The unbearable niceness of Canadians is driving us to destruction

While Americans spent last week panicking about the state of their democracy, north of the border we were having a collective meltdown about a teenage writer who dared to praise Joe Rogan. Here in Canada, we are expected only to expose ourselves to and support the positions and politics and ideologies professed by the CBC and CanLit writers whose writing careers consist of canceling writers who have actual writing careers. The notion that anyone might express interest in different points of view, that don’t fit within the narrow confines of woke politics, is effectively blasphemy.

Speaking of blasphemy, on October 16, a French teacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded after showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to his students. Paty was engaging his students in a discussion of free speech, and apparently even offered his Muslim pupils the opportunity to leave the classroom lest they be offended by the caricatures shown. To Islamic extremists such as the young man who murdered Paty, blaspheming against Mohammed is a crime worthy of death; even those who don’t subscribe to their faith should be exterminated

A week later, two people were killed in Nice after a man entered the Notre-Dame basilica and attacked three people with a knife. One of the victims was a 60-year-old woman whose throat was cut so deeply it was considered a decapitation by France’s top antiterrorism prosecutor. Chief suspect, Tunisian Ibrahim Issaoui, arrived in France via Italy, and is in critical condition after being shot by police. French authorities and President Macron branded it yet another Islamist terrorist attack.

You might think our progressive political representatives would speak out on behalf of free speech in the face of such horrific violence. And while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada did label the attacks ‘heinous, criminal acts, unjustifiable by any circumstance and an affront to all of our values’, he declined to take a strong position in favor of free speech. When asked during a press conference to respond to a question about the right to show a caricature of Mohammed, Trudeau said that while freedom of expression is all fine and good, there must be limits. It’s an odd way to defend freedom of expression: adding a caveat that places responsibility on those causing ‘offense’, not those who violently silence opinions they don’t like. But indeed this is what Canada has come to.