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COMMENTARY
October 18, 2008
Time to say goodbye
The assault on free speech and press in Canada continues on many bewildering fronts. While our "human rights" kangaroo courts have suffered recent setbacks, from having overreached in their attempts to prosecute mainstream conservative journalists, their retreat is an illusion. In Ontario and other provinces, the system of "human rights" star chambers is being quickly expanded, along with the Kafkaesque investigative machinery that lies behind them. They continue their daily, quasi-legal work of undermining a free society, by suppressing "politically incorrect" thought, speech, and behaviour -- under the radar of the mainstream media."Human rights" tribunals have been, recently, the preferred means of the radical left to advance activist agendas by extra-democratic means. It is a way for them to get around the limitations of legitimate courts, in which their chosen victims still enjoy the ancient protections of the common law -- in which both laws and precedents are fixed and researchable, due process is honoured, the truth is a defence, and the very idea of "human rights" has not been inverted by Orwellian Newspeak. But the method of using regulatory commissions to silence opposition to an activist agenda is hardly restricted to "human rights." The latest power grab is through the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the antiquated regulatory authority for broadcasting and telephony. It was established in its present form, with a social-engineering mandate to promote "Canadian unity," by the Trudeau government in 1976. Such decisions as its recent one to deny broadcast rights to two Ottawa-area Christian radio stations, 11 days after approving a new "Canadian-content" pornographic TV channel in Alberta, are typical of the commissioners' judgment. This week, the CRTC announced its intention to break the promise made by its then-chairperson, Françoise Bertrand, in 1999: "Our message is clear. We are not regulating any portion of the Internet." In a "notice of consultation and hearing" on Wednesday, the commission suddenly gave Dec. 5 as its deadline for submissions about expanding the CRTC's jurisdiction into "new media." That this announcement was made by the CRTC, rather than by Parliament, is an indication of the degree to which the CRTC is a law unto itself. In the time-honoured, mealy-mouthed way, the CRTC will soon be explaining that its intentions are innocent, that it is merely trying to keep up with the convergence of broadcast and Internet technologies. Only a naive fool will believe that. The regulator has created a strict broadcasting environment in which Christian and all other views that do not conform to political correctness are effectively kept under siege. The left hungers for the ability to create a similar tightly regulated environment on the Internet, to bring the free reporting and opinions of bloggers and other citizen-journalists under its ideological jackboot. The citizens' response to this imposture should be short and sharp: "We were not born yesterday. We know your game, we know where you are going with it. Do not try to insult our intelligence. This is Canada, this is a free country, and to keep it free we must stand on guard against commissars like thee. Take your filthy stinking hands off the Internet." But while I recommend this as a defensive half-measure, a much bolder approach is required over the longer term. No one wins playing only on defence. The CRTC already has powers of regulation over broadcasting content that are offensive to a free people; powers that go far beyond the simple and once-necessary task of apportioning finite broadcasting bandwidth. Advances in technology have made it less and less necessary to impose rationing on the airwaves. We have got beyond the "rabbit ears" age. Digital technology for cable and satellite have moved far beyond this, and the Internet itself becomes capable of delivering a range of material unimagined only a generation ago. Nor is telephony what it was in past generations. The CRTC is a fossil relic from an antediluvian era. By all means keep its archives in a museum, so that our children's children may some day see how charmingly primitive our technology once was -- in the "CReTaCeous" period of our national life, when such big blundering bureaucratic behemoths as this superannuated regulator roamed the electronic plains. But it is time now for the CRTC to become extinct. We must demand this media censor be closed -- not downsized, but permanently erased from our public life. If any remaining bandwidth tasks can be identified, they should be transferred to the secretarial pool in some corner of the Department of Canadian Heritage. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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