00:03:11.340I think people and companies should be able to choose as they wish.
00:03:15.880But the problem is that that's not what we have.
00:03:17.980And we have no prospect of getting there.
00:03:21.520And so the question remaining is, do we extend the protection to political beliefs or do we just leave things in the mess that they are?
00:03:28.560Yeah, you have identified this gap here.
00:03:32.160You've identified the double standard.
00:03:33.740And from that, the choice we have is either expand these protections to include political beliefs or strip away all of the other ones as they pertain to what people can do and who people associate with and who people sell as customers or sell to as customers.
00:03:48.940Is your ideal version, though, that one, which is we actually kind of scrapped the whole thing?
00:04:01.180The idea is that people should be protected from an overbearing state.
00:04:05.940I mean, we don't want people being thrown in jail arbitrarily or being subject to torture without due process in terms of, you know, prosecutions and so on.
00:04:15.560Now, that's where the idea of human rights originates.
00:04:20.860But the problem is that modern human rights have morphed into this other thing wherein some people can impose upon other people to recognize and validate their identities and beliefs.
00:04:36.200And, yeah, we'd be better off without that version of human rights altogether as far as I'm concerned.
00:04:42.540But the political problem is that's not going to happen.
00:04:45.920There is no political party of any political stripe with the guts to take that step.
00:04:52.420And so what we're left with is do we want to extend protection to political beliefs that right now are being subject to an awful lot of punishment?
00:05:02.760One of the things I've always found about human rights commissions is that inherently they have to create some sort of a hierarchy of identity groups.
00:05:13.000I mean, one of the most notable examples, I think it was a year or two years ago in, I want to say, Windsor, there was a waxologist from some salon that didn't want to wax a transgender customer.
00:05:26.220But the reason was that the waxologist was a Muslim.
00:05:29.380So all of a sudden you have her religious rights to not have to wax a man's genitals and the transgender person's rights to be recognized as, in fact, a woman.
00:05:39.840And in these cases, there's no right answer once you make the government the arbiter of this.
00:05:44.920The right answer, I would say, is, well, the transgender person should go to a business that wants her business and the waxologist should be able to say, I don't want your business.
00:05:53.540But we as a society do not want to have these discussions on our own.
00:05:57.800It seems like people have just welcomed in the government to be the arbiter in every single disagreement.
00:06:05.080And you'll notice that those cases that involve waxologists and transgender customers are actually avoiding the more basic problem, according to the logic of the human rights codes.
00:06:18.480As soon as a waxologist says, well, I don't want to do not forget the transgender question.
00:06:32.960Now, before you even get to the transgender problem, that's discrimination.
00:06:37.660On the face of the human rights code, that's discrimination.
00:06:41.080You're not supposed to be able to discriminate on the basis of sex or gender.
00:06:46.500So there's a lot of left hand, right hand, not really telling the truth about these things.
00:06:53.860Because if you extended the logic to all cases, then we would all be locked down in terms of the choices we were able to make.
00:07:02.260Now, one of the arguments I've heard in defense of some of these is that, you know, it's important to protect race and sex, but not political beliefs, as an example, because one is a choice and one's not.
00:07:15.600But we also do see protection, you mentioned earlier, in a very narrow way of political beliefs.
00:07:30.880I mean, there are other kinds of choices that are fully protected, and quite clearly so.
00:07:35.140So let's go back to the transgender question.
00:07:37.200If you were born a man and decide that you believe that you're a woman, that's protected because that's a listed ground of discrimination.
00:07:50.500If you are a member of a particular religion, you believe in that religion, that belief is protected.
00:07:58.840These are no more inherent characteristics than a belief in a political ideology.
00:08:04.020And to say that a political ideology is, well, it's just a belief, and therefore it's not inherent, and therefore you can change it, is to suggest that, oh, well, we can require you to change the central propositions of your political or philosophical beliefs.
00:08:21.480That's no more reasonable than expecting somebody to be able to change their religious beliefs.
00:08:26.200And that's something that we would not require them to do.
00:08:28.140And your point's a valid one, which is that if we can't strip this all away, if we can't get politicians to stand up and realize that we are robbing people of their right to run their business the way they want to, to live their life the way they want to, then we have to go the next step and say, all right, well, let's talk about real protection.
00:08:45.240And a lot of people would roll their eyes at this, but there's voluminous evidence that people with conservative beliefs face discrimination in a multitude of areas.
00:08:55.940In academia, you mentioned a couple of cases, in the private sector, in all sorts of areas.
00:09:02.240So, yeah, if you want to talk about protecting minority views, well, it doesn't get much more minority than a conservative on a university campus.
00:09:31.560One of the objections to this idea is that the whole thing will become totally unmanageable, unwieldy.
00:09:37.580The restrictions to be placed upon into the lap of employers would be untenable.
00:09:44.440And, you know, in a way that might turn out to be true.
00:09:49.960But my point is, look, if that turns out to be true, if that makes the whole regime so untenable that it sort of collapses under its own weight, that's a good thing.
00:10:04.940Either it works and political beliefs are actually protected or it extends the human rights code idea to such an extent that the whole thing sort of collapses.
00:10:15.820Either one of those two things is a win in my books.
00:10:20.580Conservatives should actually be on the front lines of trying to expand these commissions' powers just to bring about attention to how absurd a lot of them are.
00:10:28.800I just want to pivot very briefly here, Bruce, because we've been talking on the show for weeks now about Bill C-10, which is the bill that will put the internet and internet content under government regulation.
00:10:39.800Your perspective on this one I'm curious about because we know that the Federal Human Rights Act doesn't deal with, you know, what you do in your own business for the most part.
00:10:49.360But it does deal with federally regulated areas.
00:10:52.180And one of those is very key, which is the internet.
00:10:55.400And that was where years ago there was Section 13, which regulated internet speech.
00:11:00.280Is there a direct connection that we can draw between Bill C-10 and a lot of these things that you're talking about in a provincial context at the federal level with the online harms bill or online hate speech bill that Stephen Gilbeau is talking about wanting to introduce any day now?
00:11:15.800Yeah, the problem is that Bill C-10 as it is currently constituted and probably the bill that hasn't arrived yet that you just mentioned will not be quite so straightforward as to simply ban discrimination in the way that I'm talking about.
00:11:35.320What it does instead probably will be to give a federal agency the power to make arbitrary decisions about what's okay and what's not okay.
00:11:47.160Not only do you not have a list of criteria, you have taken the power of speech away from people and given it to the government to supervise.
00:11:56.760But that's, you know, that's just bad news all around.
00:11:59.980Well, well, I appreciate your voice on these matters always.
00:12:03.120We'll have to have you back on once we see at long last the text of this online hate speech bill.
00:12:08.880Although, you know, come to think of it, I think the proper position on this is that if we never see it, it will be a good thing for Canada and a good thing for free speech.
00:12:16.540But nevertheless, we'll have you back on anytime.