A report warns that ＂safetyism＂ is being weaponized by governments to justify censorship
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Summary
In this episode, we are joined by the Canadian Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (CFFC) to talk about the dangers of safetyism and how governments use it to justify censorship, surveillance and restrictions on basic freedoms.
Transcript
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you guys have a special report that has been put out on what you refer to as safetyism and how the
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state slash government is now using safetyism and it could start trampling our rights can you expand
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on that a little bit yeah so safetyism refers to a cultural or even institution or government
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tendency to prioritize physical and even emotional safety above all other values you know at the
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expense of those other values, including freedom, personal development, open debate and discourse.
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And look, safety is, of course, important, but Canadian governments have exploited emergencies
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or the sense of danger historically in the most grotesque ways. They've used the rationale of
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safety to shut down Sean Foyt, to lock down the forests in Nova Scotia. They've used it to justify
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censorship surveillance or restrictions on basic freedoms all in the name of protecting people from
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discomfort or offense or some type of perceived risk or harm and it's this culture where no risk
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is tolerable whatsoever that cellophane wrapper in the woods is apparently so dangerous that you're
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not allowed to walk your dog in the forest so in this report safety above all which you can download
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for free at the ccf.ca safetyism we go through the historic instances where governments have
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overreached and eroded and violated civil liberties in the name of safety
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and they're really disturbing examples from the invocation of the war measures act in response to
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the october crisis in 1970 where habeas corpus was suspended where homes were searched without
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warrants where people were arrested and detained incommunicado for for weeks there was the
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detainment of an internment of japanese canadians in 1942 following japan's attack on pearl harbor
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and japanese canadians were rounded up across the country and put into shacks in interior bc
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without adequate heating their property was seized by the government and stole and sold
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and then that money was used to finance their own internment because the government told people
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that japanese canadians were too dangerous because of this you know inaccurate risk
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view that they would be spying on canadians so they all had to be proactively put into these