00:00:00.000It may sound like the setup of a joke. A comedian has to go to the Supreme Court to defend his right to tell jokes, but that's actually what's happening in the case of a Quebec comedian, Mike Ward, who is taking his right to make fun of people in his comedy routine to the Supreme Court of Canada after the Quebec Appellate Court ruled against him this week.
00:00:27.000Mike Ward is the comedian who in 2016 made headlines for a human rights complaint against him for making jokes about a disabled singer from Quebec. The Human Rights Tribunal determined that he had to pay $35,000 to the young man he was making fun of and $7,000 to his mother. $42,000 for jokes that made fun of someone, which is quite frankly a hallmark of stand-up comedy quite often.
00:00:54.940Now he said he was never going to pay this. He took it to an appellate court and there was a dissenting judgment, but still the court ruled that he still had to pay the $35,000.
00:01:06.900They threw out the $7,000 to the young man, Jeremy Gabriel's mother.
00:01:11.720Now Mike Ward has said, simply enough, he is not paying. In a statement posted on Twitter, he said that I am refusing to pay. We are going to take this to the Supreme Court. Comedy is not a crime.
00:01:24.940In a quote-unquote free country, it shouldn't be up to a judge to decide what constitutes a joke on stage. The people in attendance laughing already answered that question.
00:01:36.240I'm telling you right now, I'd rather go to prison than pay even one-tenth of this stupid fine.
00:01:42.340Now Mike Ward's fight is about something a lot more fundamental than whether the joke was funny, whether it's in poor taste or callous to make fun of someone with a disability.
00:01:52.860It's about whether judges and juries have the right to legislate and litigate on comedy routines, and the answer is a resounding no.
00:02:02.660Part of freedom of expression, part of free speech is the right to tell jokes, the right to even tell distasteful ones.
00:02:09.540Just watch a Comedy Central roast, just watch a comedy special of most of the comedians who work blue, and you'll find that they're taking pot shots at people all the time.
00:02:19.480Even if you don't find it funny, that doesn't mean that someone is entitled to a $35,000 payout because of the joke that may not have landed well on the person about whom it was being made.
00:02:32.780Unfortunately, Canada's freedom of expression and freedom of speech are confined by reasonable limits as laid out in the Charter,
00:02:41.340which means that it's not as cut and dry to saying, we have free speech and the Human Rights Commission can bite me.
00:02:47.160You have to oftentimes be victimized by human rights tribunals, which is exactly what's been happening to Mike Ward for the last three years.
00:02:56.360Now, he's going to the Supreme Court of Canada because his argument is that there is no jurisdiction, even under so-called anti-discrimination rules, to take aim at a comedy routine.
00:03:08.560Mike Ward's lawyer, Julius Gray, says clearly the Human Rights Tribunal considered as discriminatory something that was not.
00:03:17.140I think the Human Rights Tribunal is not a court which can enforce rules against thoughts or ideas that it considers wrong.
00:03:24.200If anything, it would be a defamation case to be heard in Superior Court, but there's no defamation there.
00:03:29.780That's basically what's at stake right now.
00:03:32.640The tribunal and now the appellate court are trying to define the limits of humor, the limits of comedy, and by extension, the limits of free speech.
00:03:43.240Now, there are a lot of people who will say, well, the kid he was making fun of was just a kid, or, oh, the person he was making fun of had a disability.
00:03:58.260Tell a comedian, eh, you know what, I don't think that joke was appropriate.
00:04:01.920The response is not to take the heavy arm of state censorship, which is what such a substantial financial penalty is, and apply it because you think a joke was distasteful.
00:04:11.960True North is standing up for free speech unabashedly.