Sad, but true.
This message has replaced Canada oldest right-leaning online political discussion forum:
As of today, January 23, 2014, and after 13 years online, Free Dominion is closing its doors to the public. We have been successfully censored.
Today, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith issued an order in the Richard Warman vs Mark and Connie Fournier and John Does defamation case heard September, 2013. In addition to ordering that we must pay Warman $127,000, Justice Smith issued an injunction against us ordering we that never publish, or allow to be published, anything negative about Richard Warman. This means we are barred for life from ever operating a public forum or a blog (even about cookie recipes) where the public can comment. If we do so, any one of Warman’s handful of supporters could, and probably would, use a common proxy server to avoid being traced, plant a negative comment about Warman on our site, and we would both be charged with contempt of court. If that happened –unlike in the Ottawa courtroom where we were blocked at every turn from presenting a defense– we actually would have no defense. We would both go to jail. This life sentence was imposed for our terrible crimes of voicing our honestly held beliefs and allowing others to do the same. Defamation law, in its current state, is entirely inadequate and counterproductive when applied to the internet. Now it is being used as a tool of censorship. Effectively!
We are assessing our options.
In faith,
Mark and Connie Fournier“If it takes force to impose your ideas on your fellow man, there is something wrong with your ideas. If you are willing to use force to impose your ideas on your fellow man, there is something wrong with you.” – Mark Fournier
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
January 26, 2014 at 00:15
The only silver lining that is visible in this cloud is that if the Greeks were right, and I believe they were, the hybris currently being displayed by progressives and their allies in positions of power is indicative of an imminent fall into the clutches of Nemesis.
January 26, 2014 at 01:52
Let’s hope you are right!!!
And, let’s hope that that fall does not take our hard-won human rights with it, as a fall into some forms of anarchy/dictatorship would.
January 26, 2014 at 04:56
If a man’s reach not exceed his grasp, then what’s a hell for?
A rough beast was spotted, slouching towards the blogosphere. The centre-right will not hold. It was the worst of times, it was the time of worsts. Four score and seven months ago, I had a dream, that all blogs were created equal. Ask not what your government can do to you, ask what you can do to your government.
Thngs will continue on, behind closed doors. If anyone wants to join in, contact us and give us a reason to trust. We welcome being duped by new people, most of the old dupers have become super dupers and moved on to bigger outrages. We have nothing to cheer but cheer itself, a chicken in every driveway, a pot plant in every car. We hold these goofs to be self-evident, that all laws were created useless. One small step on man, one giant pee on womankind. Even if the blogosphere should last for a thousand months, people will say, this was their biggest fine.
A lawyer, a politician and a human rights activist walked into a bar. Everyone else left.
Don’t try this at home, professional blogger on a controlled internet.
January 26, 2014 at 05:02
The fact of the matter is, we are going to continue on, minus a few government spies and random citizen drop-ins, and anyone who wanted to join the forum could probably make a case with the administration and perhaps get past the gatekeeper. A sad state of affairs to be sure, but not total defeat, and with some thought being given to overcoming this rather shabby new reality. If this is a “progressive” goal, to force everyone to agree with one point of view, then I think perhaps the model being followed is more obviously communist than democratic socialism (which would be bad enough). I don’t recall Canadians voting for communism in large numbers, at least not openly advertised communism. But also, we have to wonder whether free speech would be of much use to a country that has made so many questionable choices after what were essentially open discussions and debates. Maybe Canada already used up its nine lives. Or was that more like three million?
January 26, 2014 at 16:26
Communism is an economic system that disallows private ownership of property. Losing a tort case in a courtroom comes from English Common Law.
Your problem is… going on and on about commies and satan makes you sound a little crazy to the average people It ain’t helping you Sir.
January 26, 2014 at 18:00
Most forms of communism/socialism stem from Marx-Leninism.
Political Correctness is an arm of the odious and most noxious doctrine of Cultural Marxism, which this blog has devoted much time to.
While one does not arise from the other, they have common roots and seek different means to achieving the same ends.
Currently, Political Correctness is the greatest threat to our freedom of speech…and had the jurors not been indoctrinated in Political Correctness, their verdict would not have gone against freedom of speech.
January 26, 2014 at 19:44
The trial was not about political correctness. These exact kinds of trials have been happening in this country and the UK (where get our laws and precedents from) going back hundreds of years.
This was nothing new. Usually it’s all settled out of court.
January 27, 2014 at 04:05
Voice of Reason (sic):
How disingenuous can you get?
There are few things quite as repulsive as watching cultural Marxist apparatchiks gloat over their own subversion the Classical Liberal / Christian heritage of Canada and other Western countries.
The verdict in Warman vs. the Fourniers et al. was a travesty of justice (!) perpetrated by a jury of timid, group-thinking jurors, who are the products of the state-controlled indoctrination in collectivism which we ironically call schooling and media in this country, and who were lead by the nose by a progressive-activist judge to defile the noble tradition of English Common Law by wrongly using it as a bludgeon to punish politically incorrect speech.
The evil of the corruption and falsification of law, religion, education and public opinion is so enormous that the minds of ordinary people are unable to grasp it.
— George Bernard Shaw
January 27, 2014 at 10:12
Shaw is long dead play write, who cares what he thought.
Here is a clue, do not defame anybody in a published manner, do not slander people, do not libel people. .. and most importantly do not foment hatred against an identifiable group. Or you may pay for it. If you do pay for it don’t complain when you lose.
I learned all about tort law in the few law courses I took in University. This is nothing new. You can pretend they are being persecuted if you like. But it is not true. There is case law on this stuff going back 100’s of years.
Also, do not pick a legal battle with a lawyer. <<<<< the best advice I can give.
January 26, 2014 at 12:20
xanthippa. I enjoyed having lunch with you, one fine day in Ottawa, the day of No Justice for Connie and Mark. Connie discourages me from posting my feelings on the internet in regards to what I think of Judge Smith and his six jurors.
I respect her wishes- after all, Father’s Day is not that far away. lol
I want to thank you for your stand and speaking up and posting for free speech in Canada.
Allow me to be politically incorrect, God Bless you.
January 26, 2014 at 16:20
Since when is it politically incorrect to say that? I hear it all the time.
January 26, 2014 at 21:14
If you said the holocaust never happened I would not engage you. The facts speak for themselves.
You are suggesting Christians are not being discriminated against in the USA and Canada. The facts speak for themselves.
I have no desire to debate the point. I have far more days behind me than I have ahead of me. I must now chose very carefully the hills that I am prepared to die for.
May reason continue to illuminate your heart, your mind and your soul.
January 27, 2014 at 00:24
Too true.
Thank you.
January 27, 2014 at 07:43
The fact you can deduct the money you donate to your church on your tax return proves that Christians are not subject to descrimantion. The tax code supports your religion.
January 27, 2014 at 07:51
Almost all our major holidays are Christian based.
I can not name one openly atheist politician in a position of great power.
Religious buildings pay very little property taxes.
Indeed our system is rigged to give religion favourable treatment.
So to me, I am baffled as to why you think your religion is being picked on.
January 27, 2014 at 04:14
Voice of Reason (sic):
Elephant? What elephant? I don’t see no elephant!
All throughout this past Christmas season, people (on campus, in offices, in stores, etc) would wish me a perfunctory “happy holidays.”
I made it a point to reply, “no, you mean Merry Christmas!”
And they always grinned broadly and said “YES! That’s EXACTLY what I meant!”
Then they would lean closer and, glancing nervously from side to side, they would quietly add, “but we get in trouble if we say that…”
So clearly, Voice of Reason (sic), there is no concerted effort by the apparatchiks of political correctness to make all references to our Christian cultural heritage taboo in Canada.
Christmas has not been renamed “winter holiday.”
Easter has not been renamed “spring holiday.”
Prayer has not been banished from schools.
People are not censoring their own speech in fear of losing their jobs.
It’s all just a paranoid conspiracy theory.
Nothing to see here… move along.
January 26, 2014 at 23:12
Cultural civil war is entertaining for spectators until the tanks veer off the streets and onto the sidewalks. And when they have finished running us over, they won’t just park them and resume their former lives. They will come for you next. Deny communism all you want, this is Marxist-Leninist strategy and it helps them when people are ignorant and lacking in resolve. After all, why bother fighting a civil war if you can just get people to surrender to you before a shot is fired?
Canadians gave their country away to a revolutionary clique and said they enjoyed it because they got to be called the world’s greatest people. So what? That is all make believe. People in other countries don’t know your illusions. They didn’t even ask a Canadian to speak at Mandela’s funeral. You have only been fooling yourselves. You gave your freedom away and didn’t get even a worthless gift, just a smile and a thumb’s up from the entitled classes who played you like useful idiots. I don’t care about my popularity one bit. You lost your country, I never had one to lose.
January 27, 2014 at 00:32
I’d like to highlight the difference between Marx-Leninism (which has never had more than lip-service paid to it, even as it murdered more people than Hitler) and Cultural Marxism, which is a slightly different animal…
Cultural Marxism originated in Frankfurt when a group of very, very intelligent people decided to cross Marxism with Freudian theories and created that wholly noxious and destructive doctrine called Cultural Marxism, and the Political Correctness which is one of its insidious tentacles!
I invite you to red more about it here.
January 27, 2014 at 02:46
this is truly awful.
does free dominion have any options to work around this?
January 27, 2014 at 10:20
Yes, they had the option 7 years ago to apologize, delete posts and settle for a puny amount. At every single fork in the road, they chose the wrong path.
Instead, they continued to mock that lawyer, published unflattering pictures, continued to allow posts calling him names and questioning his motives and lifestyle. Huge mistake. Huge. It was completely childish.
This is why their “friends” in the media and on Parliament Hill have mostly abandoned them.
By the time this is over, they will be a 1/2 million in the hole. Throwing away all that money and countless hours. I am sure it has consumed their lives.
January 27, 2014 at 18:34
Actually, most of their friends have not spoken up for them because they, too, have been slapped with a lifetime gag order.
January 27, 2014 at 19:29
The option you refer to “Voice of Reason” is called submission to bullying. It is a dishonourable option.
January 27, 2014 at 20:13
Quite agreed!
Especially when you consider that it is a member of the Military silencing people who honestly believe he has misused his position of power to silence his political rivals…
January 28, 2014 at 12:13
Gerry, apparently the “honourable” option is very expensive. Entering into a courtroom battle with a professional lawyer is a mistake. I said this before, its like picking a fist fight with Mike Tyson.
Xanthippa, most of their supporters only stopped mocking and insulting that lawyer when they lost the case. Up until then they had tons of comments and posted unflattering pictures. They even had a mocking banner ad that was on FD for a few years.
The whole episode was sad and they still have not learned to put up the white flag of surrender. You even saw it coming, based on your courtroom reports.
January 28, 2014 at 14:42
My courtroom reports reflected the sad reality that rich people who can afford lawyers of the caliber of Mr. Katz will get a different level of justice than the rest of us mortals….and when my – and yours – freedom of speech hinges on whom someone else can afford to engage as a lawyer, that is a sad situation indeed.
January 28, 2014 at 15:23
Xanthippa, completely agree that the wealthy and powerful CAN have an easier time in a court room.
So knowing this, why did the Forniers walk into a courtroom?
As my lawyer once told me … “if you have to go in front of a Judge, you have already lost”. He was pointing out to me that it is important to settle out of court fast to cut loses.
January 28, 2014 at 16:00
I do not know the Fournier’s motives nor can I presume to speak for them.
However, were I to be in their position, I would not back down.
Why?
Because freedom of speech is absolutely essential. And, the freedom to criticize our government must not be impeded.
People who work for the government are acting as Agents of the State, and therefore we, the citizens, must be completely free to criticize their behaviour. It was precisely in his professional conduct as Agent of the State that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s conduct began to be questioned and criticized by the Fourniers.
Once we loose the ability to criticize our government and its Agents, we have lost all pretensions to a free, democratic society.
January 28, 2014 at 16:30
We already covered this ground. but… Freedom of Speech is not absolute. There are plenty of limitations. Even in the USA (where they have a much greater free speech) they still have tons of limitations on speech.
January 28, 2014 at 16:36
Certainly, freedom of speech is not absolute.
But, freedom of political speech is.
Especially the right for the citizens to criticize their government and its Agents.
January 29, 2014 at 14:40
So what constitutes restricting free speech?
Mocking someone – really?
publishing unflattering pictures – wouldn’t 99% of newspapers be in jail
calling someone names – wouldn’t 99% of 5th graders be in jail?
question motives – why the hell will that be illegal?
January 29, 2014 at 14:51
Don’t be giving them ideas about locking us up from grade 5 on!!!
January 29, 2014 at 15:33
Juggernaut, defamation/slander/libel is about protecting the reputation of professional people.
Examples. If you publish something about a Judge being a liar and a thief, it could hinder his/her ability to be a Judge because of the damage to their reputation as a fair and balanced person who upholds the law of the land. If you call a real estate agent a liar and a thief, that could hurt their reputation and cost them clients.
Understand now?
January 29, 2014 at 15:47
There is a difference between defamation and name-calling.
There is a difference between criticizing a private person, a public figure or an Agent of the State.
These differences must be taken into consideration – and they were not here.
And yes, if you run for a political office, you make yourself a public figure and are no longer protected from libel in a way a private figure would be.
February 9, 2014 at 18:03
When did $50,000 become a ‘puny amount’ to claim for nasty comments posted to an online discussion forum open to every ‘anonymous’ Tom, Dick and Harry ?
What that particular ‘cyber-defamation’ suit against FreeDominion hosts and members has done is to bring to public attention that ‘Officers of the Court’ have the extraordinary online privilege of swinging both ways – outrageous and outraged.
That misconception is what’s actually at stake with this ongoing and expensive courtroom drama.
February 9, 2014 at 20:58
Maikeru,
What I find most distressing about this whole situation is that this has happened in the past, exactly along these very lines…
It was the ‘progressives’ who fought to limit free speech, only to have the very laws they championed turned against them when the democratically elected regime set its sights on them…and by using thee laws to shut them up, the regime effectively silenced any position as well as any media which might have raised awareness of the regime’s atrocities among the populace.
Sad, so sad…
January 27, 2014 at 07:11
Xanithippa and peterodonnell:
You are both right.
The Marxist-Leninists attack us politico-economically while the cultural Marxists attack us psycho-socially. They are two prongs of a single attack, and there is a great deal of cross pollination between them.
Their goal is to create a global totalitarian plutocracy in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a small ruling class who claim to speak for the collective, while the people are oppressed by means of a thinly-veiled police state, augmented by ubiquitous surveillance and extrajudicial corporate governance, jointly enforcing compliance with a pseudo-religious dogma of intersubjective group-think, secular edenist self-sacrifice and abject submission to the collective.
The agenda is very real, and not at all secret. But don’t take my word for it. Let them speak for themselves:
The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We don’t even let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?
— Josef Stalin
We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.
— Willi Münzenberg
The task before UNESCO … is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purposes. Taking the techniques of persuasion … as Lenin envisaged, to overcome the resistance of millions.
— Julian Huxley
Plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education.
— Edward Roth
No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. … Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
— Simone de Beauvoir
The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women.
— Nancy Lehmann and Helen Sullinger
Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy. … our efforts to organize against white, Christian America … articulate an equally heteropatriarchal racial nationalism.
— Andrea Smith
So there you have it. They call us the white Christian heteropartriarchy, and their explicitly stated intent is to destroy us, because we are all that prevents them from imposing the global dictatorship of the proletariat.
January 27, 2014 at 18:07
Every person on that list has ZERO power. Mostly all dead and all losers.
Seriously Codesliger, you are chasing a phantom. This is merely philosophy. Meaningless.
So quoting them proves absolutely nothing. You could quote Looney Tunes cartoons and it will carry as much rhetorical weight.
January 27, 2014 at 22:20
If you go much further, you’ll have Reason suing you for misrrepresentation. 🙂
January 27, 2014 at 23:44
Voice of Reason (sic):
These people I quoted were, and still are, hugely influential in shaping the political, economic, intellectual and philosophical climate of the modern world.
We’re talking about the architects of the Soviet Union, the United Nations, the Communist International, the American Education System, etc, etc, etc.
You think their ideas cease to matter when they die?
Or is it that you never bothered to learn who they are because they’re just a bunch of dead white guys, so who cares, right?
I quoted examples of a current of thought that spans over a century, like acid dripping on the foundations of Western culture, right up to the present day.
They said they were going to corrupt and weaken the West in certain ways.
And guess what?
The West has in fact been corrupted and weakened in exactly those ways.
But none of that matters, because most of the people I quoted are dead, right?
I guess we should ignore math and physics, too, right?
Because all that stuff was invented by dead white guys, so who cares, right?
Is that what you call logic?
Is that the kind of “reason” you are the voice of?
No wonder you don’t see what happened to the Fourniers is a travesty of justice and a blatant abuse of defamation law to censor perfectly valid speech.
It is exactly the kind of “corruption and falsification of law, religion, education and public opinion” that Shaw called an enormous evil.
But who cares, right?
After all, the guy who called it evil is just another dead white guy.
So it’s not evil anymore, right?
Or are you only okay with it because the people committing the evil happen to be on your side (for now)?
January 28, 2014 at 15:17
Dude, you were quoting Lenin and Stalin. The economic systems they proposed/developed FAILED. Failed miserably! Not even the Red Chinese subscribed to their theories any longer.
Math and physics are a hard science. With results that can be replicated and confirmed through the scientific method.
Philosophy is mental masturbation. All theory, no facts. Which is also why communism is a failed and discredited theory because it goes against human nature. It might be fun to get stoned in University and talk about how cool it would be if we all shared everything equally, but in the real world you have to allow people to prosper and profit. I doubt I need to give you a history lesson as to why communism will never work 😉
But my point stands, everybody on that list have zero power with the people in the western world who make decisions. You are fooling yourself if you think Stalin has any influence in Canada in 2014.
I never even mentioned skin colour, by the way. Not sure why you are throwing that in there.
January 28, 2014 at 00:48
The Fournier’s were punished to the tune of $127,000.00 for what someone else said and then told they could end up in jail if anyone else did it again on their discussion forum. If we go into the details of the trial here xanthippa faces the same fate.
Voice of raisins, this does not happen all the time in courts here or the UK, it has never happened before, and you fail to grasp it at all.
January 28, 2014 at 15:05
I don’t fail to understand at all. When you attack the character of a professional person who has to maintain a certain reputation for their occupation, you can get sued for slander/libel/defamation. It has been happening for centuries. It is not new.
I learned all about it in University law classes in the 1980’s. So I know for a fact it is not a new development.
January 28, 2014 at 19:25
What part of “The Fournier’s were punished for what someone else said” do you not understand?
January 29, 2014 at 07:49
They were punished because they had the power to use the delete key and failed to do so.
Just like a newspaper publisher can be sued for something somebody else wrote in their paper.
January 29, 2014 at 13:58
They were punished for refusing to back down from criticizing an Agent of the State – and, by extension, the government itself.
January 30, 2014 at 10:44
“Agent of the State”. *eye rolling* Also, that is the kind of accusation that might get you sued. Careful there.
They were slandering a private individual. It makes no difference where he works or where he used to work.
Then they spent years mocking him. Huge mistake.
For the 10th time, they could have reversed course at the very beginning and apologized and deleted all the posts in question. The whole thing would have ended with very little cost. But no, they dug in their heels and took bad advice. Sat in their little echo chamber of older right-wing cranks. Too stubborn for their own good.
Gotta tell ya, I was completely surprised they went to trial. I figured they would settle in the year leading up to it.
February 1, 2014 at 00:59
Civil servants are, by definition, Agents of State.
Your eye-rolling is misplaced.
A civil servant is NOT simply a ‘professional’, as can be seen by the length many high ranking civil servants will go to in order to mask their political activities and retain a patina of ‘political neutrality’.
February 1, 2014 at 11:50
In this case, “Voice of Reason”, the activity of the person in question affects the public good. His supporters believe it affects the public good for the better by preventing a resurgent Nazism. His detractors, of whom I am proud to say I am one, believe it affects the public good for the worse because a) the threat of a resurgent Nazism is not at the present a realistic threat, unlike the threat of Soviet infiltration in the 1950s which progressives continue to this day to mock US Senator McCarthy for opposing and b) whatever good might be accomplished by preventing the online expression of racist opinions is overshadowed by the harm accomplished by limitations imposed upon the freedoms of opinion and speech. Whether this man’s supporters or detractors are right – and we the detractors are – his actions affect the public good and therefore should not be protected from criticism by defamation law. His supporters have argued that he was and is only using the law as it is written and that criticism should be directed towards that and not towards his person. As I pointed out, however, in my recent essay “Malice” at my own site, we would not find this argument acceptable in other instances where someone took advantage of a bad law – we would criticize both the law and the person who took advantage of it.
January 28, 2014 at 20:08
Voice of Reason (sic):
The failure of Soviet Union has nothing to do with my point. It’s just as irrelevant as the deaths of the people I quoted.
What’s important about the quotes I posted is that they outline the goals and methods of the attack-from-within that is still proceeding against Western civilization TODAY.
The main method is to get the public to abandon the Classical Liberal / Christian culture that is primarily responsible for the strength and success of Western civilization.
And the main goal is to bring about a global totalitarian plutocracy, hidden behind a façade of secular pseudo-religious Earth-mother collectivism.
The quotes I posted prove
1) that there is an organized “open conspiracy” that explicitly has these goals and uses these methods;
2) that it has existed for at least a century; and
3) that it poses a clear and present existential threat to Western civilization.
Do you really not get it?
Or are you just trying to confuse the issue?
January 28, 2014 at 20:12
Voice of Reason (sic):
It wasn’t me who brought skin colour into it.
It was one of the leading architects of progressive political correctness, whom I quoted to prove that cultural Marxists explicitly admit that their intent is …
“to organize against white, Christian America”
which they also call the heteropatriarchy.
Your glib dismissal of philosophy and ideology as mere “mental masturbation” amounts to nothing less that an attempt to sucker the heteropatriarchy into dropping its guard, right at the focal point of this attack.
Philosophy and ideology are the principal weapons of this attack.
That’s why they call it CULTURAL Marxism.
Duh.
January 28, 2014 at 20:15
Voice of Reason (sic):
You keep talking as though the verdict in Warman vs. the Fourniers et al. were based on legitimate jurisprudence.
But it is not!
It is a blatant abuse of a poorly-written law for the purpose of censoring perfectly valid political speech.
But you can’t admit that, can you?
January 28, 2014 at 20:18
Voice of Reason (sic):
You keep talking as though Americans have different rights than Canadians.
How ridiculous!
Every person on the face of the Earth is born with the same inalienable individual rights.
These rights predate and take precedence over every state and every body of laws that has ever existed.
The only legitimate purpose of the state is to act as the guarantor of last resort for the equal rights of all its citizens.
And every attempt to depict the state as the source of rights is a total fraud.
But you can’t admit that either, can you?
January 28, 2014 at 20:23
CodeSlinger,
Voice of Reason (sic) claims he had advised the Fourniers to do exactly what Politically Correct Redneck (or something like that) claimed… Either there are a lot of people who used the very same words and unusual phrasing when advising the Fourniers or someone is entering the same discussion under multiple identities. I wonder which…and if the latter, why.
January 29, 2014 at 16:14
I would never, ever use the term “redneck” in any online handle. I did post here in the past (during the trial) but I can not remember what I was posting under. So I chose this handle.
By advising the Forniers. I mean discussing the topic on their message board when the whole disaster started. Of course I was attacked mercilessly because I was holding the minority view. Called all sorts of names, threatened and accused of being a spy for somebody (they are a paranoid bunch). When in fact I am just an opinionated person who is a political junkie and I only speak for myself.
January 29, 2014 at 16:08
Rights are granted to you by a government. Its a nice notion to say every person has rights. But it is simply not true. There are billions of people who do not have the same rights as a Canadian citizen.
Go on over to Saudi Arabia and say you have a right to practice any religion you want plus you want to open a brewery. Let me know how far you get before you are thrown in prison.
An American has a Right to keep and bear arms. In Canada and Western Europe firearm ownership is privileged. Firearm ownership in Australia is outright banned.
There are a million other examples.
January 29, 2014 at 17:21
Someone has to go back and study his/her history.
There are indeed two schools of thought: that rights are innate and unalienable and the only legitimate role of the government is to protect these on one hand and on the other hand is the school of belief that rights are granted by the government.
Canada is one of the lands where our jurisprudence is descended from the first of these schools of thought, that rights are innate to each individual and NOT granted by anyone, including the government.
January 29, 2014 at 20:59
Voice of Reason (sic):
So who granted the first cave man the right to be alive?
Who granted him the right to make and use the first stone knife?
Who granted him the right to take possession of the first cave dwelling?
Do you really think that no one had any right to do anything before the first government was formed?
Surely even you can see how ridiculous that is!
January 29, 2014 at 21:06
Xanthippa:
The school of thought that holds government to be the source of rights has no rational foundation. It is based on an obvious contradiction:
If people had no rights before the first government was formed, then they had no right to form a government, either.
But a government cannot claim legitimacy unless it was formed by people who had the right to form it.
Therefore the only consistent way a government can claim legitimacy is to acknowledge that its rights are derived from and subordinate to the pre-existing rights of the people.
January 30, 2014 at 11:05
You are slipping back into philosophy and away from reality.
In my lifetime. My rights first came from the BNA Act, then from the Charter of Rights. Without those two laws/acts I would not have any rights at all.
“a government cannot claim legitimacy unless it was formed by people”
Totally false. The English Crown created a government out of whole cloth to avoid a revolution. Are you telling me the English Crown and their Parliament are not legitimate?
February 1, 2014 at 00:50
Perhaps you ought to go back to our history.
Let me give you an example from none other than my father-in-law, who just happened to be a special adviser to 4 differed Liberal Prime Ministers: he criticizes both the BNA and the Charter of Rights because under British common law, he had all the rights and freedoms that were not specifically forbidden by law instead of the few freedoms that happened to be mentioned in the BNA and the Charter. Even such a died-in-the-wool Liberal and scion of the Civil Service recognizes (most of the top mandarins of today had been mentored by him in the past) that his rights do not derive from these documents but that these documents are simply highly imperfect statements listing his rights (and leaving some basic and very crucial ones out, by the way).
These documents are not where you derive your rights from – and never were.
While you may be entitled to your opinion, you are not entitled to ‘your facts’.
P.S. – I apologize for the slowness of my responses, I’ve been out of town at a ‘freedom conference’ and am running woefully behind.
January 30, 2014 at 15:33
@ Voice of Reason.
You are Richard Warman, the contents of your pocket is a small brochure (not the Human Rights Act), and I claim my $50.
February 1, 2014 at 22:58
No, not Warman. Never met him, don’t want to meet him. Don’t care for his methods.
But the fact is, he won fair and square.
FD was stupid to allow people post all that crap about him. They were downright moronic to fight a lawyer who had home field advantage.
February 1, 2014 at 16:09
Voice of Reason (sic):
What? Really?
“Without those two laws/acts I would not have any rights at all.”
The complete and utter lack of self esteem evinced by those words is staggering. And sad.
I can’t imagine what it must feel like to go through life convinced that your right to exist depends on someone else’s written permission.
No wonder we can’t agree on anything.
February 1, 2014 at 23:01
It’s true. You can walk around thinking an invisible entity granted you rights.
But when the rubber hits the road….. It’s the Charter that give you rights. If a Dictator seizes control of Canada one day..you will quickly learn I am correct.
February 2, 2014 at 03:54
Voice of Reason (sic):
“walk around thinking an invisible entity granted you rights”
Is that the only alternative you see to walking around thinking a piece of paper granted you rights?
Look, the word “granted” does not describe how a person comes by his rights.
A right is not what someone gives you, it’s what no one can take away from you.
— Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General, 1967-1969
See? You really ought to pay more attention to the ideas of some of these dead white guys.
You might find them… freeing.
My point is this: every person has inalienable individual rights, simply by virtue of existing.
Not granted by God.
Not granted by the state.
Not granted by consensus.
Simply by virtue of existing.
What are these inalienable individual rights? They are:
Life, liberty, property, privacy, self-defense, and self-expression.
Why these and only these?
Well, the rights to life and liberty are the essential primary rights and the rights to property, privacy, self-defense, and self-expression are necessary and sufficient to guarantee life and liberty. By necessary and sufficient, I mean that nothing more is needed, and nothing less is enough.
These six rights form an irreducible core: you either have all of them, or you may as well have none of them.
The inalienable individual rights give form and substance to the idea that every individual is inherently entitled to live and to act in his own self-interest and is immune from being interfered with in so doing. Further, because man is a rational animal, mental life and liberty are as important as physical life and liberty. Neither has much value without the other.
Reverence for inalienable individual rights is the cornerstone of a free and just society – without it, democracy is just mob rule in disguise.
Oh, and regarding dictators… never confuse the power to violate rights with the prerogative to grant them.