Robin's Boycott

by Robin Gillespie
February 1984

27 January, 1984

Dan Illingworth
Editorial Page Editor
The Province
2250 Granville St.
Vancouver, BC

Dear Sir:

I have recently cancelled my subscription to The Province, and I think it is only fair to tell you why.

On Monday, January 16 you carried an ad from the National Citizens' Coalition regarding the new Canada Elections Act, and in particular its restrictions on the freedom of speech of Canadians during election campaigns. The following day, your editorial proclaimed your support for a law which abridges the freedom of speech of those with whom you disagree. I find this appalling and I cannot in good conscience pay you to say such things.

Your position stinks of hypocrisy. If this bill also restricted newspaper editors from taking an editorial position for or against a candidate in an election, would you really have said "... this seems to us to be an unreasonable restriction. Freedom of expression has never been an untrammeled right ... if it's seen to damage the system on which our freedoms depend." I doubt it. More than likely you would have been trumpeting the benefits of freedom of expression from every rooftop in Vancouver. But no, the speech being abridged by this bill belongs to a particular group -- the NCC -- whose speech you don't like. This brings me to the really disgusting part of your position. You were willing to take their money, to the tune of $1,764.00 for a full-page ad and then use that money to support yourself applauding the destruction of their freedom of speech.

Now, let's analyse your actual argument. You claim that "single-issue groups" are threatening the "smooth working" (whatever that means) of our democracy. But why is this a problem? Apparently because they "may promote views too outlandish or explosive to be embraced by any major party." I did not realize that the views countenanced in our democracy were restricted to those embraced by major parties. You further claim that these groups "don't care about, and often probably don't see, the wider picture." This problem does not, of course exist with our major parties. Their members would never allow narrow sectarian interests such as winning the next election or scoring debating points in the Commons to interfere with their view of the wider picture.

You say their funding is obscure. True. We do not know where their money comes from. The chances are pretty good, though, that it comes ultimately from individuals who want volunteered it, and want it to be there, and used in that way. By contrast, the government as a whole, and the elected politicians, who you seem to find so superior to "one-issue groups", receive money collected from each and every member of the Canadian public, by force if necessary, regardless of whether they want it spent by those politicians, or whether they approve of the way it is being spent. I have effective control over private organizations: if I do not like the way they spend money, I don't give them any of mine. I have no such control over elected politicians.

You claim these groups can "hit and run", that they can be "quite irresponsible and get away with it, within the limits of libel and slander law"!! So you are saying that these groups can damage a politician's reputation by saying 'his opinion on such-and-such an issue is this, and that's rotten (or, worse yet, evil) and therefore don't vote for him'?! Well, our elected representatives hit and run, too, and to say that they can be "irresponsible" and get away with it is a gross understatement. When they act, they don't destroy anything so relatively small as a person's reputation. No, when government acts, people's very lives are destroyed. How many lives were destroyed when some politicians in Ontario decided that Toronto needed a new airport at Pickering and expropriated at scandalously low prices the homes of dozens of families (and then didn't build it)? How many lives were destroyed when the Liberal government set out to destroy the economy of Alberta by ruining the oil industry with the NEP? How many lives were destroyed when a Canadian government decided that all people of Japanese ancestry were potential spies and should be stripped of all their property and forcibly moved away from the west coast? (Indeed, how many lives were actually snuffed out by that action of a group of elected representatives?) How many lives were and will be destroyed now that a group of our elected representatives have democratically decided that social services and education are the least politically costly areas in which to cut government funding?

You say that single-issue groups "are not accountable to a broad group of people" and therefore by implication that our democratically elected representatives are. Well, look again at the list in the previous paragraph and at the thousands of other irresponsible acts undertaken at all levels of government in this country every day and tell me again.

You assert that "freedom of expression has never been an untrammeled right". Unfortunately, you are right. Until now, however, such restrictions as have existed have been in the fields of pornography and race relations, where they have, rather than producing the desired results, made pornography a chronically public issue drawing it all the more closely to the attention and interest of those young people whom the law is supposed to protect, and increasing friction among the races.

Our "governors" have never before (except in wartime) dared to regulate our political expression. That is an activity heretofore thought best left to the KGB's, Gestapo's and Savak's of this world. Our politicians are not yet a bunch of Nazis, but they are exceedingly arrogant and thin-skinned, and they continually demonstrate an enormous lust for power.

So now they have decided that they want to reduce as much as possible the ability of members of the public to air their bad opinions of them. It is clear that their interests would be better served if the participation of the public in "democracy" was limited to obediently lining up at voting booths and choosing one of the candidates set out for them. What is surprising is that the editor (with the apparent acquiescence of the publisher) of a major Canadian newspaper would advocate and even praise a law intended to restrict the participation of the public in Canadian elections to nothing more than voting.

You blithely suggest that it is alright that only candidates and parties can advertise during an election because any other group "can run its own candidate and this advertise." What a joke. If you are at all familiar with the other provisions of the Canada Elections Act, you will know that it is clearly designed to make it virtually impossible for anything other than the current three governing parties to participate in an election in any meaningful way.

Individual candidates are severely restricted as to the amount of money they may raise from private donors (i.e. from people who want to give them money) during a campaign. Parties that wish to support candidates must be "Registered Parties" and to become registered, they must either hold a certain number of seats in the House of Commons, or have run 60 candidates in the last election. Those parties that are registered -- and their candidates -- are entitled to copious donations from the pockets of federal taxpayers (regardless of whether those taxpayers like to support a given candidate or whether they hat his guts). Indeed, the speakers of two of the parties spent some of their time while addressing this bill whining that they had not been or still were not getting enough tax money to run their election campaigns. Rest assured that the possibility of anyone other than those who voted for this bill running effective candidates in any federal election has long since been dismissed from our "representatives'" minds.

You are worried about the damage such groups as the NCC can do to the democratic system, "the system on which all our freedoms depend," but to preserve that system you are willing to sacrifice one of the basic freedoms which we Canadians are supposed to cherish. What is more important to you: the freedoms or the system? I suggest you give this very serious thought. If enough Canadians besides you take the view that you appear to champion, eventually there will be no freedoms (including yours) left. But western democracy will work smoothly and the system will be intact.

Your case falls to the ground. All that remains are your denunciations of the NCC and we are left with the spectacle of a newspaper editor advocating that freedom of speech should be curtailed for individuals or groups who say things (political things) he doesn't approve of.

By honourable contrast to what you have done, your opposite number at The Sun forthrightly identified these gentlemen's object -- "They sought to reserve to themselves freedom of speech during elections" -- and stood up for the freedom of speech of even people who have unpopular or unpleasant views.

It is at best stupid and at worst downright self-destructive to support (financially or otherwise) an organization or individual which advocates and supports the destruction of one's freedom. Our so-called elected representatives have shown themselves to be such individuals and "our" government such an organization. There is very little I can do to prevent a steady stream of my money from flowing to their hands, but I can certainly keep my money out of your hands.

I will not give you another cent to spend urging the curtailment of my freedom of speech anytime you don't like what I have to say. I will further make it my business to state constantly, and in public, that those who value their freedom would do well to spend their money on some other newspaper. Perhaps you will see whether private groups are "accountable to a broad group of people". Furthermore, I will be donating some of the money I thus save to the NCC -- which it would not otherwise have occurred to me to do. I will suggest to them that while The Province may have suckered them in the past, taking their money so it could spit on them, the game is up now, and they should place their future advertising elsewhere in Vancouver.

One final thing: since I have made it clear that this is purely a self-defensive move on my part, you may take it as given that if The Province changes its editor or its policy to one which advocates the freedom of Canadians, I will once again become a customer.

Cordially,

Robin Gillespie