Ignatieff lacking his old rhetoric on freedom of speech

So say W.E. ( Bill ) Bellieveau in the Times & Transcript and Mark Steyn in Macleans. First, Mark Steyn’s article: Thinking about the old Ignatieff:

In Ottawa on Monday, I kept getting asked—including by three stray passersby on Wellington Street—what Beatles song Michael Ignatieff should sing. Oh, come on, you don’t really need a professional for this, do you? Help! Yesterday (All my troubles seemed so far away). The Fool On The Hill. Hello, Goodbye. Get Back (to Harvard and a little light BBC hosting) . . .

I wasn’t really in the mood to pile on Iggy, poor chap. I was in town to testify to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Human Rights about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s assault on individual liberty and freedom of expression. And, mainly because I’ve been yakking about this subject for a couple of years now and have pretty much exhausted my stock of free-speech quotations from Milton to Salman Rushdie, just for variety’s sake I decided to cite Michael Ignatieff to the committee. I was talking about the assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch that, Canada’s constitution notwithstanding, there is “no hierarchy of rights,” only a “matrix” in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish group rights and collective rights. And I responded with a blast of Professor Ignatieff:

“Collective rights without individual ones end up in tyranny. Moreover, rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights . . . The right to freedom of speech is not, as the Marxist tradition maintained, a lapidary bourgeois luxury, but the precondition for having any other rights at all.”

Bingo! In my battles with the “human rights” enforcers, I am an Ignatieffite—okay, that’s a bit unwieldy, but I’m certainly an Iggybopper. As I told the Select Committee, I support the Ignatieff position—on freedom of speech, on individual vs. collective rights, and on the way “rights inflation” damages the core of real rights.

Until a recent mid-life career change, Ignatieff used to say stuff like that all the time. Now, not so much. At least not to the point of joining his fellow Liberal Keith Martin in calling for the repeal of Section 13, the appallingly drafted “hate speech” law even more appallingly interpreted by the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. But throughout the ’80s and ’90s you could switch on the BBC almost any night of the week and find a dark-shirted tie-less Ignatieff deep in furrowed-brow conversation about freedom of speech with some novelist or philosopher. I well remember him discussing a play he found morally repellent, but declaring nevertheless: “Nothing should be beyond speaking about.”

Read the rest of this article here.

Second, Bill Bellieveau’s article: Polls aside, Ignatieff might yet emerge:

With polls showing Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals continuing to lose ground to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, national media pundits are beginning to speculate that Ignatieff’s tenure as leader of the Federal Liberal Party could be short-lived.

At first blush, it might be easy to agree with them when you consider numbers like 40 per cent Conservative and 28 per cent Liberal, but I would caution them to temper their prognosis for a while.

The other night, I was traveling to Ottawa reading my collection of newspapers and magazines. A couple of articles in Maclean’s Magazine caught my eye but more importantly, they caused me to reexamine the Ignatieff situation.

The articles had a number of interesting messages: one that Ignatieff has yet to reveal himself, two that he has something to say and three that Harper is not the man that he has been fabricating over the last few months.

I recall years ago when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was at the peak of his popularity.

There were reasons why so many Canadians fell in love with him: he was a new and refreshing character. He slid down banisters, dated movie stars and wore a red rose in his lapel.

Trudeau helped shape Canada with his vision of a unified, bilingual, multicultural “just society.”

After calling an election just three weeks after he became Liberal leader, he promised to stem the rise of Quebec separatism and turn Canada into a unified nation. On the eve of the election, he ignored threats of separatist violence and attended Montreal’s St-Jean-Baptiste parade. When officials fled as rioters hurled rocks and other debris, Trudeau refused to back down. That was major.

Trudeau wasn’t intimidated by people and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind or offer an opinion that was unpopular or in opposition to conventional thinking.

That brings me back to Michael Ignatieff. As the MacLean’s article correctly points out, Ignatieff used to speak his mind. His Harvard lectures and BBC interviews revealed a human rights advocate that has been silenced by political ambition.

He once said the right to freedom of speech is the pre-condition for all other rights. His position on freedom of speech, on individual versus collective rights and his view that “rights inflation” damages the foundation of basic rights are most timely.

They were repeated recently to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Rights, not by Ignatieff but by someone who agrees with him. They were delivered in response to an assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch who had said earlier that Canada’s constitution, notwithstanding “there is no hierarchy of rights,” only a matrix in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish (trendy or current) group rights and collective rights.

Read the rest of this article here.