Censorship

Historically, stand-up comedy has pushed expressive boundaries and found itself at the forefront of battles over free expression. In Part 1 of this series, I made the case that stand-up comedy, even the deliberately offensive kind, can tell us something important about free expression.

In Vancouver, students at Eric Hamber Secondary School have prepared a bill to protect the interests of student journalists in British Columbia. Spencer Izen and Jessica Kim, who produce the school’s newspaper, The Griffin’s Nest, sent the Student Press Freedom Act to David Eby, B.C.’s attorney general. They hope the legislature will enact the bill into law. REPORTAGE In The Tyee, Katie Hyslop reports:

In Ontario, the Upper Canada District School Board has ordered its teachers to stop assigning Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to students. The school board regards a few references in the mystery novel as anti-Semitic. REPORTAGE In the National Post, Jessica Mundie reports:

In Ottawa, the federal Liberal government is acting to curb anti-Semitic expression by amending the Criminal Code. The government wants to ban the “communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that wilfully promote anti-Semitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.” The government plans to amend Section 319 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the incitement of hatred “against an identifiable group.”

Authoritarian governments outside Canada use digital devices and the internet to repress foreign-born political activists and dissidents in Canada. The targets of digital repression in Canada include people from China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. Researchers* at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab report: Psychological and Emotional War: Digital Transnational Repression in Canada - The Citizen Lab

In Quebec, the provincial human rights commission is investigating approximately 100 cases that allege the use of “discriminatory speech” this year. Most of these investigations will be dropped, said Philippe-André Tessier, the president of the commission, because of the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on Ward v. Quebec. The case pitted comedian Mike Ward’s right to free expression over singer Jérémy Gabriel’s right to dignity as defined by Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.