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Comment by kenrose | Hacker News Reader

> not in free speech etc.

What's your source on this? Free speech is enshrined as a "fundamental freedom" in the Charter. There are reasonable limits as well, to ensure that things like hate speech are deemed illegal.

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I've met a number of people (all American, so I infer it's due to some American news sources) that believe Canadians are arrested on a regular basis for flimsy and arbitrary claims of hate speech, and those arrests are political. The same people tend to believe we wait six months and probably die before getting cancer treatment because of our socialized medical system.

So chalk it up to Canada being used in the partisan ratings war that seems to dominate news nowadays.

It's definitely our media not on the side of citizens. How many lies do your hear about your health care system?

I don’t know, maybe lots? What I hear from my chosen news sources matches my experience (or feeds my confirmation bias), so I don’t recognize it as lies.

You can chalk it up to Jordan Peterson and his fanboys insisting that white men are the most oppressed group in this upside down new world we live in. That segment really likes to paint Canada as the thought-police boogie man.

Jordan Peterson absolutely and completely does not "insist", insinuate, or suggest that "white men are the most oppressed group". I am a really big fan of Dr. Peterson's work and I have never heard him say or publish anything remotely resembling such a statement. In fact, he is completely opposed to identity politics on the whole.

Some misguided white men might think that they are "the most oppressed group", but they are just that: misguided.

Er, engaging in the oppression olympics is the opposite of what he does.

His argument is that people should be judged as individuals, not by what group they randomly happen to be part of.

Peterson advocates for free speech and MLK's dream: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Like all charter rights, it is weighed in balance with the others and so can be limited.

So, IE, Blasphemous Libel is a thing in Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemous_libel#Canada

Canadian Human Rights Tribunals often produce concerning rulings regarding free speech [1]. I found this case to be particularly concerning even if the "jokes" in question were distasteful. Reminds me of the "Nazi Pug" in the UK [2] which was equally alarming.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mike-ward-comedian-h...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/04...

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