Civil liberties have always been a hot-button issue in Canada, and they ve never been more important than they are now. But what does it mean to be a civil liberties advocate in Canada today? What role does it play in the current political climate? And who are the new civil liberties groups emerging to fill the void left by the decline and fall of the old ones? In this episode, Ezra talks to Bruce Pardy, founder of Rights Probe, to find out.
00:00:30.000Well, when I was growing up, the civil liberties public interest law firm to watch in Canada was called the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
00:00:40.440There was a minor offshoot of it in British Columbia, but the big one was in Toronto.
00:00:45.620And it was run by a very, I don't know, progressive man who was an old-school, sort of Berkeley-style civil libertarian.
00:00:55.980And you could tell that he deeply loved it in his bones, but that generation is long gone.
00:01:02.580The left, I think, has chosen to walk away from its admirable legacy as a free speech movement
00:01:10.360because the speech they don't like, they don't want to debate it anymore, they want to shut it down.
00:01:15.840Now, obviously there are still a few civil libertarians on the left, but not too many.
00:01:20.880And they seem to be quite selective with whose freedom they support.
00:01:24.620I remember reading about in the 60s and 70s when they were, for example, in a very Jewish neighborhood in Chicago
00:01:32.260when neo-Nazis and KKK members marched through Skokie, Illinois, it was called.
00:01:39.720And the ACLU, the American version of this, would send Jewish and black lawyers to defend the Nazis.
00:01:47.160And they sent Jews and blacks on purpose to make the point.
00:01:50.840We hate what these guys say, but you've got to support free speech for people you despise if you want it for yourself.
00:02:00.920And it has taken a little bit of time, but in the void left by the decline and fall of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and others,
00:02:11.300other civil liberties groups have come.
00:02:13.580The Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms,
00:02:20.220my favorite, the Democracy Fund, the Free Speech Union of Canada,
00:02:25.400and a group that we haven't talked about before, that we're going to talk about today, called Rights Probe.
00:02:31.200And right there, there's almost half a dozen new civil liberties movements that I'm not going to say they're on the right,
00:02:38.060because I don't even know what that means sometimes.
00:02:40.140If you were skeptical of forced vaccines, are you right wing or left wing?
00:02:45.440If you were against lockdowns, are you right wing or left wing?
00:11:30.020And my definition has always been that you are free when you are not subject to the coercion that is the force of other people, including the state.
00:11:41.440And if we started to think of freedom in that singular way, instead of carving off these exceptions.
00:11:48.440See, part of our problem is our constitutional architecture, and not just in Canada, but across the Western world, including the United States.
00:11:55.340You have our constitutions that are designed this way.
00:11:57.920The state has unlimited power, except, and the exceptions are, you know, the Bill of Rights or the Charter of Rights.
00:12:06.780And one of those rights is freedom of speech.
00:12:09.020But we need the exception because we set up the general rule.
00:12:12.460The general rule is unlimited power on the part of the state.
00:12:16.660And one of the ways to think about this differently is to think about how that could be reversed, as in the state can do nothing except, what are the exceptions?
00:12:26.660What kinds of things do you want the state to do?
00:13:09.580Whereas our mindset is if it's not specifically banned, it's permitted.
00:13:12.900And it's a totally different way of seeing the world.
00:13:16.600I won't go into some of the anecdotes my friends told me, but even walking on a lawn at a university, you would be terrified that someone would come and make a, you know, report about you.
00:13:28.460I won't, I'll tell those stories another day, but it's a different in mindset.
00:14:48.680But they're limited in their civil liberties.
00:14:51.840And Lee Kuan Yew would say that that was absolutely essential.
00:14:58.160And one of the things I learned recently is they, even in their, even in their neighborhoods, they would ensure that the different ethnicities of Singapore were mixed.
00:15:10.220So you couldn't just be in a Muslim neighborhood.
00:15:13.180You couldn't just be in an ethnic Chinese neighborhood.
00:15:15.700Lee Kuan Yew realized, or at least he said, that if left to their own devices, a multiracial, multiethnic society like that would, would, would become clannish and would, would splinter.
00:15:31.100And I found that compelling coming from him in that part of the world.
00:15:36.100And I wonder if we reach a point in the civil liberties loving West, that if you bring in enough people of certain cultures that don't value freedom of speech, and you give them the tools of a liberal democracy, you give them free speech, you give them electoral democracy, if you're not at a certain point slitting your throat.
00:16:00.300Hitler used democracy, he was elected in 1933, and there was a lot of shenanigans, but if you give illiberal people the tools of liberal democracy, maybe they can take it over.
00:16:11.860And that's, I think, one of the things that worried Lee Kuan Yew.
00:16:14.500And I think it's something maybe we have to worry about in the West.
00:16:18.100If you bring in an enormous number of illiberal people, do you give them the tools of liberalism?
00:16:36.980Number one is to be ruled by a powerful elite that can decide, you know, what it is that you shall do and how you speak and, and, and so on in the, in the general welfare, in their judgments.
00:17:10.080Well, that sounds great in theory, but it's a terrible thing in practice because imagine, for example, if you had that system in place during COVID and you put to the people the question, you know, should everybody be required to get a vaccine?
00:17:21.880You know, and you got 75% of the people saying, well, absolutely.
00:17:25.000Well, you end up with a, with a system of law that says you get a vaccine or you go to jail.
00:17:32.860Yes, I grant you that, but you don't want your elites to be so powerful to be dictating what the general welfare is either, because that's the situation that we're railing against right now.
00:17:42.440So you've got to have a different kind of architectural system that provides every single person with the space to decide for themselves how to be as long as the bottom line for me is always, and we've come to a place in this culture where it's a very weak belief.
00:18:00.900But the bottom line is you cannot use force or the threats of force against other people, period.
00:18:10.180If you have that as your, as your foundational idea, then you can have a lot of freedom without trouble.
00:18:17.100It doesn't mean everybody's going to think the same thing.
00:18:19.160It doesn't mean people are not going to gather in tribes, but it means that you're going to have a peaceful society where people make their own way.
00:18:25.700Right. And Singapore, you know, is full of accomplishments, but I'm not sure that I would want to reproduce their system exactly.
00:18:33.220Yeah. You know, it's fascinating to me to look at the UK where five MPs contesting the general election last year won on an explicitly sectarian campaign.
00:18:49.700Their slogan was lend your vote to Gaza.
00:18:54.620They were running in the UK and they elected five MPs.
00:18:57.520Right. And, you know, to me, that's terrifying because I, I think that unlocks all sorts of new systems of rule and power and, and that I don't think the West is used to.
00:19:11.960We'll leave that aside because there's so many things I want to talk to you about that you have issued from Rights Probe.
00:19:16.660You're, you're not just a member of Rights Probe, you're an author and researcher and professor.
00:19:21.520And I want to talk about something that I think is not being sufficiently covered across the country.
00:19:27.980And I know it's really started to shock British Columbians who have been sort of woken up, who were sleepwalking past this.
00:19:35.700Let me read the headline of a recent essay you wrote.
00:19:39.940Courts and governments caused BC's property crisis.
00:21:03.000But you see, this, this is a consequence of bad ideas, bad ideas that have been with us for a while.
00:21:09.600They're, they're coming home to roost now and people are surprised because they weren't at the surface before.
00:21:15.060But they really shouldn't have been surprised if they've been paying attention.
00:21:18.900One of those bad ideas is that the law should be different for people of different, different races and backgrounds and cultures and lineage.
00:21:28.420And the second bad idea, and there are lots of them, but the second bad idea is that, that governments and courts have the power to decide what's proper with respect to your property.
00:21:38.700Your property in Canada has never been secure.
00:21:41.160It's more, it's more, more insecure now than it's ever been, but, but our property have always, has always been held subject to the crown.
00:21:50.080The crown, our governments have always had the power to expropriate property and to compensate you.
00:21:56.720Well, our, our statutes say they must compensate you, but, but they were, they have always been able to legislate your property away if they have chosen to do so.
00:22:05.600They've just mostly chosen not to do so, but we are now in an era where the, the, the idea that Aboriginal groups have essentially the right to claim any territory that, that they've ever occupied or use,
00:22:22.400or can show through oral evidence that they have a claim to, and that is undermining the security of property, especially in BC, because BC is largely unseeded, so, so to speak, without, without, without treaties, but is, but is not the only area by any means.
00:22:39.120There are lots of land claims around in, in Ontario and New Brunswick and, in Quebec and, and so on.
00:22:45.280So people should not be, um, satisfied by the claim that this is a BC problem.
00:22:53.560It's, it's not, but it's especially acute in BC.
00:22:56.280And as you alluded to this, this decision, the Coachan decision, uh, relating to Richmond has declared Aboriginal title to be senior and prior to fee simple interest.
00:23:06.660Now, the New Brunswick court of appeal recently in, in, with respect to a New Brunswick land claim, basically came out and said, well, not quite so fast.
00:23:18.280Aboriginal title is not able to, to, to supplant fee simple interest, but a claim for compensation can be made against the crown, which is better, but it's still not a full answer.
00:23:29.780Because any claim against the crown for a huge swath of land, of course, is going to be paid for by, by tax dollars, meaning the, the residents will pay one way or the other.
00:23:39.200So the, the, the, the, the, the foundational problem is this idea that if you have a certain kind of descent, then you are a different cat legal category than everybody else.
00:23:50.780And, and, and that is the idea that in this country we have to do away with.
00:23:56.000You know, um, I go to the UK quite a bit cause I'm riveted by their debates over immigration.
00:24:01.600And, um, one of the things that the establishment always says is we can't stop the boats because, oh, because why?
00:24:10.740Because of the European convention on human rights, even though the UK left the European union in a Brexit vote a dozen years ago, 10 years ago, um, they still stayed in this legal, you know, superficial, like infrastructure, superstructure riveted on top of, you've got centuries of British law, which many would say is the finest source of liberty of any legal system.
00:24:52.660It's a foreign law and we have to abide by it because we're part of the convention.
00:24:56.240Well, get out of it is the short answer.
00:24:58.880I think there's something similar here in Canada, but we never were in it as officially as like everyone in the UK knows they were in the European union.
00:25:07.520In Canada, we have something called UNDRIP, which immediately puts everyone to sleep because what's that?
00:25:14.080It sounds like some, a leaky faucet or something.
00:25:17.040The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
00:25:23.040And even that, it's so foggy and like, you know, I'm worried people are turning off our show right now because they're so bored by it.
00:27:17.760It's an aspirational document put together largely by countries that don't have, quote, Aboriginal peoples in the first place.
00:27:25.840But what happened after that is important.
00:27:29.700So, at the time that UNDRIP appeared, the Stephen Harper government voted no, along with the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and so on.
00:27:38.900And that position was reversed when the Trudeau Liberals came into power.
00:27:45.500But that still wouldn't have changed anything except for the fact that, in 2019, the B.C. legislature passed a statute saying that the B.C. government was responsible for making sure that B.C. laws were consistent with the declaration.
00:28:01.120And so, one of the things that the declaration says is, essentially, that Aboriginal peoples have the right to the territory that they ever occupied or used.
00:28:12.020And so, what's happened since then is that the B.C. government, the N.D.P. government, has taken that as a literal mandate to go ahead and make agreements with various groups for various territories, either acknowledging Aboriginal title or handing over management rights.
00:28:28.220And also, recently, what has happened is the B.C. Court of Appeal has said, actually, yes, that's what it means.
00:28:33.580This means, this means, this statute, DRIPA, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, the B.C. statute, the effect of that statute is to incorporate UNDRIP into British Columbian law.
00:28:47.340And it means that the government has an obligation to do these things.
00:28:50.080So, this is, this is a self-made problem.
00:29:07.980And it is a function of the fact that our leaders have the power to make decisions, make policy decisions in the general welfare to do things that they shouldn't have the power to do.
00:29:19.680So, a lot of people, the angle that they're taking in all these problems is the wrong people are in power.
00:29:45.940But if you'd simply substitute some people for other people, you're going to get the same kinds of problems because the problem is the power, right?
00:29:53.520People want to have policy discussions about whether this policy is right or wrong.
00:30:17.620And a simple act of the B.C. legislature, it sounds like it's almost a constitutional amendment if it impacts every other law in such a massive way.
00:30:26.300I think of the United States where, yes, the executive can sign a treaty with anyone in the world, but it has to be ratified in the U.S. Senate, if I understand their law correctly.
00:31:10.660But what has happened in the meantime is that the B.C., the NDP B.C. government has been making these agreements with various Aboriginal groups, like, for example, over Haida Gwai.
00:31:21.980They made an agreement with the Haida Council to acknowledge Aboriginal title over Haida Gwai in spite of the fact that a whole lot of private individuals own fee-simple property on Haida Gwai.
00:31:34.620You could – if you get a new government in power, you could change the agreement.
00:31:38.380You could – well, you could certainly legislate a change to the agreement.
00:31:42.000You could legislate change or repeal of DRIPA.
00:31:45.160But what happened is that the Haida Council and the B.C. government and the federal government went together to the B.C. Supreme Court to ask for a consent order, a consent declaration, saying that the Aboriginal title as acknowledged by the Haida Gwai agreement was now a Section 35 protected constitutional right.
00:32:11.120And the court granted the request so that no future government can now go back and fix it.
00:32:19.020So what is happening intermentally is constitutional change in an indirect way.
00:32:23.540It's crazy, and it shows how bad ideas, when repeated, can become the Overton window, and they just – it's almost like they're spoken into reality.
00:32:36.360I'm in Toronto, and everywhere I go, I hear land acknowledgments in places, by the way, where if you read any treaty – and I've read several of the treaties with Indians a century and a half ago or so – they use language like surrender.
00:32:56.160I mean, these treaties could not be clearer what they are.
00:32:59.540It's like when the Japanese surrendered to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1945.
00:33:10.460I mean, maybe they had some – they mentioned, you know, an Indian reserve, and there were certain things that they would be granted.
00:33:16.300But there was – it was extinguishing the title.
00:33:19.900At least that's my read of these documents.
00:33:22.060But every single public assembly at a school, every sports event, every government function starts with a land acknowledgment, even in place – it's – and people have started to treat that as like some holy sacrament.
00:33:40.740I mean, we used to say the Lord's Prayer, opening an event, or the anthem.
00:33:47.100And in Toronto now, on Remembrance Day, not only did they have a land acknowledgment, but then they had an acknowledgment about black slavery.
00:33:57.960I, you know, I did some research on this the other day.
00:34:02.180When slavery was abolished, the sale of slaves, the slave trade, there was a grand total of 16 – one, six – 16 black people in Toronto, according to the census.
00:34:14.240But it was – this was not – this was not a thing.
00:34:16.940But if you repeat it often enough, if you say it often enough, you speak it into existence because the – you know, a high school student today is a law school student tomorrow, is a judge the next day.
00:34:29.160And I think we are speaking our way into an insanity.
00:34:42.940But there is something strange going on that way.
00:34:46.520And it is, of course, these land acknowledgments are the height of hypocrisy.
00:34:52.340You know, it's when the people – I'm sure some of the people in B.C. who are now concerned about their property interests were the ones declaring these land acknowledgments and then turning around and thinking, oh, my goodness, you're taking my fee simple title away.
00:35:24.760And people are not able to think through the implications of what it is that they think and believe.
00:35:30.900You know, it reminds me of global warming ideology.
00:35:33.980I mean, if you really do say and bend the knee to carbon dioxide is evil and bad, you know, you say that long enough.
00:35:41.880And when oil companies started saying it to greenwash themselves, thinking, oh, I'll just, you know, spend 1% of our revenues on some distractions to appease the left.
00:35:53.440You haven't – you know, it's like that line in Hamlet.
00:35:58.380But, you know, the appetite is grown by the eating.
00:40:40.700You have to deal with the facts that cause it.
00:40:42.580And by the way, it would be weird to have a person who never felt hate in their heart.
00:40:47.680There's certain things that you see in life that if you don't feel hate, what's wrong with you?
00:40:52.640If you don't feel sorrow, what's wrong with you?
00:40:54.420If you don't feel love, what's wrong with you?
00:40:56.860I mean, to have this range of human emotions.
00:40:59.800In a civilized democracy, we don't want people to act out on hate in a violent way.
00:41:04.560But you can transmogrify that hate into something positive.
00:41:07.840Don't tell me that people who build enormous positive movements aren't motivated occasionally by the hate for the lack of what they're calling for.
00:41:17.160Don't tell me that Martin Luther King didn't hate, you know, racial discrimination.
00:41:27.720I know a bit about C9, and we've talked to our people about it.
00:41:31.240Touch on C9, but help me with C8 because I haven't read it yet.
00:41:34.880Well, C8 is a very different kind of bill.
00:41:36.580It basically gives the power to the minister to require Internet service providers to stop providing you with service.
00:41:44.160And even if you haven't committed a criminal offense or the like.
00:41:47.840So it's a bureaucratic kind of bill that gives too much power to the administrative state to do whatever it thinks is right without justification.
00:41:55.580And an order can be issued under that statute whose existence and details can be hidden from you.
00:42:06.140So you could theoretically lose your Internet order by the government without knowing what the heck happened.
00:42:12.360All right, so it is, you know, very different bill from C9, which is the hate bill.
00:42:20.560And the C9 is very explicit in terms of the criminal code offenses it's creating and so on.
00:42:25.640Now, C8 is, if you like, more insidious because it's giving power that can be exercised without explanation, without transparency.
00:42:33.280And if anything, maybe that one is the one that will end up proving to be a more serious violation or potential violation of civil liberties.
00:42:42.320But C9, as you have been alluding to, is a bill that is essentially, and this is not the first step down this road, but is essentially criminalizing the emotion and emotion of hate.
00:42:56.400It's extinguishing between criminal offenses that are equally violent and saying one is worse than the other because the first one was done with hate and the other one was done with indifference or the like or with greed or whatever the case may be.
00:43:18.040Right. So it is getting away from the idea that a criminal offense should consist of an act, the actus reas, and intent, the mens rea.
00:43:26.480This is going further and saying we're going to punish an emotion, an emotion.
00:43:31.080If you're in a free country, you're allowed to feel whatever you feel.
00:43:35.360And if you have free speech, you're allowed to express what you feel.
00:43:39.080That doesn't mean you're allowed to use violence.
00:45:32.640And who do you think the law is going to be used against?
00:45:34.960As far as I know, there hasn't been a single hate crime prosecution of any of these Hamas activists.
00:45:40.560After two years of the most outrageous – at Bathurst and Shepard, they literally built some sort of reenactment of the last moments of the terrorist leader, Yaya Sinmar.
00:45:51.600I was arrested when I went to take a picture of it.
00:45:55.300The people who made that were not arrested.
00:47:31.040And you get into a situation that has been called, and I like the term, it's called anarcho-tyranny.
00:47:37.720Anarcho-tyranny, what they mean is, they mean the tyranny of the small rule imposed against law-abiding people,
00:47:44.800you know, where the authorities have lots of tools at their disposal to decide on a particular moment
00:47:48.960whether they're going to come, you know, and attack or prosecute, punish someone for a small, you know, minor violation of some minor rule.
00:48:02.340The anarchy part is, in the meantime, violent crimes and political corruption and foreign interference all go untouched
00:48:10.880because the powers that be don't want to touch it.
00:48:12.640Anarcho-tyranny, anarchy alongside tyranny, the tyranny of the petty bureaucrat alongside the anarchy of the non-policing of serious matters.
00:48:24.660You know, I'm thinking, you made me think of China's richest man and Russia's richest man.
00:48:31.660Russia's richest man, I don't think he has that title anymore, was named Mikhail Khorakovsky.
00:48:36.000And he was very Western-oriented, and he was in charge of Yukos, which was a huge oil and gas company.
00:48:45.940And then one day, his private jet landed in Siberia, was stormed by Russian special forces, and he was taken to jail on some,
00:48:52.520I mean, listen, I'm sure he had some dodgy dealings, you can't succeed in Russia without it,
00:48:58.120but it was, like you say, a minute, and he was thrown straight in jail for years.
00:49:04.160And they basically nationalized Yukos and took all his money because he was getting a little too liberal in his thinking.
00:49:10.780Same thing with Jack Ma, the richest man in China, sort of a pro-Western face to China, arrested, disappeared, literally disappeared from the world.