Free Speech is for Losers: A Conversation with Bruce Pardy

0:00Welcome to the Liberty Exchange Podcast, I'm Jonathan Fortsye. My guest today is Bruce Party, Professor of Law at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, an Executive Director of Rights Probe, a Law and Liberty Think Tank. A fuller bio was available for Bruce in the show notes. Bruce writes and speaks regularly on topics central to free societies. Bruce came into the public eye during the Canadian Trucker protest in the winter of 2022, where he helped many understand the complex legal issues as they unfolded during the protest. We had an extended conversation about the trucker protest in January of 2025, and that can be found in episode 16 of the Liberty Exchange Podcast. Since 2022, Bruce has continued to offer analysis of how our basic freedoms are being eroded by the growth of the administrative state. In our conversation today, we focus on the rise of the global censorship movement, and the many ways that free speech is being targeted by governments around the world.

1:00Bruce reminds us that it is often the powerless, the supposed losers in society, who most require free speech to defend their rights and livelihoods. The powerful seek to entrench their positions and so often seek to curb control and censor, regardless of political affiliation or ideological commitment. Bruce, welcome back to the Liberty Exchange Podcast. Thank you Jonathan. Great to be with you. The last time we spoke, we were discussing the Canadian Trucker protest of 2022 and all of the many violations of individual freedom during that dark period, both in Canada and elsewhere. I thought today that we could turn to the question of free speech, which is very much in the public eye right now, free speech and related themes of censorship and so forth. I know that you've written fairly extensively on this and you've been tracking this issue certainly in Canada for the last number of years.

2:05I thought that would be a good place to start. It would be the Canadian situation with regards to free speech and then we could look more and generally abroad because I think it has implications or parallels with what's going on in the EU and Britain and indeed even in the US. Right. Great. Sounds good. Yes, so Canada is not a great jurisdiction for free speech, even though we have a right in our charter that says that we have free speech. And that, to some extent, is the fault of our courts who have taken those words in the charter and decided that it doesn't actually really mean what it says. If you combined that section of the charter along with our famous section one, which allows for reasonable limits on our charter rights, the Supreme Court, for example, has said that it is acceptable and acceptable limit on free speech to have restrictions on hate speech,

3:12what's called hate speech, which is a thing, as I understand it, which is protected in the US, which is an interesting result because both the right to free speech and the bill of rights and the right to freedom of expression in the charter are very basic statements. They're not elaborated upon and in that respect, they look pretty much the same or similar. And yet where we have ended up as countries is very, very different and that probably is as a result of both our national and judicial culture. But past a while, Canada has suffered under the determination of both of the federal liberal government over a period of time. And frankly, the regime is in the provinces to have a heavy hand on what it is that you can say. So for example, at the federal level, we now have a bill in parliament called Bill C9,

4:19which proposes to extend, well, first of all, to define what hate is for the purpose of the criminal code provision that's already in place. And I think that's an important point to make. We already have these provisions, both in our criminal code and restrictions in our human rights codes that do sensor speech, that do prohibit discrimination in your speech and hate in your speech and what this new legislation is proposing to do is provide a definition of hate and to extend the potential liabilities in various ways. So the situation is not good. The infamous Bill C63, which was also a proposal of the federal liberal government. That bill died when the most recent federal election was called, but there have been noises from the party that that bill is going to be resurrected. And in fact, some elements of it are contained in Bill C9.

5:21So the basic picture is things are not great. They could be worse and there looks like they might become worse. We're probably not in as bad a situation yet as they appear to be in the UK and perhaps other places where people apparently are being thrown in prison and not just for a couple of days for a social media post and so on. It hasn't got quite to that yet, but that is on the horizon if we keep going down the route that we're on. Yeah. I'm glad you raised the UK because it seems like very similar kinds of language are being used to justify censorship or control of speech, certainly speech online. I think the UK legislation is called the Online Safety Act, and so that pivots around a similar set of supposed concerns about causing harm online, keeping people safe from dangerous speech online or elsewhere, presumably. And so the justification is quite similar and this is very difficult to define a concept

6:33of hate and related ideas like safety and harm are all bundled together, aren't they, to create quite a philosophical and legal quagmire? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we have less the station on the idea that you're allowed to do whatever you want as long as you don't cause harm to others. That the idea of harm has been morphed into the original idea which was you can't use force, you can't use violence. You can't injure people to the idea that, well, words can be violent. And therefore, if you're speaking in a bad way, then therefore you're causing the harm and therefore I have to be safe and therefore we need legislation to manage your speech. And where we're ended up, where we've ended up now is a justification if you like for just that, for managing the population, managing speech, managing thought, managing attitude

7:41and where you end up is a very totalitarian kind of place with largely the approval of the people who have been convinced that their safety depends upon other people's speech being curped. And so, yeah, we're in a bad situation all around and in many of these countries that have these things going on in common. I don't think that it's a conspiracy in the sense that some small group of people in a room said, right, we're all going to do this at the same time. And on the other hand, it's also not coincidental that these approaches have been adopted more or less simultaneously because the philosophy behind the system of governance has become to be the same. The ideology is similar and it is an ideology, I think, that regards the group as the moral

8:49agent. You know, human beings are very tribal. Yes. And they are beings that seek meaning and the tribe contains the meaning and if the tribe is the nation and that's what it's become in the minds of many people, then they approve of the nation imposing what they believe are moral apparatus. And as long as you have that idea, the idea that the group is the moral agent, that means that individual choice is secondary to the group behaving properly. And I think that might be part of the root cause of all this trouble. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. To what extent do you think this is driven by the fact that dissenters from the narrative are now able to reach millions, if not billions of people, on social media, the rise of the so-called citizen journalist. And they are able to conduct their own research, access data and reach millions of people

9:53build communities as we saw, for example, during COVID, and challenge many of the so-called official elite sanctioned narratives about, say, for example, the origins of the virus or the best treatment for illness and the efficacy of lockdowns and so on and so forth. To what extent do you think the drive towards controlling speech online is motivated by a desire to control these dissenting voices? Oh, I think there's a huge part of it. A huge part of it. So to go back to COVID, COVID is a very good demonstration of this phenomenon, as you allude to. So during COVID, we had the administrative state, basically triumph. It managed to take control over everything that was going on.

10:57You were to lock down here, you were to close your business here, you couldn't go to school here, you had to wear a mask here, you had to take a vaccine to do this, it was a triumph. Now, the fact that the policies didn't work is nothing to do with it, you know, the triumph was in managing to assert control, except for that leak in the bucket, which was social media. It turned out that that was the escape hatch for all the people who dissented from the rules. And they did exactly as described, which was they were able to reach each other, they were able to communicate with each other, they were able to gather information, to understand that they, the other people, besides themselves, didn't think that this was right. And in a sense, that ability managed to bring the thing to a close and managed to reframe the situation so that today is an open question about whether the thing was proper in the first

12:02place. And so that, I think, was revealed to be the vulnerability of the whole campaign. And therefore it has become imperative to try and fix it for the next time, whatever the next time happens to look like. Yeah. And so I think that there is perhaps analogously an attempt to control dissenting voices, certainly dissenting voices online, that may be questioning certain policy issues, questioning say the mainstream narrative on immigration policy, for example, or certain policy issues adopted by populist governments like the AFD in Germany or reform in Britain. And certainly concerns about the return of Trump in a desire to control the narrative about MAGA, for example, in the US. So do you see that, you know, perhaps there are analogies here, and this could be driving some of the attempts to censor and control free speech?

13:03Yes. Yes. Absolutely. No question about it. And the fact of the matter is that the belief in free speech with the exception of a particular constituency, you know, the libertarians of the classical liberals, the belief in free speech might maybe actually a mirage or a sleething idea. Let's put it this way. It might be that free speech is a thing that the side that is losing believes in. The side that is not in power believes in free speech because their speech is being censored. And when you're in power, you don't care that much because you have control and you have a narrative that you think is crucial to your continuation of being on the top. And therefore, the idea that some narratives should be censored is not that big a deal. Right? So it has been this way for such a long time, right? So it used to be originally, I'm not sure if originally is the right word, but, you know, the left was the constituency in the 1960s, for example, that was where the free

14:09speech was. In the 1980s, cross-centred, I don't know if the idea was right. Exactly so. That's right. And that's because their speech was being censored by the conservative right who were ascended at the time. And of course, the whole thing flipped eventually because the progressives became ascendant and centered speech in a different way that the conservative right did not approve of. And so the conservative right became the free speech warriors and, you know, back and forth and back and forth. In other words, I think both of those ideological persuasions are actually more interested in proper speech than in free speech because their records just don't just don't bear the weight of the claim that they are interested in free speech for its own sake. Right. So do you think that there is, it's just simply instrumental, essentially, the free speech is invoked in order to open up ground for one's own narrative and then, yeah.

15:10It is instrumental, it is instrumental, but I think it also goes back to that idea of the group being the moral agent, right. So if, and this is consistent with the way they both behave and, and, and, and frankly, the beliefs they both profess, right. So if the conservatives believe in institutions as they, as they commonly say that they do, what they mean by that is the individual requires institutions with authority to be able to guide them along a proper path, okay. That means guidance from above. That means you are being told what to do in, in very sort of crude terms. And of course, the progressive left is exactly the same in the, in that abstract sense. They are, they, you know, once they've grasped power, they are not interested in individual deciding their own way. I mean, they are also very much interested in institutions because of all the trouble that they went to, to capture them, right.

16:11So in a way, they're, of course, the moral order is that they believe and are very, very different, you know, mirror opposites of each other. But they both believe in the same abstract idea that it is, in fact, the group as guided by institutions that is the moral agent and is the, is the, is the essential thing that has to get things right. And as, as long as you have that as the idea, then the idea of sort of curbing, limiting, restricting, guiding individuals is not that big a deal because it's, it's not, it is not in itself an immoral idea because the group is the moral agent. Yeah. So it's really only when you're committed to the individual and individual integrity and individual rights that you can defend from a logical foundation, the moral position of free speech. Hmm. Right. Exactly. So if you are requiring people to behave morally and you succeed, like they would say, well, what is the problem?

17:12I mean, the result here is, is correct. We have managed to use our laws in an instrumental way to achieve the proper moral result. So everybody should be happy. Yeah. We see concerns currently on the so-called right or amongst conservatives where they seemed to lack a sufficiently rigorous defense of free speech or, yeah. Oh, oh, absolutely. No, no question. So for example, I'm reminded of a, of a Texas law that came forth maybe a few months ago that required Internet service providers or websites, I forget which, to take ID, to record ID from adult users of foreign sites, right? To save, you know, to save the children, you know, I've got no, I've got no problem with children not having access to foreign sites, but what they're doing is dictating the way

18:18in which adults will interact online in order to achieve their legislative purpose, right? And that kind of thing is not unusual on the conservative right as the kind of justification that they mean for censoring speech. Those adults are being controlled. And of course, that's a very different kind of objective than you get from the left. But nevertheless, it is still the same kind of root, like we are going to use our legislative power to require you to do or not to do certain things because we don't approve of the result that you are leading to. We also saw a knee jerk desire to control online speech interestingly after the murder of Charlie Kirk, for example, there was a number of conservative voices that wanted to prosecute people for admittedly, absolutely egregious behavior, celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk and so on and so forth. And I think you see similar sorts of things amongst conservatives with regards to say flag

19:25burning or disrespecting, you know, the constitution and so on. Fortunately, though, what I've seen and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about this, what I've seen is that because free speech is more robustly defended amongst conservatives now, they seem to have adopted a libertarian classical liberal line on speech and censorship. There was in general a conservative rallying around free speech and a defense of free speech, a calling out, if you will, or a policing of their own, of conservative voices that were not sufficiently respectful of free speech, do you see the same sort of thing going on? Yes, I think that's fair. I think that's fair and you know, Charlie Kirk personified the idea of dialogue and free speech.

20:25And so, you know, in many respects, it was difficult to justify that kind of, you know, desire to crack down on speech, commenting on that outcome. And so, so they're right. So it's not a right off. I mean, there is, there is hope there are elements within that constituency that I think understand the imperatives that they need to push back against. And to be fair also, some of the steps that have been criticized by the left as in incursions on the free speech, so for example, that Trump administration's directives to universities, you know, that you shall not, you know, go in full on D and so on. Those are not, those, for my money, those are not free speech questions. What the administration is doing in that situation is saying, look, you are getting federal

21:30money. We are simply telling you, if you are going to keep receiving federal money, we are going to set the policy under which that money is going to be used. And if you don't want the money, that's totally fine. Then you can go off and do whatever you want. So that is, that is not censorship in the same sense at all. What the, what the left is basically saying, there is, no, no, we have the right to the money and to do with it, whatever we want, even though it's public money, and that I don't buy at all. That's right. Yeah. And some institutions pointedly do not take federal funds in order to preserve that independence like Hillsdale and others. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yes. Many of the free speech movements seem to be concerned about preserving free speech online. And that seems to be the battlefield now. I'm thinking of figures like Mike Benz in the US and Matt IEB and Michael Schellenberger reporting on the Twitter files.

22:33Do you think that there are distinct fields of that all for lack of a better word that make the, the effort to preserve or reclaim free speech different depending upon the context or is this all kind of of a piece? It's difficult, right, because it is true that the internet is becoming the place where free speech happens. Right. If you look at the controversial speech restrictions, speech laws in the past, they've been, well, in Canada, they've been provincial primarily because the province controls property and civil rights. And so most of the activity in the civil realm, civil liberties are under provincial jurisdiction. And so the restrictions that you had, for example, in provincial human rights codes was about whether or not you could post, post flyers in the parking lot that said a certain thing.

23:34And sure, that's still going to happen. But that's not the primary way people communicate now in the public square. It is online, it's on social media, it's on the internet and so on. And so yes, that, that is the place where the rubber hits the road now, but the complication is you can go by yourself with your own pieces of paper that you print it off on the, on the photocopier and go and, you know, put your posters under the, you know, the, the, the windshield wipers of the cars in the parking lot without any intermediary. But now we all have intermediaries, right? We all have big companies, big huge monolithic companies who control what is said on their platforms. And so that gets us into this difficult situation where we have to try and figure out where where the, where the state ends and where private commercial operations begin and, and when it is that a sector is so, you know, essentially it consists of an oligopoly that controls the

24:35speech of a nation or even broader than that, you know, it introduces an elements into the, the problem that didn't exist before. And so we still have to figure out, and we, I don't want to, I, I'm not keen on simply going to the place which says, well, you know, they're big companies and therefore they not allowed to tell you what to say on their platform. I mean, that, that, that's not a, that's not a principled position to take. Nevertheless, I understand that if, to any extent, their dominance in this space is because of government intervention, government protection, well, then that is the problem. And we need to look at that. Yes, I mean, this, this is a very complicated gray area, isn't it? This distinction between private and public and certainly is, where you have, what we have traditionally thought of as fairly robust protections for free speech,

25:41first amendment, of course, that, that protects free speech. But what we've seen is this attempt by certain elements of the government, and I'm thinking of the DHS under the Biden administration, to sort of, in a sense, have third party censorship, effectively control the sorts of things that people are able to say. So the collusion between the Biden White House and the Stanford Internet Observatory and other tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook and others, and I, I say collusion. I mean, there were accusations of collusion and collaboration amongst those entities. Some of that is still up for debate. There are obviously many different opinions about what was going on there. But it seems that there was sort of an effort to censor by other means rather than direct

26:43government involvement. Yes, and this also happens to be the way that a lot of COVID measures were put into place also, right? It's a way to get around the explicit protections you have in the Bill of Rights or the Charter of Rights. You find the gaps, you go around the back door, you suggest to the commercial operations that are out there that this is what you would like to see as a government. It's not a rule, but nevertheless, you can understand if you're one of these commercial operations that they're going to be consequences if you do or don't, do it's a government prefers. Whether or not you're a big internet company or whether or not you are a restaurant that says, well, we're actually being heard here into doing a certain thing even in those moments when it's not actually a course of rule. It's a very difficult thing now because it's almost to the point now where we have to concede that anything that government does,

27:47whether it appears to be voluntary or not like an astral voluntary action is actually coercive because of the nature of the beast. Whenever a government asks for something and claims it's not coercive, well, it's the government and the government takes taxes that government has resources through coercive means the government has the power to coercive you don't cooperate. I think the line maybe should be set at saying, look, whatever governments do, whatever it's appearance, the government is a coercive entity and therefore that's the way it should be seen in the law. But Bruce, it's the ministry of love. It says right here, it's the online safety act or the online harms act. Exactly so. Yes, I think that's a very important point. The suggestion or the request is backed up with always a threat of coercion. Sure. And this is even a more

28:50important distinction in my books than the distinction between the individual and the group. When libertarians talk, sometimes the objection is, well, you guys are against groups. You know, you want individuals to exist as atomized individuals without connections with families and religious organizations and community groups and so on. And of course, that is completely untrue, completely untrue. The distinction is between voluntary and involuntary. As long as your actions are voluntary, you can gather together with whoever you want. You have groups, you know, have religions, have families, have big families. I mean, great. Because you're now behaving as a free individual or free human being. It's the involuntaryness of the way institutions and especially, of course, government institutions work. Even when they don't actually enforce a rule, they have the power, both potential legal power and maybe even today kind of moral authority,

29:56to dictate to people what to do. And that's the problem. It is when you cross over from voluntary to involuntary, which is where all these speech problems arise. So here's one other example. So in Canada, we have this terrible situation where the government is funding legacy media. They are paying television stations and newspapers are subsidizing the salaries of the journalists who are covering the government. So that's not coercive in the sense of an explicit rule that says, you know, you can't say this and you must say that and you must cover us and what we do in a favorable way. That has not happened and there wouldn't be silly enough to do that. It's just, well, here's some money from the state. And by the way, you are the outfits that are supposed to be covering what the state does in the public interest. Well, that's an obvious conflict of interest.

30:56And the mere entry of the state into this space, which in a not obviously coercive way, excuse the whole package. And in Canada, for those who aren't Canadians, it's one step worse in that the independent news agencies like rebel media are often excluded explicitly from parliamentary debates or from debates amongst prospective leaders of the opposition and so forth. That's right. There's another consequence of the state's ability to certify and to allow and to license and to give permission, right? If you can give permission to some, then you can deny permission to others. So if you want to pretend that some journalists have accreditation, then you can pretend that others don't. I mean, there's nothing in it. How did you become a professional accredited journalists? Well, what does that mean? And in addition, the fact that you

31:59are subsidizing some means that the others who don't get subsidization means that they are immediately at a competitive disadvantage. I mean, you can't compete in a free market if the market's not free. I mean, the same thing happens with the universities. Most large universities in Canada are public universities in the sense that they are partially subsidized by public funds. That means the prospect of being able to launch and run a private university is diminished because you are competing against other entities that have a step up on you in the monetary sense. Because they're getting funded by the state. So the participation in any of these areas by governments with tax dollars skews the marketplace and interferes with what otherwise would be the outcome. Well, we've seen the unraveling of a large state-funded broadcaster in the UK. The BBC has come under fire recently for very deliberately constructing a false picture of

33:08what happened on January 6, 2021 by piecing together, slicing and dicing and piecing together Trump's speech in order to present Trump in a particular light. Yes. Well, they made a strategic mistake there. They just went a little bit too far. So it was obvious what it was that they had done. But this kind of thing is happening all the time. I would imagine the BBC, and certainly at the BBC. The BBC has become a propaganda machine. But you need to be able to see it when you watch it. And a lot of people who are used to it don't see it for what it is. And so if you are one of these organizations, the thing you don't do, you try and figure out where the line is. And the BBC crossed that line in the Trump example that you're referring to. Because everybody, you can see my backside. Here's what you display it. And here's the real one. And everybody can see, oh, that's not correct. But if you don't go quite that far, if all you do instead is to frame

34:15things in a way that is in accordance with the ideology and the agenda that you're supporting, well, then it's not so obvious. So you have the CBC to spin this out. You have the CBC focused on one small corner of the trucker protest, but completely ignoring people playing street hockey and adopting a trucker and bouncy castles and late night dances. That's right. Well, there's a great example that I, this is, this is, you know, years ago now when the trucker thing was happening. There are some smart help person filmed the CBC filming the crowds, like the truckers were traveling from wherever they started from towards Ottawa. The CBC was out. You know, it became a thing because people are starting to to support them and wave flags as they pass by and so on. And in some situations they sent a CBC crew out to record, you know, how small

35:21the crowd was at these places that the truckers were passing by. But some smart person recorded the CBC reporter and noted that the camera was pointed one way and the crowd was behind them. Right. So it looked like there was nobody there, but actually there were huge crowds that weren't, that were not reported on the CBC. The, the bias becomes all the more apparent when you scan headlines internationally or you scan multiple legacy media headlines and see that they're virtually indistinguishable from one another. It says though they're all getting their news from the same source. I mean, almost verbatim. That's right. And that is not it engages with this free speech issue in important ways because these, these outfits are in theory, the outfits that are supposed to be most committed to free speech and open critical inquiry and finding the story,

36:23so to speak, that can tell us something true about what's going on in the world. But it's clear that something like the opposite is going on. Oh, no question. No question. And it's one of the tragedies of our era, right? I don't imagine that the framers of the US Constitution would have sought that the press would have become sort of the fourth pillar of the state. And, and the, it's so the so-called enemy of the people because they are the ones responsible for framing the narrative and getting people to to cooperate and follow the path of what they're being told to do. And back to your point about social media, the social media is the is the is the solution to that in some respects and the weakness of that of that situation. So it's maybe we're just lucky that the social media thing is happening more or less at the same time that the corporate media is becoming, you know, embedded with the state itself. If that hadn't happened, then who knows where we would be today? Yeah. Yeah. So what's the the path forward here, Bruce? I mean, how do we

37:29navigate the next few years to reclaim some of, you know, our our liberties on this front? Like let's take Canada as an example with ill-caate and C9 winding their way through parliament. Um, other than trying to educate the public about the value of free speech, what what measures should we be pursuing? Yeah. Well, it's a very good question. It's a very difficult one to answer because the things don't look very good in Canada, frankly. Because because the for many reasons, but one of them is that the many of the people seem to believe in the idea that the government is there to keep them safe and to manage social problems and to respond quickly to things, whether it's speech or COVID or whatever the case may be, climate change, right? That's

38:30if you went up to the one of them and said, do you really think this is what government is for? They might say, uh, don't understand the question. What do you mean? What is the government for? I mean, this is what government is, right? This is why we have it to respond to social problems and to manage our society because how can we how can we manage to make our way through without a managerial class of people who don't know what they're doing? Okay, you got to get rid of that idea. And one of the difficulties with focusing on free speech as a thing, I mean, of course, we need to do that because it's under threat. But the way, you know, our bill of the bill of rights and the charter of rights are framed is that it looks like free speech is a thing itself. But along with the other kinds of rights that you might be able to find in those documents. But I think that's an unfortunate consequence of the way it's been framed. It's like I think it we better off to think of freedom as a singular thing. It's a state of being. It's a political

39:37and legal state of being. You know, it means that you are not subject to coercion with the force of the state to make you do or not do things you don't want to do. And all of these particular instances, you know, free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association and so on are simply, you know, instances or expressions of that basic state. But that's not the way we see it. We think free speech is the thing and freedom of religion is the thing and so on. And I think we have to get away from that. And we have to make the point that our constitutional structures now have been revealed to not be based upon the idea of the liberty of the individual. I mean, these rights that have been set out in these documents are simply carving out very narrow exceptions to the general proposition that the state is all powerful. It has a responsibility to provide for the general welfare. Okay. That's a terrible idea because there are infinite numbers of

40:42justifications for doing anything on the basis of the providing for the general welfare or emergency or common interest or public goods. I mean, that's the playbook. So it's going to be a very difficult task, I think, but it is that core idea that it is the job of the state to provide for these things. And it is the group or the nation that is the moral agent. And if you don't have that, you don't have meaning, you don't have meaning, you don't have anything. And therefore, the individual has been, you know, placed at the bottom of the heap. And that's a very difficult narrative to push back on and overcome in the minds of the people who are used to it. Yes. Yeah. No, I think that's very well well said and makes the broader philosophical point. I mean, in a sense, we need to return to a robust individualism that not only sees individuals

41:43as separate moral agents, but also, you know, in a sense, revitalize kind of heroism about individualism, about people taking control of their own lives, their own destinies, and responsibility for their futures. Yes. Yes. Yes. We are lacking agency, a belief in agency. People don't believe they have agency and that they are dependent. And some of them said their rights about the degree to which agency has been overwhelmed by the mechanisms of the state. So, yes, I agree. Bruce, thanks very much for talking with me about the support and issue. Thank you, Jonathan. It's been a pleasure. Always.