Or is that, the weasel lawyers? It’s really synonymous, isn’t it? Despite much bobbing, ducking, weaving and trying to point out that America’s free speech rights are not absolute, the Canadian lawyer never quite gets around to directly answering my point:
Finally, if Mr. Day is to characterize my mention that Canada does, in fact, have constitutional protection for freedom of expression as “pulling a fast one,” I am wondering how he anticipates readers might view his erroneous suggestion that Canada does not?
I shall repeat my post for the benefit of Mr. Wise and anyone else incapable of understanding how the nebulous terms of the limits on Canadian free speech “rights” negate them entirely:
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
The reason Mr. Wise still refuses to post this part of the text despite having posted the following section from it is because doing so would lead to the inevitable demonstration that the “reasonable limits” currently being applied to Mr. Steyn’s speech have been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada. Moreover, Mr. Wise conflates civil and criminal law in his attempt to demonstrate that American free speech rights little different than Canada’s so-called “rights” while skipping over the fact that the truth is an absolute defense in the case of perjury, slander, libel and so forth while it is manifestly not in the case before the various Canadian human rights tribunals. As for national security and other exceptions, they are overt VIOLATIONS of unalienable American rights by the U.S. federal government, they are not proof that the rights never existed in the first place.
So what, precisely, are those “reasonable limits”? And are the tribunals legally empowered to define them in the absence of any specific legal definitions? Inquiring Americans would like to know.