I wasn't going to post about Ezra Levant's recent interview at TVO. But, this uninteresting interview is now up on The International Free Press Society, which is elevating Levant's run-of-the-mill discussion as a "freedom of the press" and "freedom of expression" issue, as their website indicates.
In Levant's comments section at his website on his TVO post, there is praise after praise for his positions. There are also comments on Steve Paikin's (the TVO host) role as a devil's advocate.
Steve Paikin was no devil's advocate. He was expressing a genuine, naive and good-hearted concern, which I think many Canadians have, when he kept saying things like "you feel your identity is under attack" and especially this:
"Is it not beneficial to a society to try to reduce the amount of hate that we inspire through writings towards one another? Is that not an intrinsically good thing to do?"Paiken’s well-taken point is: how do we deal with all these differences, these inequalities, these potentials for hurts and insults that is now so prevalent in Canadian society?
Levant was really quite unprepared to answer this question. He is stuck in his narrow fight of dismantling this fraudulent institution. And he never questions why it exists in the first place.
My answer, as I’ve indicated in many posts, is that as long as high levels of immigration of peoples of such divergent backgrounds from the traditional Canadian culture and society continues, there will be increasing governmental coercion to be "nice" to our neighbors. Dismantling the HRCs doesn’t get rid of the problem.
There is nothing wrong with being good neighbors, as Paiken innocently kept bringing up. But, if our whole governmental system is geared toward forcing people to be nice to each other, and specifically to the new comers of such divergent and different backgrounds, then we have to start asking how to stop this.
One obvious solution is to reduce (stopping is too much to ask) the number of immigrants that come into Canada.
If Levant had read my blog, and I don’t mean this facetiously since none of the other conservative bloggers and writers are bringing this up, and also read my most recent recommendation, Lawrence Auster’s The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, he would have known how to respond to Paiken.
In fact, I also invite Steve Paiken to this blog to get a clearer answer for the kinds of questions he was asking Levant.
Levant has an obligation to answer genuine questions like Paiken's and which ordinary Canadians are also asking. They sincerely want to live in harmony with their neighbors. He has entered into the fray of coercive governmental policies. He cannot avoid the issue of high immigration and the many HRC-type of activities the government is still performing.
