I wonder sometimes when I read the letters and the reports that come through our media whether we have given up our right to free speech without even realizing it.
We have the human rights commission which limits our ability to speak freely about our opinions on matters of social and political concern.
To do so means the threat of spending a lot of our own money on lawyers to defend ourselves in front of a tribunal. We have the federal government talking about licensing of newspapers in order to control who can say what and when.
I also noticed that when Canadian citizens attempted to remove an illegal blockade from a highway it was they who were arrested and not the people who had set up the illegal blockade. Some have claimed that those removing the blockades were racist. I don’t believe that is true.
I am not in the process of debating whether these blockades should or should not be observed. I am of the belief that everyone is entitled to free speech. And part of that free speech should be to express our views when we see laws being broken.
Most of us can agree that disobeying the rule of law is a different matter and it angers us to see law enforcement kept from doing their job. Should we take matters into our own hands? Probably not. Otherwise we descend into anarchy.
And then we have our local education board, the Chinook's Edge School Division, keeping private the information about a visit from an important provincial minister. The comments by the editor of the local paper were bang on. We deserve better.
The public has a right to know what is going on. Meetings behind closed doors do not lead us to have more confidence in our elected leaders. Perhaps they need to remember they were elected.
All of these items point to the same troubling conclusion: that we are not to say what we think, that we are not allowed to show our opinions publicly, that we are not allowed to question the powers that be on the error of their ways. That we should, “Put Up And Shut Up."
Is this the Canada that you are so proud of?
Or have we simply put our heads in the sand and decided that we will not speak out anymore? If the latter point is the case, then I fear for our society and our country.
Chuck Blanchard has been an Innisfail resident for 11 years and is a former two-term mayor of Invermere, B.C.
