We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have laboured in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
There is a disturbing willingness in Canada to suppress the fundamental right to freedom of speech so long as the suppression is deemed to be in service of the common good. “We cannot tolerate anarchy on the internet,” declared Justice Minister Arif Virani upon introducing the Justin Trudeau government’s Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act. Internet sexual exploitation, especially of children, and hateful content are the forms of “anarchy” targeted by the Act. While a blitzkrieg upon the first would certainly be cheered, the criminalization of the second boils in controversy and threatens the rights and freedoms of all Canadians.
The Online Harms Act would have empowered the state to impose house arrest for a possible future hate crime, established an unelected Digital Safety Commissioner to operate independently of Parliament in order to enforce social media regulations, and raised the maximum penalty for any offence “under this Act or any other Act of Parliament” found to be motivated by hate to life imprisonment. While the bill died along with the prorogation of Parliament in December, this does not change the political willingness – and apparent public support – underlying it. And insofar as rights are recognized as inalienable, as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares in its preamble, such a willingness marks a dangerous confusion of the meaning of justice.
“We cannot tolerate anarchy on the internet”: Federal Justice Minister Arif Virani introduced Bill C-63, or the Online Harms Act, which would have criminalized numerous forms of online content as hate speech, with the maximum sentence set at life imprisonment. (Sources of photos: (left) The Canadian Press/Patrick Doyle; (right) Unsplash)Like many laws, policies and regulations pertaining to issues of liberty and free expression over the past few decades, Bill 63 rests on a “positivist” conception. And as with other such measures, the damage wrought by hate-speech censorship efforts goes far beyond immediate effects and leads to a disfigurement of human rights. Since gaining a foothold in the 1960s, the positivist view of rights has bestowed upon the state the authority to whittle, conjure, trample, suspend and even, with satisfactory self-justifications, destroy them.
Everything once taken for granted could be taken away, even “inalienable” rights, not least because we have allowed positivism to unburden us of the memory of why we considered them “inalienable” at all. The right to freedom of speech is threatened because we have forgotten the nature of human rights themselves. What to do? From the edges of the High Middle Ages, an understanding may be revealed in the bellow of a certain “Dumb Ox”: St. Thomas Aquinas, and his explication of the natural law.
Insofar as human rights are accepted as intrinsic and essential, Thomistic natural law provides the most reasonable framework by which to understand human rights. Elevating this philosophy in Canadian jurisprudence would create a reliable foundation upon which freedom of speech as a human right and hate speech as freedom of speech might be reconciled, the government’s role in regulating these rights determined, and the violative trajectory of hate speech legislation brought back to earth.
What is legal positivism, and how does it impact free speech?
Legal positivism holds that laws are valid simply because they are enacted by the state, regardless of any moral considerations. In Canada, this concept has allowed governments to redefine and restrict essential human rights, including free speech, by considering them to be mere legal constructs open to being altered or eliminated at the whim of politicians.
Censorship Crusades and Legal Positivism: How Did We Get Here?
Nineteen-sixty-five marked the official beginning of Canada’s crusade against hate speech, just five years after passage of the federal Bill of Rights (and 17 years before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). Guy Favreau, Minister of Justice in the minority Liberal government, commissioned a Special Committee on Hate Propaganda whose findings led the government in 1970 to criminalize the promotion of genocide, “public incitement of hatred” likely to disturb the peace, and the “wilful promotion of hatred”, under newly added Sections 318, 319 and 320 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
Back to the beginning: The 1965 Special Committee on Hate Propaganda created by then-federal Justice Minister Guy Favreau led to the criminalization of various forms of hate speech in 1970 via amendments to the Criminal Code; freedom of speech in Canada became a “qualified right” rather than an “absolute right”. (Source of photo: John Boyd/The Globe and Mail. #64025-01)
In its deliberations the Committee had faced a dilemma: important though the combating of hate materials was believed to be, would criminalizing such expression infringe upon Canadians’ right to free speech? The Committee concluded freedom of speech was a “qualified and not an absolute right”. According to it, any speech failing to serve “vital community interests”, enhance “the life of the speaker” or the minds of others, or promote “responsible discussion of the community interest” could not be defended as a right. These findings represented positivism in action; sweeping in their implications, they opened a can of worms that continue to plague us today.
First off, it is impossible to speak of “qualification” without referring to some central standard or authority. Who determines when speech has failed to meet standards, and by what measures? While “who” was probably assumed to be the individual judge presiding over each hypothetical future case, a key concern is that determining what “enhances the life of the speaker” or the minds of those who hear him or her, and what constitutes “responsible discussion”, are all matters of abstract deliberation about which different judges may come to vastly differing conclusions.
Legal positivism reduces rights and liberties from essentially sacred and virtually untouchable things that inhere in each human being, to mere matters of law – granted by, enforced by and, potentially, taken away by that nation’s authorities operating according to their own standards.
Any law consistently inconsistent in application must be doubted as a just law. Furthermore, the answer to the question “by what standard?” is not fixed: it becomes by whatever standard governments and the courts determine. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which Canada signed – proclaims human rights to be inalienable, speaking of rights in terms of “qualified” versus “absolute” implies the opposite: that such rights are legal constructs, the management of which rests with the state and its organs. One way to understand such thinking is as an application of legal positivism to human rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares certain human rights to be “inalienable”. Yet the concept of legal positivism undermines such rights by reducing them to legal constructs as defined by the state, and thus independent of any higher moral principles. (Sources: (left image) United Nations Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (right photo) Pexels)
Legal positivism holds that laws are simply constructs that do not need to align with wider moral truths in order to be legitimate. A law’s purpose is utilitarian, i.e., intended to accomplish a state-sanctioned goal, and its validity comes not from its alignment with any moral principle but simply from its existence. Legal positivism would remove the moral source of authority even from laws related to individual liberties and human rights, expressing all of these as man-made creations. It thus reduces rights and liberties from essentially sacred and virtually untouchable things that inhere in each human being, to mere matters of law – granted by, enforced by and, potentially, taken away by that nation’s authorities operating according to their own standards.
It is this philosophy, progressively embedded throughout Canadian legal, judicial and legislative institutions, that paved the way for numerous further laws concerning hate crimes and hate speech legislation. These have included the addition in 1977 under Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Section 13 of the federal Human Rights Act, the 2022 criminalization of Holocaust denial, Bloc Québecois leader Yves-François Blanchet’s proposal to remove religious conviction as a defence against hate-speech accusations, the recent calls for the criminalization of residential school “denial” and, 58 years after the Special Committee, the Online Harms Act. All of these reflect a positivist understanding of human rights.
Still Dangerous: The Enduring Threat to Free Speech Embodied in the Online Harms Act
Introduced in February 2024, the Online Harms Act (OHA) combined stronger measures against sexual exploitation via the internet and heavier consequences for the publication of “content that foments hatred.” The fierce and sustained opposition to the latter measures prompted the Trudeau government last December to break the bill in two; both halves were culled when the Governor General prorogued Parliament that same month.
Canadians should not assume, however, that the OHA’s malign provisions can’t be resurrected by a future Liberal government. The OHA embodied nearly every point of controversy and anti-hate measures proposed, enacted and struck down in the nearly six decades since the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda. John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which litigates on behalf of individual Canadians whose freedoms have been violated, wrote that, “It would take a dozen columns to properly address all of the threats to free expression that are contained in the Online Harms Act.”
The dangers of defining hate: The now-defunct Online Harms Act posed a severe threat to the freedom of speech of Canadians by failing to establish a workable definition of hate; among its many critics were John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (bottom left) and Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy (bottom right). (Sources of photos: (top) VDB Photos/Shutterstock; (bottom left) Toronto Star; (bottom right) Rebel News)From its pre-crime recognizances to raising the maximum sentence for hate-motivated crimes to life imprisonment, the expansion of what Bruce Pardy has dubbed the “discretionary managerial state” through the creation of a regulatory Digital Safety Commission, and the failure to establish a workable definition of hate, the OHA was internationally flogged as an “extremist” and “Orwellian” attack on free speech.
“Under Bill C-63, you can be put away for life for a ‘crime’ whose legal existence hangs on the distinction between ‘dislike’ and ‘detest’,” wrote columnist Jane Stannus in the Spectator. Indeed, Part 2 of the OHA defines hatred as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike.” Upon this vague, subjective and frighteningly broad basis for guilt, the OHA added Section 320.1001(1) to Canada’s Criminal Code: “Everyone who commits an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament, if the commission of the offence is motivated by hatred based on [prohibited grounds of discrimination], is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.”
How does natural law differ from legal positivism?
Natural law asserts that human rights, including free speech, are intrinsic and stem from human nature and a higher moral order. Natural law rights are thus beyond the control of the state. Legal positivism, on the other hand, regards laws about rights to be open to constant and arbitrary alteration by government.
Unlike laws that prohibit empirically provable actions such as theft or speeding, one that centres on an abstraction – in this case, a person’s internal feelings – requires subjective interpretation which, in turn, becomes a recipe for judicial whimsy and inconsistency. A 2017 study on free speech and tolerance by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., found that conceptions of hate speech vary from person to person, often according to political affiliations. For example, 59 percent of progressives (what many Americans term “liberals”) regarded saying transgender people have a mental disorder to be hate speech, in contrast to just 17 percent of conservatives.
The recurring nature of bills like the Online Harms Act raises the question: why are so many anti-hate laws unconstitutional? Answering that question requires asking an even more basic one: what is the nature of human rights?
One might argue that this is why we have “experts” such as tribunal judges or the Supreme Court of Canada’s justices to settle such matters. The case of Bill Whatcott undermines this argument. In 2005, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission brought Whatcott before the province’s Human Rights Tribunal due to four flyers about homosexuality that he’d distributed. The tribunal pronounced him guilty of disseminating hateful content on all four counts. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, however, found that none of the flyers constituted hate propaganda. The Supreme Court of Canada then found that two of the flyers expressed hatred and two did not. Which court was correct, and should the other judges be fired for incompetence?
One might reply that the Supreme Court of Canada is the nation’s final authority. Yet even it does not always reach consensus. When the high court upheld the constitutionality of Section 13 of the federal Human Rights Act in 1990, Justice Beverley McLachlin fell into the minority of the split verdict. Of defining “hate”, she wrote that it is a “term vague and subjective, capable of extension should the interpreter be so inclined. Where does dislike leave off and hatred or contempt begin?” McLachlin further added, “Any expression ‘likely to expose’ persons to hatred or contempt on a prohibited head of discrimination is caught [by the definition], regardless of whether the expression was intended or could be foreseen to have this effect.” Seemingly good advice; but remember, McLachlin was on the losing side.
When judges of the highest calibre fail to agree on such matters, what authority determines who is correct? Consensus, even if it had been reached, is not infallible, and McLachlin’s perspective was vindicated twenty-three years later when Section 13 was finally repealed. Was the decision to repeal it wrong, or were the majority of the Supreme Court judges in 1990? It should be noted that the OHA aimed to revive Section 13.
Accordingly, while the OHA has died as a piece of legislation, the authoritarian urges it expressed have not been interred and the threat these urges pose to Canadians lives on. The recurring nature of such bills raises the question: why are so many anti-hate laws unconstitutional? Answering that question requires asking an even more basic one: what is the nature of human rights? It is here that St. Thomas Aquinas can be brought to present-day Canada’s aid.
When did Canada’s first hate speech law come into existence?
Canada’s first hate speech laws were enacted in 1970 following the recommendations of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda established in 1965 by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. These laws (Sections 318, 319 and 320 of the Criminal Code of Canada) criminalized genocide promotion, public incitement of hatred, and willful promotion of hatred.
Meet St. Thomas Aquinas
He was a large and heavy and quiet boy, and phenomenally silent, scarcely opened his mouth except to say suddenly to his schoolmaster in an explosive manner, ‘What is God?’
Born in the Kingdom of Sicily in 1225, the future St. Thomas Aquinas was the youngest of eight children of the Count of Aquino and the Countess of Teano. At age 5 his family sent him to the Abbey of Monte Cassino to live and train as an oblate with the Benedictine monks. There he was educated in Scripture, theology and philosophy, earning a reputation as a bright, promising, inquisitive mind. Political turmoil pulled him to the University of Naples in 1243, where he secretly joined the Dominican Order of Preachers, known for their poverty, uncloistered public engagement and intellectual dedication.
An intellectual giant of the Middle Ages: St. Thomas Aquinas was remarkable for his blazing intellect and Christian devotion; his legacy includes the legal concept of Thomistic natural law. Shown, St. Thomas Aquinas in Ecstasy in His Library with Two Angels, by Jacopo Vignali, 1650.Appalled by this decision, his parents sent two of his brothers to kidnap him on the road to Paris, where the Dominicans had sent him. For over a year they held him prisoner in a tower of their castle, trying to persuade him to change his mind. He would not budge, however, and his family at last relented. Following his release the young Aquinas professed his religious vows and resumed his journey to the University of Paris.
Aquinas was not only quiet but, to put it kindly, rather stout. Inspired by these traits, his peers concocted an only half-ironic nickname: the “Dumb Ox”. His teacher, St. Albert the Great, predicted that despite the belittling epithet, Aquinas’ “bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world.” Albert’s words proved prophetic, and Aquinas earned the recognition of his era’s scholars and popes.
Until his death at 49, his life shone with a flaming intellect and a Christian devotion that established him as a giant of Medieval Scholasticism and a Doctor of the Church and, following his passing, a canonized saint and father of what became known as Thomistic philosophy. In his writings, Aquinas strove to advance the unification of Aristotelian philosophy from Ancient Greek times with Christian theology. Among the most important fruits of this, articulated in the Summa Theologica (1265-73), was Thomistic natural law.
Natural Law and the Right to Free Speech
The image of God always abides in the soul, whether this image be obsolete and clouded over as to amount to almost nothing; or whether it be obscured or disfigured, as is the case with sinners; or whether it be clear and beautiful as is the case with the just.
—Summa Theologica
Natural law begins with the telos, the end purpose of a thing. Aristotle believed that all things have a telos defining what they are and determining what is “good” for that thing. For instance, it is “good” for an acorn to grow into an oak tree, ergo that is an acorn’s telos. And we know something is an acorn if it is within its nature to grow into an oak tree. Everything exists in such a way that its nature directs it toward its telos.
In basic terms, Thomistic natural law is the universal body of inclinations, knowable through and prompted by reason, that compels human beings toward their telos. Being a Catholic, Aquinas believed the human telos was happiness through union with God. Truth, he wrote in the Summa Theologica, “is to the greatest degree found in God,” and, in the Summa Contra Gentiles (1258-64), “Man’s ultimate happiness consists in the contemplation of truth.”
Aquinas described five natural human inclinations: to do what is good and avoid evil; to preserve life; to marry and raise families; to pursue truth; and to participate in society. Even if one disagrees with Aquinas about humanity’s telos, considering our rational, social, procreative and moral nature, the five inclinations he set forth can still be regarded as essential aspects of fulfilling what it means to be human.
A guide to being human: Writing in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas articulated five natural inclinations of human beings – to do good, to preserve life, to raise families, to pursue truth and to participate in society – which together lead them to the realization of their telos, or ultimate purpose.Our human rights, such as the right to life, reflect these inclinations and are best understood within this framework of natural law; they are those needed to enable each individual to pursue and fulfill the inclinations that guide him or her toward their telos. For a thing to be a human right, that thing must be necessary, in its fullness, for a person to pursue that natural inclination. As Jacques Maritain, a Thomist philosopher and contributor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wrote (as described by American philosopher, economist and natural law theorist Samuel Gregg), “Rights were inviolable insofar as they protected the capacity of individuals to make choices freely in order to realize particular moral goods and virtues…central to human flourishing.”
Odious speech is, of course, ugly speech. It reeks like a dead thing unearthed. Still, only by airing odious views can they be properly challenged. Let people gag at the rot rather than being fooled into perceiving yet another ‘truth-to-power’ martyr and leaving flowers at his or her lionized grave.
Freedom of expression is a human right because it advances the pursuit of truth and knowledge through the exchange of ideas and enables participation in society. In the De Regno (1265-1266), Aquinas wrote that man is a naturally “social and political animal, living in a multitude.” Participating as such a being requires free expression and occurs through political discourse, scientific theorizing, religious practice, social and academic debate, arts and literature, and other contexts of communication. Without free speech, participation is crippled.
Does hate speech deserve to be defended as free expression upon these grounds? Most would not believe it to be conducive to the pursuit of knowledge or truth. Nor does it seem to improve society by its expression; just the opposite. In spite of this, “hate speech” should not be banned as a category because many forms of odious speech do contribute indirectly to the pursuit of truth and enable participation in society. Odious speech is, of course, ugly speech. It reeks like a dead thing unearthed. Still, only by airing odious views can they be properly challenged. Let people gag at the rot rather than being fooled into perceiving yet another “truth-to-power” martyr and leaving flowers at his or her lionized grave.
Nineteenth century British philosopher John Stuart Mill stood powerfully against the censorship of unpopular beliefs in his famous essay On Liberty: “If the opinion is right, [those who can’t hear the speech] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” In the same era Frederick Douglass, the American escaped-slave-turned-philosopher and close friend to President Abraham Lincoln, echoed this point in his Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston. “To suppress free speech,” Douglass declared, “is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
Unpopular and ugly though someone’s speech may be, it is only through the individual’s ability to express personal beliefs that listeners have the chance to strengthen their grasp of the truth. Encountering contrary views compels closer examination of the listener’s views, which may reveal their errors. Ideally, the speaker may be challenged and, if mistaken, have the chance to reform through similar examinations. In the case of someone expressing untruths, unkindness or actual hatred, such a journey is impossible if that person is prevented from expressing them to begin with.
The Limits of Rights
Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices…but only the more grievous vices…and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
—Summa Theologica
This does not mean that natural law advocates for absolute freedom to speak without consequence. Not all speech or expression is protected as rights. Explicit threats of or incitement to violence are not considered rights. It is also true that certain types of non-permitted speech may be motivated by hatred. But this should be merely coincidental; the earlier point is that hate speech should not be prohibited as a category. Because human beings are also and inevitably sinful – or, in more agreeably modern phrasing, because we act upon our capacity to make bad choices – some things considered vices must be permitted, namely those that do not damage a person’s ability to pursue the human telos. Some forms of speech that may or may not be hateful are included in this.
There is a notion that human rights describe categories of human behaviour that would permit limitless action – and, accordingly, threaten to devour all social order – if government did not establish boundaries. This is false. Actions which violate the rights of others would not exist as rights under natural law, even if government did not limit them. If the federal government declared tomorrow that we have absolute freedom of speech, that would not make threats of violence any more rightful than they are now. Such actions would continue to be violations of the rights of others.
The logic of rights within Thomistic natural law is that we possess them because human beings were created in the image of God (imago Dei) and therefore carry infinite value. (A non-Christian might assert we possess value by virtue of our humanity, wherever that might find its transcendent source or other external authority.) Because imago Dei is a necessarily universal trait, everyone else must also have rights. The cliché is true: one’s rights end where another’s begin.
The job of governments and courts should be to recognize the inherent boundaries – not manage, let alone continually shift them. All those years ago, Canada’s Special Committee on Hate Propaganda was partially correct in saying that the category of action called “freedom of speech” was “not an absolute” – but it was incorrect in saying that the right to freedom of speech was not absolute.
The Dumb Ox in the Kangaroo Courts: A Brief Verdict
Now sometimes the things commanded by a superior are against God, therefore superiors are not to be obeyed in all things.
—Summa Theologica
Human law, in Aquinas’ view, is the body of laws written and enforced by human authorities to apply the natural law to the particular peoples and contexts of concern to the governing authorities. Any human law that contradicts the natural law is immoral. This directly opposes the positivist claim that a law gains legitimacy from the fact of it being written. As U.S. civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his famous Letter From Birmingham Jail, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’” (The late-Roman-era Augustine whom King cited was a great influence on Aquinas.)
In addition to its dismissiveness towards the human telos, positivism’s second failure to meet natural law standards is the outright damage it does to the human telos. For example, hate-speech censorship directly injures the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and the individual’s participation in society.
Thomistic natural law renders hate speech censorship a violation of the right to freedom of speech. Positivism’s first failure to meet natural law standards is its neglect of the necessity upon which true rights stand. This is also why positivism accepts several false rights – unnecessary to the pursuit of the telos, if not flatly contradicting it – as legitimate. One current example is the ostensible “right to live free from discrimination”. This concocted entitlement, beloved of human rights commissions, is not a true right because it is not needed to fulfill one’s telos.
Any discrimination that could threaten the human telos is already combatted by the inherent rights to life, expression, conscience, religion, etc. Rights, if they are to be respected, must be anything but trivial. Even worse is the deeply disturbing assertion that there exists a “right to die”, another problem reflecting the grave consequences of positivism. This “right” did not even exist in Canada until 2016, which hints strongly at its overall legitimacy, since it was somehow overlooked both by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rightsand the preceding nearly 3,500 years of philosophy, theology and Judeo-Christian Scripture.
In addition to its aforementioned dismissiveness towards the human telos, positivism’s second failure to meet natural law standards is the outright damage it does to the human telos. For example, hate-speech censorship (like what was expressed in the Online Harms Act) directly injures the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and the individual’s participation in society. It drives bad ideas underground, where their holders are more likely to languish in self-martyrdom and their sympathizers to idolize them. It robs listeners of the opportunity to think critically about their own beliefs and to challenge the speaker’s errors.
Through vague and malleable definitions of “hate”, state-sanctioned censorship opens the door for trivial accusations and dire consequences, chilling free expression for fear of punishment. Its precedential force empowers government to further restrict freedom of speech and other rights. It places in the hands of the state an authority over which it has no claim: to manage human rights, an authority belonging entirely to the principles of the natural law.
How did Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, threaten freedom of speech in Canada?
The Online Harms Act was intended to create a wide range of new hate crimes, and would have established a Digital Safety Commissioner with broad regulatory powers. The penalties under this proposed legislation extended to life imprisonment. The bill died when Parliament was prorogued.
Canada, Unmoored
Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a prime mover, put in motion by no other.
—Summa Theologica
Aquinas’ natural law, built upon the supremacy of God, is no foreigner in Canada. Our Latin motto, A Mari Usque Ad Mare – From Sea to Sea – is a direct reference to Psalm 72:8, which reads, “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” It is also no coincidence that the newly independent former colony of Canada was described as a “Dominion”. Our national anthem prays, “God keep our land glorious and free!” The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms begins with the acknowledgement, “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law…”
These principles have not been erased from Canada’s defining documents, yet the nation’s judicial and political systems have quietly nudged them under the rug. They are not divorced, though certainly estranged. Still, restoring natural law would not require Canada to embark on a strange, unnatural or foreign project – but simply to reclaim her heritage.
Natural law depends on, and is unreasonable without, belief in an intelligent creator of the universe: God in the Judeo-Christian sense. The decline of natural law in Canadian jurisprudence, therefore, cannot be separated from the rise of secularism and left-wing politics, particularly its more radical ambassadors. Perhaps not coincidentally, left-wing or “progressive” politicians and activists are usually also the most aggressive advocates for hate-speech censorship laws.
A right invoked should have the effect of an honest person’s vow, a solemnity gathering around the weight of this invocation of eternal human worth in the eyes of the universe’s very Creator. Only the principles of natural law explain this weight.
The conjunction makes sense: those opposed to natural law are often of the more radical left-wing shades, because natural law stands in resolute contradiction to the left’s faith in government as the nation’s parent and ultimate source of all authority. God as supreme cannot coexist with the state as supreme. This is not to say that all those who advocate censoring hate speech hold the insidious goal of state supremacy in all things; but many surely do. And it is certainly the trajectory we are on, precedent by precedent. Freedom is far more fragile than many of us apparently realize.
Canada needs natural law because our clear understanding of human rights depends upon its principles. Our progressive abandonment of it has made of us “intellectual barbarians” as John Patrick, President of Augustine College, puts it. “A barbarian,” Patrick explains, “is somebody who doesn’t know his own cultural history.” Though we may still enjoy the fruits of the natural law and Christian presuppositions about the world, the ability to maintain such a culture exceeds us in our ignorance. Without the natural law we are no more able to preserve a proper understanding of rights than most people could rebuild a disassembled smartphone in spite of their daily use and enjoyment of it.
There is something truly sacred about human rights, untouchable and distinct from the mere privileges granted by society. A right invoked should have the effect of an honest person’s vow, a solemnity gathering around the weight of this invocation of eternal human worth in the eyes of the universe’s very Creator. Only the principles of natural law explain this weight.
The crumbling of natural law in Canada has torn away the foundation for human rights. The Online Harms Act may be dead, but that does not change the fact that many believed it was a good idea, and enough were willing to impose it even on an unwilling nation. If we do not reclaim our heritage, it is inevitable that similar and possibly even worse proposals will come forth and perhaps prevail.
Canada is unmoored; she has cast away the only meaningful conception of human rights ever to stride the world. Without this understanding, we will never preserve a reverence for life, the family unit, equality regardless of characteristics, or free speech and expression. We walk a darkening road, the Medieval flame of St. Thomas Aquinas’ natural law flickering behind us. By its illumination, we must turn back.
Morrigan Geleynse is a first-year English writing student at Redeemer University in Hamilton, Ontario.
This article is an expanded adaptation of Ms. Geleynse’s Third Prize-winning entry in the 2nd Annual Trottier-Morgan Student Essay Contest.
Source of main image: Public Discourse.
