Ezra Levant argues Canada’s administrative state—where legislature, judiciary, and executive align on managing society—resembles fascism, comparing it to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. He critiques inconsistent hate speech laws, citing pro-Hamas protests in Toronto while conservatives like the Freedom Convoy face prosecution, and warns against suppressing grievances rather than addressing them. Testifying before Parliament, Levant demands repealing Bills C-63, C-18, C-11, and C-16’s gender amendments, framing free speech as a shield against government overreach, not truth-seeking. Without restraints, he predicts a future where dissenting journalists are either state-funded or silenced, undermining democracy’s core principles. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, a feature interview today with Bruce Party, the law professor who fights for freedom every day.
You don't have a lot of those left.
I'm always amazed that he hasn't been sacked by his university for being too free to me.
We'll have a great chat with him today, but let me invite you to get the video version of this podcast.
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Tonight, a feature interview with Bruce Pardee, one of the few remaining freedom-oriented law professors in Canada.
It's December 27th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Professors Matter00:06:20
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
You know, I enjoyed my time as a university student.
Maybe that's why I spent seven years in university, but I didn't take enough of the classics of humanities, of history, of philosophy.
I took more commerce and law, which really are trade schools, let's be honest.
I'm not sure if I would do well in university these days because so much of it is infused with politics.
You know, I always loved Shakespeare ever since high school.
I don't think I could survive a Shakespeare course at a university because it would be unlocking feminist narratives or transgender narratives.
And, oh, they would find them.
They would torture that text until they would find them.
I just don't think I would survive there.
I would probably try and get my professional degree and then scram as soon as possible.
And I think it's because the culture of the university of change, of course, culture is just the plural form of people.
What's culture other than a group of people and how they act and how they talk and how they think and what they value?
And I think there's a change in the culture of academics themselves.
Obviously, not all of them, but every year more old school professors retire, and every year new professors are hired, promoted, and granted tenure.
And I think the idea of a professor who loves a rollicking debate and teaches how to think rather than what to think, I just get the feeling that they are an endangered species.
And I don't mean to call our next guest that because I certainly don't want to summon any demons that would take him out.
But I really do think if I were a university student, I would choose my courses and maybe even my university based on could I find some professors that I respect, even if I disagree with them.
Is there a professor who's intellectually honest and rigorous, who can handle an argy bargie back and forth?
I had a little bit of that when I went to law school some 30 years ago.
I don't know if I would find that now.
You probably know who I'm talking about because I can count the number of critical thinking, debate-oriented professors on one hand's fingers.
What a pleasure to be joined by Bruce Party, professor of law, and all-around good guy.
Also, he's an expert with the McDonald Laurier Institute and with other think tanks because he does a lot of thinking.
Professor, great to see you again.
Australia, always good to see you.
Thanks for having me on.
You know, let me just ask, how is school going?
You're teaching again, right?
Yes.
Yes, and it's going great.
How are the kids?
I'm calling them kids.
Everyone younger than 40 is a kid to me.
How are the students?
They're great.
They're good.
I have two groups in the fall term, and they're both terrific.
One's a first-year group, and one was an upper-year seminar course.
And, you know, they're good.
They have open minds, and they're inclined to speak when given the chance.
So have they selected your class because of you, because of how you address things, or is it almost random?
I mean, I would think that students with a particular point of view might seek you out.
Is that happening?
Well, they don't have a choice in first year.
So they may have either won the lottery or lost it.
I'm not sure which they think.
You can choose your seminar courses every year on your own.
So some of them may have self-selected.
Who knows?
I can't tell you for sure, but I enjoyed the group.
Forgive me.
I just have one last question, and I'll move on to your ideas, but I am sort of daydreaming about what it would be like to be in college these days.
I remember about 30 years ago, I attended a class that would absolutely be banned in 2024.
It was the retired professor, he's retired now, Tom Flanagan, who was a professor at the University of Calgary.
And he taught a course called Biopolitics, where he sought to understand: are there any links between biology and politics?
He would try and answer questions like, why are there more men in politics, especially at high levels, than women?
Why are there more men in certain professions than women?
Why are so many women in nursing and education and so many men in carpentry and deep sea fishing?
So he would try and find a biological root.
You would never be allowed to teach that.
I don't think that would be called racist and sexist and things like that.
There were some students, professor, who chose that class to spar with Dr. Tom Flanagan, to argue with them.
And it actually made the class wonderful.
I mean, I was an ally of Dr. Tom's, but I love that there were feminists who showed up every day and they really teased out, coaxed out the debate.
Is there any of that going on?
And this is my last question about your teaching.
Just forgive me.
I'm just so excited that you're back in the classroom.
Do you have any students who say, I'm going to take on Bruce Party?
I'm going to out-debate him.
Does that happen?
It happens on occasion.
Sure.
And I enjoy that too.
I would like my students to do that.
And occasionally they do.
And that's very much encouraged in my classrooms.
I can't speak for the other classrooms.
I'm not in there.
But that's always been my idea as well of what a good university environment is.
So yeah.
All right.
I'll move on to the heavier matters, but I was just reminiscing about my own college experience long ago in the 20th century.
I want to talk about one of the mediums that professors like yourself have at your disposal in 2024 that were not around when I was in school, ways that you can express yourself even beyond the dozens or hundreds who might be in your school.
One of them is a platform called Substack.
It's really the updated version of what would have been called blogging 20 years ago.
It's a very popular platform, and it actually allows people to make a little bit of money.
There's a subscription or there's a free model.
And Professor, you started a new substack called First Principles with Bruce Party.
Rule of Law vs. Legislative Tyranny00:11:21
And you have a post on there called Our Constitutional Mistake.
All we have ever done is move power around.
I'll just read the first sentence or two, and then I'd love you to take it away.
We made a mistake, you said.
Kings once ruled England with absolute power.
Their word was the law.
Centuries of struggle and reform gradually overcame their tyranny.
We adopted this idea called the rule of law.
We established checks, balances, limits, restraints, and individual rights.
For a while, it worked.
The law in Canada, as in other countries, that inherited British common law, provided a system of justice as good as anything that civilization had ever produced.
But, but now the rule of law is fading.
That's a lot of stuff.
You know, they say always ignore everything before the word but.
Like when people say, I'm for free speech, but ignore everything before the word but.
You just said we got the best system in the world, but what do you mean?
Yeah, the but is it's fading.
And so we've been operating on this assumption that the rule of law works because people, especially those people who are in charge, believe in the rule of law.
But the rule of law means that governments are restrained.
And one of the ways we do that is to have checks and balances.
You know, different branches of the state do different things, and then they compete against each other.
And, you know, that can work, and it has worked in the past, but it's not working so well now.
And I don't mean that they always agree.
They have their quabbles, quibbles, quibbles, and fights, quarrels.
But for the most part, the people who rule us now share a belief in the proper role of the state.
And the proper role of the state is to manage, to manage society, to manage the people to proper ends.
And the checks and balances are not checking and balancing each other anymore.
So, for example, if you look at what we're complaining about at different moments in time, we will complain about a statute that the legislature has passed because the statute does something egregious.
But in a different moment, we complain about what the courts do.
The courts make a decision that is not in accordance with what we believe the Constitution says, for example.
Or then we, on a different occasion, we complain about what some bureaucrat has done, because after all, bureaucrats are not elected, and not a court.
Okay.
Well, now we've criticized what each of the three branches has done.
The legislature, the judiciary, and the executive.
And our complaint is that they are pushing us around.
And that is true in each of those three cases.
So all we've done in the very beginning, starting with the king, you know, this evolution of the rule of law began a long time ago, maybe with the Magna Carta.
And the original problem was the king, because the king had absolute power.
And so eventually, we got around to the idea that maybe we shouldn't have one guy with all the power.
And so we took power away from the king and gave it to legislatures.
And that sounds better, right?
Because legislatures are elected, or mostly, sometimes now.
Fine, except that legislatures over time proved that they could be tyrants too.
They passed legislation that we don't like.
So the Americans came along first and said, we have a solution to that.
We're going to create a Bill of Rights.
Now, what does the Bill of Rights do?
All it does is take power away from the legislature, the Congress in the case of the federal government in the U.S., and give it to the courts to say when the Congress has gone too far.
Moving power around.
And then we have a last step, which is that the courts and the legislature now move power back to the king.
But the king's not there anymore.
Instead of the king, we have an administrative state.
So these three branches, these three groups of people, the legislature, the courts, and the executive branch, all of those bureaucrats and the people who rule over them, are now managing society, and they all agree about that.
And so the mistake that we made, our constitutional mistake, was we didn't go far enough.
All we have ever done is move power around from place to place to place instead of taking it away and saying, no, no, no, you can't rule over me without my consent.
We have never gotten to that place.
You know, when you were describing the administrative state, we hear, you know, Eisenhower used the phrase the military-industrial complex.
You also hear the national security apparatus.
I think these are all different facets of what is sometimes called the deep state.
People you can't get rid of.
You can't vote them out.
They'll outlast you.
There used to be a British comedy called Yes Minister that was about all these politicians who were a little bit buffoonish and how the permanent staff was sort of manipulate them and coax them to do this or that.
But I think it's a beautiful show and it illustrates the point really, really well.
So go on.
I'm sorry, I interrupted.
Well, let me play a clip a bit, just to show people what I'm talking about.
And they would have this code language.
If a minister had a big idea, they'd say, oh, minister, that's very bold.
Which is, as in, you're going to get, it's just a clip to show what I'm talking about.
I suppose the origin of this criticism is this rumor about another big scandal in the city.
How did you guess?
Oh, Humphrey, I've decided to respond to all this criticism about a scandal in the city.
The press is demanding action.
What are you proposing to do?
I shall appoint someone.
And when did you take this momentous decision?
Today, when I read the papers, but when did you first think of it?
Today, when I read the papers.
And for how long may I ask, did you weigh the pros and cons of this decision?
Not long.
I decided to be decisive.
Prime Minister, if I may say, I think you worry too much about what the papers say.
Only a civil servant could have made that remark, Bernard.
The thing is, Bruce, the government was so much smaller, they couldn't intrude on you.
I remember when I was in university, my favorite course was actually Latin American history, and we studied the conquistadors.
And the conquistadors, when they went to the new world and brought back all their gold, you know what their tax was?
They called it the royal fifth.
As long as they gave a fifth of anything to the king, they were good to go.
Now are we at the royal two-fifths?
In Canada, it's more than the royal half.
And so the thing is, if you had this quarrel between politicians and judges and the deep state, well, if they're only haggling over one-fifth of the world, that gives us four-fifths to be free in.
But add in AI, add in the big tech panopticon, always spying on you, always controlling everything 24-7.
I think that the state has gotten bigger economically, but then it's bolted on this tool where it is continuous shaping of your world.
And a lot of that is either government-designed or government-partnered, like big tech and big government.
Maybe that's the problem, is that suddenly it's not just that we give 50% of our money to the government, it's that we give 99% of our lives to the government in some form through tech.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah.
No, I've called this the coming state singularity, that moment when state and society become indistinguishable.
The state has taken over the job of shaping society to such an extent that it's starting to be difficult to know where it begins and ends.
And that includes taking commerce and markets and companies and so on under its wing and cooperation.
I mean, that's, if you like, that's the definition of corporatism and indeed a fascism, where even the private entities in a society are all on the same page and believing in the same ideas and rowing in the same direction.
That's not a free society.
But you're referring to a question and a problem that may start to come to the surface in the United States shortly and is in the background here, which is, you know, as we all know, in the United States, they've turned a page, right?
They have a new government coming on with a different kind of mandate altogether, which is which is going to be fantastic to watch.
But there's going to be tension there as well between two kinds of forces inside the same on the same team.
One of them, I think, is going to be a reform branch that wants to slash and cut and abolish parts of the government, the Dodge people, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musks.
And there's another branch, though.
The other branch is the people who actually would probably embrace the administrative state as long as it can be changed so as to promote the right virtues and values.
That is, if you take the bad people out and put the good people in, we want to maintain the mechanism of government to manage the people.
We just want to manage them in the middle.
Who would that be?
So Vidvik Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are the big cutters in the Department of Government excess or whatever it stands for.
Right.
Efficient Department of Government Efficiency.
Who are these people in the Trump world who you think lust for the power?
They just want to have their team wielding it.
Who are they?
JD Vance, for one.
JD Vance is a, I would describe him as a common good conservative, meaning that he, amongst others, believe in the idea of government being a guiding light.
They believe in institutions.
They believe in authority as long as it's wise authority.
They believe in telling people what to do.
Now, preferably voluntarily.
They don't want to make people do things, but if push comes to shove and people choose badly, then there must be somebody with wisdom and authority and expertise there to guide people in the right way.
You know, I'm pretty liberty-oriented, pretty small government-oriented.
Libertarian Limits00:15:36
But let me tell you, I had an experience a couple months ago.
I went to San Francisco's tenderloin district.
Our friend from Australia, Avi Amini, had just landed in San Francisco and he took an RV for a month across America doing stories about the election.
And I went to greet him when he landed in San Francisco, which was really Kamala Harris Central.
That's where she grew up in politics and got her start.
She really is the personification of all the policies of that city.
It's just a wreck.
And we went to the Fentany Capitol.
It was terrifying.
Although I got to tell you, Bruce, Vancouver's East Hastings Street is worse.
I was there with this Aussie and this Ontarian in San Francisco.
They were shocked by what they saw.
And I kept saying, guys, it is literally worse in Vancouver.
But here's my point.
Let me just tell you 30 seconds of this.
There was a guy I met, young black guy, sitting there, stoned out of his mind.
And I said, does anyone help you?
I said to him, would you like it if someone came and just took you away even if you didn't want that?
Do you need some powerful person to save you from yourself and your drug dealer?
And I asked that question of a number of people.
And what do you think he said, Bruce?
He said, yes, please.
Here, take a look at that clip from the Tenderloin District.
As of right now, I hang out on the stream.
I'm trying to get a job.
I just got out of jail, actually.
Where do you sleep?
Really?
I just stay up all night as of right now because I get my stuff stolen.
The moment you fall sleep out here, your stuff goes missing right away.
What substances are you on?
Are you trying to get off them?
Yeah, I'm on fentanyl.
That's the boxing for it.
I'll try to wean myself off of it with.
How long have you been on fentanyl?
About two and a half, three years.
You're not going to stop until you're ready yourself.
What if someone came in and took you off the street here and put you somewhere, even if you didn't want to go there until you were clean?
Would that work or is that just not going to work?
So that's libertarianism.
There's a guy, my body, my choice.
That guy in particular wasn't harming anyone else.
I mean, he was, I wouldn't really walk near him if I had young children or something, but he wasn't violent, at least then, although I think if he needed a fix, he would do literally anything to get the dough.
But what do you say when you say you want liberty?
Let's empty the insane asylums.
Let's empty the drug rehab clinics.
You want your pure liberty.
You got it.
Lower East Side, Vancouver, Tenderloin District, San Francisco.
And boy, I hope you're strong enough to resist the addiction because it'll get you.
What do you make of that?
And I'm just playing devil's advocate.
What would you say to that young kid who basically said, please, someone save me from myself?
Right.
Right.
Well, so, but that's an interesting conversation that you had with him, right?
Because he was able to articulate what he really wanted.
So you wouldn't actually be acting against his wishes or without his consent, really.
I mean, maybe there might be moments when you said, no, I've changed my mind.
But in those instances, and you made this distinction yourself in your description, in those instances where somebody is causing other people harm or threatening them with harm, then that's not what we're talking about.
You don't have the liberty to do that.
But if you are dealing just with yourself and you are otherwise competent, and that may be an open question with some of these people that you're referring to.
But if you are competent and you are dealing only with yourself, then it's very difficult to figure out what the justification is for making somebody do something differently.
Now, in practical terms, you can see the argument with respect to someone who's addicted to drugs.
But you can take that idea and say, well, yes, you're free, but you're not free to act against your own self-interest.
If you apply that across the board, then now you got real trouble.
Because there are a lot of people who are going to say, well, yes, but you really shouldn't be spending your money for that because that's not in your self-interest.
Or you shouldn't be carrying on like that in your social life because that's not in your self-interest.
It's the invitation to those people who know better than you do about life.
You could have a COVID vaccine who's saying, I need to vacc you because you know not what you do.
That's exactly right.
That's a very good example of what I'm talking about.
Once you cross that threshold into saying that somebody else has better idea than you do about your life, now you're into a problem space.
So sometimes it's difficult, though.
But this is one thing.
The example that you brought up is very important because this is the typical example that is brought forward.
The person who wants to use heroin is not free.
Yes, they are.
Of course they are.
Because freedom means not being coerced by other people or the state.
If you're not being coerced by other people or the state, then you are free.
Okay, but what about banning drugs?
I mean, Justin Trudeau, when I think of what he's most passionate about, drug legalization was really core.
I mean, he was a user himself, and he thought, oh, this will give me young voters.
And I would say censorship is his second passion.
His, not just rolling out marijuana legalization, but decriminalization of hard drugs, that has altered the math tremendously in Canada.
Yes.
Yes.
But I don't think we're asking the right question.
Is that a violation of liberty to ban hard drugs?
Oh, sure it is.
Sure it is.
Sure it is.
I mean, if you're going to be literal about it, every prohibition that prevents you from doing something on your own is a violation of your liberty.
But I think we're missing the bigger question, which is why is it that if and when something is made to be legal again, why people would go and do it anyway?
I mean, if you're sitting in a room of people that you know, you know, in your living room, I mean, is it the case that if suddenly hard drugs were made to be legal, that those people would go and use them?
No.
They wouldn't dream of it.
So why is it that some people in our society are deciding to make that what appears to be a very unwise choice?
That's the more important question for me.
Well, and that's a more complex social and cultural and religious question.
I want to ask you about another challenge to freedom.
Yes.
Mass immigration of people who come to Canada with different values.
I look at what I love the best about Canada and other countries.
Like I've been to Ireland a couple times in the last year.
I see Ireland being transformed in front of my eyes.
It's astonishing.
I'll give you this anecdote.
I was in the little village of Dundrum, population 200, and the government took over the local hotel, bought it out, and has moved 280 military-age migrant men in there.
So the Irish population of Dundrum that's been there for centuries is now a minority in Dundrum.
And all sorts of mayhem will now follow when you have 240 single men.
I mean, everything has changed.
The high trust society that, of course, a young girl would play outside and walk home.
Of course, you don't need to lock your car doors, sorry, your car or your house.
Everything's changed because you don't have that high trust society.
In Canada, we see it.
All of a sudden, food banks are overwhelmed not with Canadian homeless, but with so-called foreign students who just realize that we're suckers and they don't have to pay for groceries.
They can get free food.
And you see some food banks saying, well, if you're an international student, we have to ban you because you don't share our code.
And at what point, and how do you, again, the libertarian point of view would say, let them in.
You know, who are you?
I think libertarians tend to open borders.
Well, many of them do.
Many of them do, but not all of them.
I don't.
I don't think open borders are a good idea.
So this is one of the divisions within the libertarian camp, if you like.
My take on this is that the citizens of a country own the country.
I mean, I think we should think about it that way.
And part of having a country is having borders.
If you don't have borders, you don't have a country.
You just have a space.
And so the idea that people should be able to come and go as they please, I mean, maybe in an ideal future world where all countries are built like that and all countries are essentially free, well, then maybe okay, right?
Because you should be able to live where you want.
But that's not the world we live in.
If you want to maintain a free country with the values that accompany that, then you better have borders.
Because if you have open borders, people are going to come from the countries that don't work that way and they're going to overwhelm the country that used to exist.
So I agree with you there.
You know, I really go far on free speech.
I abide anti-Semitism.
Even I'm Jewish.
I hate anti-Semitism.
But I know that, you know, freedom of speech is something you have to give your opponents if you want it for yourself.
I think you should marginalize it and denormalize it.
But what happens when you have such a vast inflow of people who grew up in an endemically anti-Semitic country?
And we never vet these people for a fit.
And so now I'm literally in a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto myself where every single Sunday, dozens of pro-Hamas protesters in loudspeakers shout atrocious anti-Semitic threats, really, calling for genocide.
And I'm thinking, okay, I want to, you know, maybe we can tackle this using real laws, mischief, nuisance, trespass, uttering threats.
I'm not a big fan of hate crimes.
They're on the books too.
None of these things are being pursued because of politics, because they're now a vast voter bloc.
And there are literally Jews who have been in Canada for generations who are saying, you know, How's it going to be in 10 more years?
How's it going to be in 10 more years after that?
Maybe, like the Jews of France, they got to leave.
I wouldn't want to be a Jew in Manchester, UK.
I wouldn't want to be a Jew in Birmingham if there's any left.
And what's the future for Jews in Montreal?
And I'm just speaking from a personal point of view because I love freedom of speech, and I love to be able to say I'm very principled on that, that I want it even for my opponents.
But at a certain point, there are so many people who do not share our basic underlying foundations that one of us has to leave the country.
Yeah, it's a difficult problem.
Part of the problem is, though, that we are getting into the era, some people have argued, of uneven application of laws.
That is, and you alluded to this in your comments, that once the thing becomes a political matter, then the law is not being neutral anymore.
So, if there are people who are actually making threats, like making a threat is one thing that free speech does not include.
You can't go up to somebody and threaten imminent violence, and you can't threaten genocide.
That's not supposed to be in the bucket of free speech.
So, if you actually have that happening, that might suggest that the law is not being applied the way we would like to imagine it.
And if you have laws that are not being applied evenly, regardless of the political orientations or the identities of the speakers, that's not good enough either.
And those things I think are part and parcel of the way our legal system is evolving.
It's all tied up with our laws about equity and hate speech and so on.
The social justice tide, which has changed our basic understandings about how the law is supposed to work.
So, I hear you.
I don't think, though, my inclination is not to throw away free speech.
I think that free speech idea is important for the protection of all those people that you might be concerned about.
Because once free speech gets weaponized, it will likely come back to bite you and be applied in the opposite way that you imagine it to be.
I'm subjective to complaints before the BC Human Rights Tribunal right now.
I mean, whatever law you give the government, thinking it'll be applied against your opponents, it will be used against you.
Exactly so.
And even if you're enjoying a moment where your guy has the whip in the hand, imagine your opponent having that same power because that'll be how it ends up.
You know, that's the irony.
The official Jews of Canada, as I call them, lobbied for these hate speech laws that really aren't being used against anti-Semites who abound.
They're being used against conservatives sometimes.
I suppose you could say even the truckers, in a way, we were denormalized by the hate finders.
I don't know.
Right, so exactly so.
But see, this is a difficult concept.
I think it's a wrong concept.
So, if you imagine that you live in a free society, like what does that mean?
What are you free to do?
Well, you're certainly free to think for yourself.
And if you're free to think, then you're free to think bad thoughts.
And some of those bad thoughts might be that you hate other people.
In other words, if you are a free person in a free country, you are allowed to hate other people.
And if you live in a free country with free speech, then you're allowed to say that you hate other people.
And people don't like to think that way because we don't want people acting that way.
Well, I understand that, and I don't want to encourage it.
It's unfortunate when it happens.
But if you are consistent with the principle that you believe in liberty, then you have to allow for the possibility that some people are going to hate other people and they're going to say so.
So I don't really like the idea of hate speech.
I do believe, though, in the idea that people are not allowed to coerce other people.
Yeah.
Or threaten them with violence.
And that's the line for me.
If you are actually threatening violence, that's not okay.
That's the proper line to draw and still be able to say that you live in a free country.
You know, it was Doug Christie, a lawyer for many people prosecuted under different hate speech laws in the 80s.
I heard him once say that hatred comes from a feeling of grievance.
And unless you address that underlying grievance, you're not going to stop the hatred.
Grievance and Convoy00:06:33
In fact, if you shut people up, you'll only fortify their grievance.
Not only do they have the grievance, but they're not allowed to err it and seek a remedy to it.
Not only that, not only that, you'll also not understand what people are really thinking.
I mean, don't you want to really understand what they're thinking inside their brains?
It's much, I don't know, I'm not sure if it is, but it might be safer to know where people are coming from because they're saying so out loud rather than hiding inside.
I would rather interact with them on the surface in accordance with what they're saying, than trying to figure out in the dark where people lie.
You know, when I was growing up in the pre-internet era, I often thought, if only I could get my big idea to the world, I would change things.
And so I tried in my own way.
I had newspaper columns.
Even when I was a student, I was trying to get, because I really believe my ideas would, if people just heard, if I could just get an audience, I would, and there's a vanity there.
And conspiracy theorists, hate mongers, people with a grievance, they're all hoping that they can convince the world that there's an injustice going on.
They're the most unreasonable people.
They're unreasonable because they say something is wrong.
I know the truth.
I have the secret truth.
Whether they're a conspiracy theorist or just a dissident or a contrarian.
And they're all seeking the chance to persuade.
Now, some are tyrants who don't want to persuade.
They just want to conquer.
And what I find is, if you let those people run their course, if you give them Twitter where they can say the craziest thing they want, if you let them run in an election so that they will have the judgment of their peers, if you give them a trial of a jury, and if it's a real jury of their peers and they're convicted by the jury, I find that if you let people go to term and test and prove their theory, and if they're rejected by the world, if no one cares about their idea, if no, the tweet didn't go viral,
no, your jury did convict you, you had your chance in the election and you got 0.1%.
A lot of people will say, at least I had a fair system.
And I've seen it, and I won't mention who, but I've seen a jury trial where the accused criminals, because it was a jury, not an Ottawa judge, because they saw that jury be impaneled and said, yes, those are my peers, they accepted the criminal conviction because they no longer could labor under the perhaps a delusion that they were just being persecuted by some political prosecutor and political judge.
It was their peers who said, no, you did something wrong.
And I think that's what happens when you let people go to term with kooky ideas is they test it and, oh, if I could only tell the world, well, you did tell the world and no one picked up your ideas.
So maybe your idea wasn't that great.
I've seen, and I feel that myself.
Certain things that I believe in so passionately do not go viral.
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
I'll focus on something else.
There is something about letting people test their theory against the world rather than saying, no, you cannot run the experiment.
No doubt.
No doubt at all.
And the reverse also happens, which is that if you are censored, if you're prevented from expressing this idea, this crazy idea that you have, then suddenly you are the victim.
And instead of being the perpetrator of the bad ideas that you want to express, you're the one that the state is persecuting.
Right.
And so the dynamic becomes opposite to what it ought to be.
Very strange days we're in.
I want to wrap up by playing a clip of you testifying before Parliament, which I'm really glad is happening.
There's lots of committees out there, the Justice Committee, the Heritage Committee, all of them dealing with aspects of liberty.
And there's just absolute crackpots who are invited to attend sometimes.
I saw Rachel Gilmore give, I just want to play the first few seconds of her testimony.
Bruce, she talks about how she, for those who don't remember, she's sort of a TikTok star who was fired from global for just saying astonishing things.
And she's a real cancel culture type herself.
Anyways, I'm not sure if it was the NDP or the Liberals who got her an invitation to testify about Russian disinformation.
And she just starts off by talking about how she has big feelings about things.
And I'll just show it to you.
This is who the liberals and the NDP invite to testify as experts while they're making the law.
Here, take a look at Rachel Gilmore.
Hey, everyone.
Thanks for having me.
This is obviously a very important topic, and I have some big feelings about it.
So to kick things off, I'm sure you all remember the Freedom Convoy.
Yeah?
Well, as part of my coverage at the time, I joined several Telegram channels and groups where organizers and supporters gathered to exchange everything from planning details to fringe conspiracy theories.
And you might not have realized this, but it was actually just days after the convoy.
Actually, you guys probably do know this.
Just days after the convoy that Russia invaded Ukraine.
So it was really interesting, an interesting time to be monitoring all of those telegram channels because all of a sudden, the ones that have been posting about the convoy and COVID, groups with tens of thousands of members primed to distrust experts, government media and institutions, shifted to posting about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Oh, she's astonishing.
So I'm glad that to balance out some of the absolute kookiness, and hey, let the gal have her moment.
I mean, I think that was the best day of her life.
I'm glad that some actual thoughtful experts are allowed as a counterweight.
Let me throw to a clip of you testifying in your capacity as McDonnell Laurier Institute Senior Fellow.
Oh, I was just doing it just to correct that.
I was doing it just on my own.
I mean, I am an MLI fellow, but I'm not representing their views.
Okay, got it.
I saw they republished it.
So obviously they take pride in what you said.
Let's take a look at that testimony.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what it meant.
Free Speech vs. Government Interference00:05:35
Let's take a look.
Your committee is studying how the government should protect free speech.
This seems to me to be quite a strange question for you to be studying.
Because the answer seems obvious.
And also, because for years, the federal government has been doing the opposite.
Free speech is a right we hold against government.
Free speech means the right to be free from government limits on speech.
If governments did nothing, we would have free speech.
Governments protect free speech by getting out of the way.
Therefore, if you want to protect free speech, stop limiting speech.
Defeat Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.
Repeal Bill C-18, the Online News Act.
Repeal Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act.
Repeal the gender amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act in the old Bill C-16, and so on.
If you want to protect free speech, stop limiting speech.
Powerful, philosophical, and deadly accurate.
How was that responded to, if at all, by, well, tell me just quickly if you got any response from any of the parties?
Because even conservatives, you know, they're risk-averse politicians too.
Did anyone react to your submissions, which were much longer than that?
Yes, I thought the conservative members of the committee were very good.
They asked some good questions, and they seemed to be on a good page.
There was no real substantive response from the others.
And most of the other witnesses, and I referred to that along the way, this is really the point that I was trying to make.
Most of the other witnesses came asking for the government to do something, like subsidize this or prevent that or stop them from saying that about us and give us this opportunity.
It's like, no, no, you don't have the idea.
That's not what free speech means.
Free speech means the right to stop the government from interfering.
And there was no real engagement even with that idea from the rest of the room.
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of debating, opposing, think of it, Her Majesty's loyal opposition.
We take the country's biggest complainer, we give them an official title and all sorts of legal immunity to do nothing but attack the government.
Soon that won't be allowed because that implies there are two points of view.
And the whole concept of narrative control is that there's not multiple points of view.
There's one point of view that's subsidized by the government and every other point of view is banned by the government.
I mean, I think we're getting to the point in Canada where there's only going to be two kinds of journalists, those paid by the government and those prosecuted by the government.
And I think we're bloody close to that.
I don't disagree.
I do not disagree.
And it is because, in part, because people don't have the right idea about what free speech means.
We've lost the idea of free speech.
If you have a government talking with a straight face about the idea that they're calling disinformation, that means they have no idea what they're talking about.
And they're twisting things so as to create the impression that we need them to come in and interfere so that we have free speech.
Free speech has nothing to do with speaking the truth.
You're allowed to say something that's not true.
And you're allowed to say something that makes no sense.
And you're allowed to do that because you're free, not because you're serving some higher purpose.
I mean, people say, well, free speech is important so that we have a route to the truth through a marketplace of ideas that compete with.
Sure.
I mean, yeah, that's one reason to have it, but it's not the reason to have it.
The reason to have free speech is because you are free, and that means the government cannot interfere.
If you don't have that idea, then you don't have the idea of free speech.
Well, I've enjoyed talking with you, and I'm jealous of your university students who get to engage with you and debate with you on a regular basis.
I'm really glad you're teaching, and I'm glad you're representing freedom in other forms, whether it's journalistically on your sub-stack.
You have a new YouTube channel, I understand.
I do, yes.
And what's that channel?
We'll just put a link to it under this.
Yeah, it's called, it's called, I'm calling it First Principles.
Well, that's a great place to start.
I will send you the link.
Thank you.
All right, we'll put it under this video for people to click there.
It's great to catch up with you.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
And I hope that freedom advances in 2025.
And I think it will, actually.
Me too, Ezra.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
Thanks, my friend.
There you have it.
Professor Bruce Party, Fighting for Freedom Every Day.