Western Standard - May 15, 2022


MPs discuss criminalizing protests after NDP leader heckled...

Mentioned
J.B. Singh Jim Crow
Triggered： The long-gun registry is back and the Liberal lies have begun CORY'S RANT - My occupy experience

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

189.32

Word count

571

Sentence count

35


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how important it is to protect the right of free speech, expression, and peaceful protest. I also talk about the dangers of policing the right to protest and how it can erode our basic human rights.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So going down the road, though, do we really want, I mean, look what we did to the right of protest this year already last winter. And these lefties who are calling for more controls on it don't seem to understand. This is going to turn against you. You know, when you infringe upon the rights of others, eventually that gets turned on you.
00:00:18.720 You won't always have a liberal NDP coalition in Ottawa. It's going to feel like it's there forever. Oh, I assure you that. But it won't be. And you start putting in changes like this. Another government down the road is going to use that to turn it against you. And the right of protest, assembly, expression, speech, these are essential base rights. And we can't let them be eroded just because some people have been unfortunately abusive with it.
00:00:45.560 I don't think Singh and some of his supporters really understand what they're asking for. You know, look at how badly I mean, look at how many good things came about from free expression and protests. And some of those protests got out of control. I mean, you know, the civil rights movement in the United States, that was from the outside, you know, fighting to end the racial segregation and then to allow, you know, schools to have mixed children within them, things like that.
00:01:11.940 Those protests often broke local laws of that time. Those protests got out of control. Sometimes those protests got a bit violent. Sometimes there were small riots.
00:01:21.580 But it led to a good end. And there was no other way for people to express themselves at that time. They couldn't just go to the ballot box and reverse those Jim Crow laws.
00:01:32.140 So we can't underestimate how important it is, even if you don't like the message of some of the protesters. Sometimes the protesters are kooky. Sometimes they are out of control. Sometimes they're going too far.
00:01:43.600 You have to accept that because it's just too risky to start cracking down and start to try and cherry pick which are legitimate protests, which aren't, and start infringing on those rights that are so very important.
00:01:57.220 So, I mean, if I do have any message to put out to people as well, I mean, it's not just with these progressives foolishly calling for more infringement on the individual's rights of expression and protest, but also I would for the people who think that going out and going haywire and swearing at and surrounding politicians' cars as they did with Singh and doing that, you're not doing anybody any favors either, guys.
00:02:20.560 I mean, I'm no friend of J.B. Singh or his ideology, but that sort of approach and demonstration is not earning you any respect or support from common Canadians where we want to actually make some change.
00:02:34.680 And as well, it is empowering the reactions of politicians like this when they're talking about imposing more laws to try and crack down on future protests.
00:02:43.520 So, you know, cut it out, guys.
00:02:45.320 You can be expressive and you can be excited and you can be a little rude, you can be a little tasteless, but when you push it too far, you give them what they feel to be the justification to infringe further on your rights, and it's not going to be a good outcome for any of us.