Censorship

The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, the internationally acclaimed author and defender of free expression, in Chautauqua, New York, on August 12, 2022, prompted writers around the world to comment.

Historically, stand-up comedy has pushed expressive boundaries and found itself at the forefront of battles over free expression. In Part 1 of this series, I made the case that stand-up comedy, even the deliberately offensive kind, can tell us something important about free expression.

In Vancouver, students at Eric Hamber Secondary School have prepared a bill to protect the interests of student journalists in British Columbia. Spencer Izen and Jessica Kim, who produce the school’s newspaper, The Griffin’s Nest, sent the Student Press Freedom Act to David Eby, B.C.’s attorney general. They hope the legislature will enact the bill into law.

In Ontario, the Upper Canada District School Board has ordered its teachers to stop assigning Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to students. The school board regards a few references in the mystery novel as anti-Semitic. REPORTAGE

In Ottawa, the federal Liberal government is acting to curb anti-Semitic expression by amending the Criminal Code. The government wants to ban the “communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that wilfully promote anti-Semitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”

Authoritarian governments outside Canada use digital devices and the internet to repress foreign-born political activists and dissidents in Canada. The targets of digital repression in Canada include people from China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. Researchers* at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab report: Psychological and Emotional War: Digital Transnational Repression in Canada - The Citizen Lab