The author is professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and contributed to the collective work edited by R. Antonius and N. Baillargeon, Identity, “Race”, freedom of expression, which has just been published at PUL
I’ve never been to a Mike Ward show; usually i don’t like humor trashnor profanity. I also believe that it is often easy to claim to be provocative when one flatters the low instincts of one’s audience. In short, I find it disgusting to make jokes in very bad taste about a young singer with a disability. The recent Supreme Court decision not to recognize the comedian guilty of discriminating against Jérémy Gabriel seems to me to be the right one.
The five majority judges refused to extend to the right “not to be offended” that already enshrined in the charters, to live an existence free from discrimination. I think they were right. Their judgment, if it had been contrary, would have set a precedent, and this right “not to be offended” would have opened a real Pandora’s box, which they hastened, prudently and with reason, to leave closed.
In this case, as in all those accepted by the Supreme Court, the case was somewhat secondary to the general issues it raised. If it had only been a question of a young man filing a complaint because of the odious comments he was subjected to while still almost a child, it is likely that Jérémy Gabriel would have won his case. But the stakes raised by this case were much more important. It was a question of marking out freedom of speech in a democratic society, and which intends to remain so.
Indeed, recognizing words, even malicious, even insulting, as discrimination, that would have contributed, as pointed out by Mr.e Julius Gray, who defended Mike Ward before the Court, to open a major breach in a principle of freedom of expression already weakened by the ” cancel culture », Breach in which all kinds of activists would not have ceased to rush, since the religious fundamentalists who would have used it to revive under the name of offense a concept of blasphemy that has just been created. suppressed in our laws until the defenders of the “diversity of genders” to whose ears the association of the words “women” and “uterus” also appears, in certain cases, as offensive.
Remember that we can already, in Canada, fall short of losing your job and being symbolically lynched on social networks simply for having uttered “in full”, or for having made students read, a word whose use is not prohibited by any law, not even by the regulations of the universities concerned. In these circumstances, it only takes a little imagination to conceive of the disastrous consequences that would have had on our freedom of expression if we could, in addition, be sued before the courts on the grounds that we were is thus found guilty of discrimination. Let us therefore thank the magistrates of the highest court in the country for not having wanted to put their finger in this gear, nor in what would inevitably have become a trap for all those who speak publicly.
Besides, can we imagine for a moment that Mike Ward’s more than caustic jokes against the complainant were less aimed at him, as a person, that they had as their primary objective to make fun of the feigned compassion, because mainly in the media, that society shows towards certain victims? Stated plainly, the comedian did not attack the fact that “little Jeremy”, as the media had adorably nicknamed him, had been able to realize his “dream” and “sing” in front of the Pope and the cameras television only because he was disabled? If this hypothesis turned out, Mike Ward’s frankly unpleasant jokes would have been heard in the second degree. And by criticizing the syrupy pity that our society has loved for some time, he would have been in his role of irreverent buffoon which consists, even if it displeases, to criticize the dominant ideas. This is only a hypothesis, and I do not know the style of this humorist well enough to confirm it, but it prevents him from being reproached, beyond a reasonable doubt, as the time-honored expression requires, for having acted like a jerk.
Anyway, to be honest, I wouldn’t have liked to be in the shoes of the magistrates who had to decide this case. Because my first instinct, like that of many people, would undoubtedly have been to estimate that the comedian had clearly exceeded the limits by taking for the head of Turk, in a public spectacle, a young handicapped teenager. And no doubt I would have condemned it. But it is not the role of the courts to say what is moral and what is not. As we should all hear, their role is to sanction an action because it is prohibited by law. And we must remain free, in our soul and conscience, to take any action that is not specifically and formally prohibited.