The criminalization of the Link

by Mark Steyn

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the "hyperlink"- that's to say, if you include a link to a site "where hate material is posted", you could go to jail for two years.

I don't recall this figuring as a policy proposal during the election campaign. I would imagine that almost no Tory voter is in favour of the proposal: The vast majority would be either opposed or indifferent, or bewildered as to why it's happening at all. After all, at the last Conservative conference, the vote to scrap Section 13 was unanimous.

That last one - why's it happening? - is easy to answer. It's happening because it's the kind of remorseless incremental annexation of individual liberty to which the permanent bureaucracy has become addicted. And, as I always say, the lesson of the post-Second World War west is that you don't need a presidency-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. It's an outrageous law, poorly written. For example, you might link to a harmless bit of fluff at blandpap.com, but two years later somebody might have posted some "hate material" in a far corner of that site that you've never read and have never linked to. Tough. As the typically crappily drawn law currently stands, you're guilty of a crime. Richard Warman, Canada's leading Internet Nazi, has pronounced SteynOnline a "hate site" (and sued Blazing Cat Fur for linking to it). Suppose you're some harmless little jazz site and you link to one of my Song of the Week columns. Too bad. You might have thought you were linking to something about George Shearing or Johnny Mercer, but deep within the site is "hateful material" about Richard Warman's Nazi activities or Warren Kinsella's Sinophobic jokes. So you're looking at two years in the slammer.

Who'll determine what's "hateful material"? Three types of people: Weird self-aggrandizing creeps like Warman; ambitious social engineers like the BCHRT judges who just fined a stand-up comic 15 grand for putting down a heckler homophobically; and just plain stupid bureaucrats, like Shirlene McGovern, who "investigated" Ezra Levant at Alberta taxpayers' expense for years and couldn't be bothered to learn the differences between the real Mohammed cartoons and the fake ones. None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live - or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it's entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power. And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There's so much of this stuff around it's barely "ideological": it's just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn't it?

At the tail end of the Cold War, I used to meet charming, intelligent eastern Europeans and wonder how they could live as they did. How could an educated citizenry not chafe under daily tyranny? I remember one of them - an amusing Hungarian cynic - explaining it to me: For most people, "rights" are theoretical. After all, how many rights do you actively need to avail yourself of to get through the day? To do your job, buy some dinner, watch a little TV. Maybe "free speech" is a big deal if you want to be a poet or a playwright, but for the rest of us, not so much so. And he gave a Mitteleuropean shrug.

I was aghast. But I wouldn't be today. Why not criminalize the hyperlink? After all, as that Hungarian might have said, how many hyperlinks does the average Canadian need to get through the day? What does one more concession to statism really matter?

No government, least of all one that purports to be "conservative", should pass this legislation. The presence of Geert Wilders on Canadian soil and the pitiful airbrushing of even mildly approving pieces about him remind us of the increasingly cowed state of our public discourse. We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you