a sex-offender database. Presumably this means that members of the public can check that they are not living in the proximity of anybody who is likely to express him-or-herself with words.
I am sure that Monsieur Fremont will agree that the safest thing to do is either not to report an attack on the Canadian Parliament or to ensure that all papers or individuals who mention such an attack are immediately fined $10,000 and put on the Hate-Speech-offenders list for doing so.
The Human Rights Tribunal will be able to decide on each occasion how much money it wants. Might it not in fact be more convenient for the Tribunals if they simply put all writers on a system of direct-debit and levy the fine on absolutely everyone after any terrorist attack?
We had hoped that the country had learned that for most of the civilized world, blasphemy laws are meant to be a thing of the past. But after the latest events in Quebec, we will no longer be fooled. The whole world will be able to see that in Canada blasphemy laws are a thing of the future.

Jacques Fremont, head of the Quebec Human Rights Commission, has been quoted saying that he will use his new powers to target "people who would write against... the Islamic religion... on a website or on a Facebook page." (Image source: CRDP video screenshot)

Imagine that somebody then had told you a few years ago that developed Western democracies would be discussing the introduction of blasphemy laws. "You mean 'repealing' surely?" your wise younger self would probably have said. And if you had been persuaded that, no, new blasphemy laws really were going to be brought into effect in the not-too-distant future, doubtless your follow-on question would have been, "So how did the Spanish inquisition manage to make such a comeback?"