CKNW Editorial
for May 10, 1999

Has it really come to this in this country of freedom and democracy?

A Sherbrooke man named Bouffard owns a convenience store. A chap named Amjad Mohammed entered and the two got into a verbal spat. It seems Mr Mohammed had, several years before, bounced a cheque on Mr Bouffard although it had been quickly covered.

Just how the row started is unclear from the newspaper report but suffice it to say that Mr Bouffard called Mr Mohammed a bad name that for the purposes of this editorial we’ll concede was a racial slur. It probably was something like "black bastard" or even worse. Make it as bad as you wish. There was evidently another customer in the store.

Mr Bouffard was ordered by Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal to pay $3000 "in moral damages " for offending Mr Mohammed’s dignity and reputation and violating his right to equality. Plus $1000 costs.

This, according to the report, in one of a long line of cases where slurs have visited damages on the sluror to the credit of the sluree.

Let us make this one point clear. Racial slurs are most improper and can be very hurtful. Society rightly condemns those who in their conversation make disparaging remarks about people on the basis of their colour, religious beliefs, sexual persuasions and the like. It is anti social behaviour of the worst sort.

But are we now making hurtful free speech an actionable offence? Are we now legislating against rudeness? Will we soon have a government code of correct behaviour laying out the penalties for its breach?

Of course calling people names is a very antisocial thing to do but until the do-gooders in the Human Rights business started to get their way with politicians on the make we let society handle rudeness by imposing its own strictures.

Is the way to combat racism legislating against racial jokes? Or jokes about minorities, like women, who aren’t a minority at all?

And who makes up the rules? I don’t wish to trivialize what I agree is anti social behaviour but will it be the case that if an Englishman calls an African a nigger he will be hailed before the beak and ordered to pay damages but the African can, without penalty, call an Englishman a "limey".

Will the rule be that majorities cannot call minorities names but minorities can call majorities what they wish?

My point is scarcely in favour of anti social behaviour which like all of you I’m sure, I deplore but is rather this – how much is society prepared to hand over to officialdom? And has the insult become an actionable offence?

A couple of years ago we had a judge, himself a member of a minority make an off colour remark about women at a stag party. Do we unfrock him for this? Should Gordon Campbell, who made an inappropriate remark about the NDP (who clearly are a minority in this province) be hailed before the bar of justice to explain himself? And is the next logical step to ban the Merchant of Venice because of Shylock the Jew or burn all copies of Huckleberry Fin because of Nigger Jim?

Man is not by nature a temperate beast. He is an animal occasionally inclined to passion. In these heated exchanges which occur every second of every day often produce hurt. It is part of life – parents hurt kids and vice versa, lovers say hateful things to one another. Is the long arm of the law now to descend to the grocery store, the local pub and, yes, the bedrooms of the nation to root out and punish anti social behaviour? Will we now all be hostage to a society which, no longer content to leave manners and mores to the common sense of its members now sets behaviour beadles in our midst to make us pay and pay very dearly for something said in the heat of the moment?

Have we learned no lessons? Don’t we realize that we have made famous men out of a couple of scumbags, Jim Keegstra and Ernst Zundel because we forgot what our Moms taught us – sticks and stones may break our bones but names will never hurt us?"

Of course our Moms were wrong – names can hurt. But Mom’s essential message was that there are some things in life you must learn to live with – that life is full of hurts for which the only defence is a thick skin and the knowledge that the slanderer’s views are not shared by your decent fellow citizens.

I sincerely hope that our Human Rights legislation is not like that of Quebec. For they are going down a path which is not only wrong in principle but, when you think it through, is scarcely going to make inter community relationships more harmonious.