Free and safe discourse about key political issues, like immigration, faces serious challenges today, not just in America, but in Canada as well.
Recently, at a sold-out event outside Toronto hosted by U.S. commentator Dave Rubin and leader of the anti-globalist People’s Party of Canada (PPC), Maxime Bernier, dozens of “anti-fascist” protestors (yes, they’re big in Canada too) tried to shut down proceedings by intimidating and shoving attendees and subjecting them to screaming chants of “Nazi scum, off our streets!” They call the PPC names like “Nazi” because it’s the only party in Canada concerned about the effects of multiculturalism and Canada’s record-high immigration levels.
In a now-viral video filmed outside the venue, mask-wearing thugs can be seen shouting in the face of an old lady with a walker and blocking her pathway to the entrance doors.
Despite the video gaining national news coverage in Canada (including big coverage in the United States), no elected politician outside the PPC has condemned the attacks. Instead, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has condemned threats made against the old lady’s harasser; a wealthy, young immigrant from Syria named Alaa Alsoufi whose family temporarily closed their restaurant in downtown Toronto, apparently in response to the threats after his name was revealed. Shockingly, both the leader of the conservative opposition party and establishment conservatives in the media have followed suit. A nation certainly is in a rotten state when its elite go out of their way to take the side of a grandma-bashing, Stalinist thug.
One irony apparently lost on the antifa organizers was that the topic for the PPC event was slated to be the state of free speech in Canada. An additional lost irony was how eerily close their “anti-Nazi” chant resembles “Clear the streets for the brown battalions/Clear the streets for the storm division” of Horst Weissel Lied, the official anthem of the actual Nazis from World War II. This would include the main instigator of the protest, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN); a gestapo-like group that not only partners with and is partly funded by the disgraced U.S. outfit, the Southern Poverty Law Center—which numerous insiders have stated operates solely to scare and defraud money from gullible donors—but which is being sued for fraudulent activities in Ontario court.
Unlike the SPLC, however, their Canadian partners apparently won’t condemn the kinds of violent tactics so routine at antifa “protests”—tactics which have earned them the designation of a “domestic terror group” both here in Canada and by the Department of Homeland Security under former President Obama. Not only that, CAHN Executive Directive Evan Balgord and Chairman Bernie Farber have gone so far as publicly to defend the group’s mask-wearing and violent activity.
Most unfortunately in Canada today, compared to these Stalinist street thugs and professional “hate-monitors,” our established political parties are little different. The PPC is brand new, having formed only last year as an alternative to, as our leader describes them, the “intellectually and morally corrupt” Conservative Party of Canada. The far-Left New Democrats have called for efforts to try and stop the PPC from participating in official party leader election debates, while this past Spring, Justin Trudeau’s center-Left Liberal Party signed the “Digital Charter” against “hate speech,” and moved to bring back a notorious law barring online speech that exposed groups to mere contempt. All the while the establishment Conservative Party have remained silent.
Simply put, in Canada today, free speech and the number of elites who support it, is shrinking fast and Americans must ensure the same doesn’t happen in their home country. As Rebel News-founder and Canadian Ezra Levant once said, “What happens in Canada today often happens in the United States tomorrow. We’re like a political laboratory for bad experiments.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, a liberal member of the court, once warned that whatever is added to the field of prohibited speech is necessarily taken from the field of free debate. The PPC has written its free speech platform around this very message. As it proudly states, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, when fully protected, “advance the intellectual life of a nation, foster greater ideological diversity and societal understanding, and nurture other freedoms necessary for a successful democracy.” In an open society where free inquiry reigns, anti-intellectual extremism can never take hold. Thankfully, like you Americans, this is what the vast majority of Canadians want and believe in.