Originally posted Dec. 2003. Just came across it, and though it was worth reposting in light of recent controversies over hate speech prosecutions in Canada:
Some Canadians are rather touchy about criticism from Americans regarding freedom of speech in Canada. The irony of this touchiness is that the Canadian Supreme Court has based its free-speech jurisprudence, at least in the context of antidiscrimination concerns, in large part on the theories of left-wing American academics such as University of Michigan professor Catharine MacKinnon. The Canadian left has a penchant for importing left-wing ideas from the U.S. and elsewhere, adopting them as public policy, and then accusing anyone who objects of being “anti-Canadian” because these policies somehow define Canadian identity. I like Canada a lot myself, but I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws.
EvilDave says:
Canada’s main problem is that they don’t know who they are. They only know who they are not.
October 24, 2009, 5:26 pmThey have no positive affirmative identity. Only a negative identify formed out of “We’re not American!”
Malvolio says:
Once, in a hotel room in Vancouver, BC, I watched two local talking-head on TV yammering about “what Americans think of Canada” and it occurred to me: we don’t think of Canada. I was living in Seattle at the time, maybe 50 from the border, and we might as well have been living in Miami for as often as Canada came up in conversation. It must be frustrating feeling superior to someone who ignores you completely.
October 24, 2009, 5:37 pmJohn Burgess says:
You can ask the Brits about that, too…
October 24, 2009, 5:54 pmtamerlane says:
I’m half Canadian and love the country and its people. It’s worth remembering that Canada is as diverse, if not more so, in its politics as the US. It’s also worth remembering that Canada and her citizens have been very good neighbors and loyal supporters of the USA for a very long time.
Nonetheless, I can’t resist mentioning a conversation I had while visiting a cousin this past Columbus Day (Canadian Thanksgiving) weekend. All my Canadian relatives are Liberals (roughly equivalent to Democrats in the US). This cousin was giving me a hard time about all the “propaganda” right-wing Americans were producing about the Canadian health care system. She said she could go to any doctor or hospital she wanted, any time she wanted, for any problem, and absolutely free. Then she paused for a moment and mentioned the one exception two years ago, when she went to the States to get some diagnostic work done that she would have had to wait six months for in Canada (she lives in the western suburbs of Montreal). What amused me was that she didn’t see that this put any crimp in her argument even though: (1) She is very well-connected and wealthy and this option is not available to ordinary Canadians. (2) We both knew the diagnostic procedures uncovered a serious condition that if left untreated for even a few months would have killed her.
But still I love them.
October 24, 2009, 6:05 pmKevin Jackson says:
EvilDave, I’m hoping your comment was tongue-in-cheek, because it’s ridiculous. Canadians know very well who they are. The problem is that not all Canadians agree on what that is.
Kind of like Americans, in fact.
October 24, 2009, 6:37 pmOff Kilter says:
” I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws.” There’s hockey, eh..
October 24, 2009, 6:38 pmBleepless says:
Canadians brood and whine about the US more than Americans do.
October 24, 2009, 7:08 pmFub says:
Friend of mine was duly registering an ancient rifle he keeps at his cabin in the wilds of BC. As soon as Sgt. Preston realized he was American he sanctimoniously intoned, “You do know that you can’t just use this to shoot anybody you please like in America, don’t you?”
October 24, 2009, 7:20 pmChrisIowa says:
The Aussies are more reliable.
October 24, 2009, 7:30 pmtroll_dc2 says:
EV, there have been developments since 2003. See this.
This source is probably strongly biased, but the facts are the facts. You may want to watch developments here.
October 24, 2009, 7:55 pmJimbino says:
Canada to me means having to live with your trash. In driving to Edmonton, I could by cokes in gas stations and convenience stores, but could only return the expensive aluminum cans in a grocery store, which I otherwise had no use for.
The result is that my car piled up with aluminum cans. And that was in Alberta. Imagine what trash a person would have to put up with in the socialist Eastern Canada!
October 24, 2009, 7:58 pmJ. Aldridge says:
Canadians should touchy about criticism from Americans since not very many (including the current court) have any idea what what freedom of speech means.
October 24, 2009, 8:02 pmJoseph Slater says:
Of course we could say with confidence that no Americans would be touchy about criticisms from Canadians, or from citizens of any other country. Right?
October 24, 2009, 8:10 pmKieth Nissen says:
Mr. Bernstein, I think you should have expanded a little on the assertion that the Canadian Supreme Court has relied on left-wing Americans (such as Ms. McKinnon) to define free speech (or limited free speech). Are Americans referenced in the Court’s decisions? it sounds implausible. Enlighten us.
October 24, 2009, 8:20 pmAndy McGill says:
The problem with Canada is they lack a real sense of identity, other than they are not Americans. The ideas of Catherine MacKinnon are that women do not have an identity other than they are not men.
Any country that thinks human rights is about suppressing speech that doesn’t fit with today’s theories has lost contact with the human condition.
October 24, 2009, 8:20 pmbystander says:
So what if they are? I was under the impression that the discussion is about what the average Canadian thinks of criticism from Americans. The way Americans react to criticism from other countries should be the topic of another post.
October 24, 2009, 8:49 pmVinny B. says:
The First Amendment is such an American concept, with no place in the Great White North.
October 24, 2009, 8:51 pmEvilDave says:
True, but not realistic. Suppressing free speech in the name of human rights is very trendy right now.
October 24, 2009, 8:53 pmOf course, it may require a level of DoubleThink you’re not prepared for, but that just means you’re not as “intelligent” as the international Left.
David Bernstein says:
K.N., I don’t know why you find this implausible, but here is one excerpt from the leading Canadian case stating that bans on hate speech are constitutional:
October 24, 2009, 9:02 pmPalanos says:
My wife is Canadian, and her explanation of Canadian politics is quite interesting. Her theory is that Canada always wanted to be seen as the European part of North America, but lacked the cultural and political foundation for those ambitions. Her opinion was highly influenced by her father, a late conservative member of the Ontario provincial legislature.
It always seemed to me that Canada wants its natural resources, but not the fact that is in North America. Unfortunately, it cannot pick up the land and send it across the Atlantic so it can be merged with the European Union. That’s what seems to drive their love/hate relationship with Americans.
October 24, 2009, 9:04 pmMartinned says:
As I’ve tried to explain in past threads, there’s nothing inherently “left” about supressing speech for the benefit of something else. In fact, it is often done/suggested by christian-democrats looking to please their conservative base with “blasphemy” laws. (They’re not really about blasphemy properly understood, but about insulting religion, hence the scare quotes.) Similarly, the left and the conservative statists tend to agree wholeheartedly on a whole range of other speech supression as well.
The only reason why this fact doesn’t show up in the US is that the American electoral system drives the outcome towards a two party system, leaving the ACLU with the democrats and the libertarians with the bible thumpers in the Republican party.
October 24, 2009, 9:13 pmMartinned says:
That’s Canada alright: Half way to civilisation. (At least from the US perspective. If you look at it from the other side, it’s half way away from civilisation.) Canadians know how to spell English, they know how to use the metric system, they know how to speak something other than English, how to write a decent bill of rights, the list goes on and on. In more ways than I can count, Canada is the US, but with the benefit of 100 additional years of English rule.
October 24, 2009, 9:17 pmkrs says:
I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws
Hockey, moose, maple products, Shania Twain…
October 24, 2009, 9:18 pmJoseph Slater says:
Bystander:
I’m not sure what the point of the post was. If the idea is to criticize Canadian human rights law, OK. But it was a repost of something done six years ago claiming that “some” Canadians are touchy about criticisms from Americans. With no examples of such touchiness, then or now. So, not much to really chew on in that regard; people of most countries can indeed be touchy when folks from other countries criticize them. And indeed, people in the U.S. can be among the touchiest.
October 24, 2009, 9:23 pmDiversityHire says:
© freedom of peaceful assembly
The FSF’s copyleft in one line.
They have no positive affirmative identity.
The canonical canadian identity is definitively established in Strange Brew. Further elaboration would be pointless except for corner cases like attending a Leafs game.
October 24, 2009, 9:24 pmRob says:
I think this entire post and ensuing conversation may have come about because somebody was watching a little bit too much Rick Mercer.
October 24, 2009, 9:39 pmNorthern Dave says:
There is a powerful block in Canadian political and academic circles which adores everything American left. They dream of a Fabian Socialist future and are eager to take comfort from any quarter that gives it. I mean, good grief, Michael Ignatieff is currently running one of the two major political parties. People like the former Supreme Court Chief Justice Bora Laskin were trained in Harvard in the 1930′s (Laskin was one of the vanguard of Social Activist judges up here). Trudeau and company ran a concerted campaign to restructure the values and morals of the country and were successful.
The difficulty currently is that most Canadians put a different content into both the current definition of “Canada” and future visions of the shape of the Dominion – most radically irreconcilable to each other (eg. some envision an Islamic Republic of Canada and others a Canadian Soviet). Each subgroup has a distinct affirmative identity but there is not the cohesive identity of the pre-Trudeau years.
We used to be more civilized and Presbyterian than those of you who lost the War of 1812, but those days are gone….(mind you Knox wouldn’t recognize modern Presbyterians in general….).
As an after thought, the only thing pretty much everyone (except a few business leaders greedily looking at massive profit margins) is agreed on is the inviolate status of Universal Health Care.
October 24, 2009, 9:52 pmRepeal 16-17 says:
With a provision (the “Notwithstanding Clause”) saying that the Canadian government, and any provincial government, can simply bypass the Charter on Rights and Freedoms by simple legislation. I’m glad our Bill of Rights isn’t so easy to circumvent. I’m not saying it isn’t impossible (thank you SCOTUS), just not it’s not as easy to circumvent Constitutional rights here as it is in Canada.
October 24, 2009, 9:53 pmjab says:
Tamerlane,
“Cute” anecdote… but you already know anecdotes don’t prove anything.
I could counter with this anecdote:
Women being denied insurance because they were raped and
potentially exposed to HIV.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/insurance-companies-rape-_n_328708.html
See… I’m sure we could go back and forth with battling anecdotes,
October 24, 2009, 9:57 pmbut I’m not sure that accomplishes anything.
David Bernstein says:
“I’m not sure what the point of the post was.”
That the Canadian left is happy to give Americans input when Americans can be used to support left-wing policy, but they get all upset (or pretend to) when Americans provide input that doesn’t support their policies, even when the Americans are saying, “here’s why you shouldn’t rely on those other Americans.”
October 24, 2009, 10:01 pmMartinned says:
That’s (a remnant of) parliamentary sovereignty. I’m not sure if the parliament of Canada is even able to abolish that rule, or whether it doesn’t simply apply to the rest of the charter as well. (According to the clause, it only applies to articles 2 and 7-15.)
Art. 4 of the UK Human Rights Act of 1998 says the same thing:
Art. 15:
October 24, 2009, 10:09 pmMartinned says:
Which is what anyone with a brain always says when someone brings up the horrors of quoting foreign case law in US court: No one ever cites anything they don’t already agree with anyway, except binding precedent, which does not include either foreign precedent or marxist propaganda from US academia.
October 24, 2009, 10:14 pmrpt says:
One of these years the useless and undefined term “left” will be abandoned. It has no agreed upon meaning and is used only to mean something the user doesn’t like.
October 24, 2009, 11:11 pmLarryA says:
And here I thought the Obama left was taking its cues from Chicago. Who knew they were imitating the Canadians?
October 24, 2009, 11:14 pmJN Heath says:
I live in Montreal and agree with David — Canadians I’ve spoken to are touchy and defensive about the speech restrictions. The gist of their defense is that it’s okay because the accused is given an opportunity to justify themselves before a tribunal; that some kinds of speech are not “legitimate”; that it is the business of government to protect us from offensive speech; and also the business of government to determine what speech is “offensive”. A fundamental difference between them and us (I’m American) I’ve noticed is that we have a very different idea of what a “right” means. I’ve found it difficult even to convey to them that for us a “right” is a liberty that by definition cannot be taken away. For them, a “right” is whatever the government does not currently regulate.
October 24, 2009, 11:30 pmKirk Parker says:
martinned,
Excuse me–Americans do know how to use the metric system, we just don’t want to.
And as someone with 1/4 Canadian ancestry, can I get away with repeating this old one?
October 24, 2009, 11:52 pmCornellian says:
With a provision (the “Notwithstanding Clause”) saying that the Canadian government, and any provincial government, can simply bypass the Charter on Rights and Freedoms by simple legislation. I’m glad our Bill of Rights isn’t so easy to circumvent.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms only came into existence in the early 1980s, so it was drafted with the benefit of nearly 200 years of hindsight into how things had gone with the U.S. Bill of Rights. Thus, certain provisions in the Charter (including the Notwithstanding Clause) were added precisely to address certain problems that were felt to exist with the Bill of Rights. In this case, the problem was something American conservatives have been complaining about for a long time, “activist” judges that ignore the elected branches. The Notwithstanding Clause is a reaction to that problem. It doesn’t give free reign to legislatures to ignore the Charter. It allows a legislature to enact a law and stipulate that the law applies “notwithstanding the Charter.” The law is then immune from a challenge that it is inconsistent with the Charter. The critical limitation on the use of that clause is that the immunity applies only for five years. This clause is rarely used outside Quebec since the Charter is quite popular with the voters. If you try to invoke it, you generally get attacked by the political opposition and five years later, when the opposition is in power, they won’t renew the Notwithstanding immunity.
If you’re a fan of legislative supremacy over the courts, you ought to like the Notwithstanding clause. I’ve seen lots of posts from US conservatives suggesting Congress can (and should) exempt various federal laws from challenge in the courts by exempting such cases from the jurisdiction of the federal courts. That’s a far more radical measure than the Notwithstanding clause because of the built-in 5 year sunset provision.
October 25, 2009, 1:06 amCornellian says:
The Canadian left has a penchant for importing left-wing ideas from the U.S. and elsewhere, adopt ing them as public policy, and then accusing any one who objects of being “anti-Canadian” because these policies some how define Canadian identity.
Generally speaking in Canadian politics you can’t go wrong by portraying your opponent as being just like an American or overly fond of Americans.
October 25, 2009, 1:09 amCornellian says:
The First Amendment is such an American concept, with no place in the Great White North.
Section 1 of the Charter was based on the First Amendment. It’s not identical (by design) but it’s a lot closer than you’ll find within the law of virtually any other country. You’ll find plenty of hysterical comments around here that free speech doesn’t exist in Canada because Section 1 doesn’t precisely mirror the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence in Canada, but that is an absurd overreaction. Virtually every other country in the world other than the United States does not protect free speech as strongly as Canada does.
October 25, 2009, 1:15 amCornellian says:
Some Canadians are rather touchy about criticism from Americans regarding freedom of speech in Canada.
Whereas Americans never take offense when being criticized by foreigners about anything.
Canadians never responded to criticism with anything as idiotic as renaming French Fries.
October 25, 2009, 1:17 amVisitor Again says:
David Bernstein: “I like Canada a lot myself, but I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws.”
___________________
Do you really have to hope that Canadian identity is more than this? If you intended this sentence to be taken seriously, I doubt very much that you like Canada at all, much less a lot, and you apparently know little about Canada. For starters, most Canadians take civility to heart and don’t make snide remarks based on ignorance about other peoples. Nearly every comment on this thread is patronizing and offensive.
On a lighter note, you missed ice hockey and ice fishing and curling and … well, so many things. I watched my Montreal Canadiens take out the New York Rangers in overtime tonight, 5-4, after twice coming back from a two-goal deficit. Good times tonight in Montreal and in my little apartment in South Los Angeles. Go Habs, Go!
October 25, 2009, 1:32 amKazinski says:
Joseph Slater:
That’s kind of ridiculous, the rest of the world spends an inordinate amount of time dissecting everything the US does and telling us what were doing wrong, but 99.9% gets absolutely zero attention. Of course that maybe because even some of the most blatant American bashing goes over our head, but touchy we aren’t.
October 25, 2009, 1:33 amJPG says:
Well, since you live in Montreal, you should give a try reading Le Devoir or La Presse and, while you’re at it, survey a larger proportion of the local population instead of relying exclusively on your own personal generalizations. Perhaps your perception on actual Canadian sympathies for free speech limitations – as addressed here – would drastically change…
October 25, 2009, 2:20 amLeo Marvin says:
The last person I heard criticizing American-style freedom of speech was Tovia Singer, the radio voice of the Israeli settler movement. He was waxing rhapsodic about Germany’s and Austria’s criminalization of Holocaust revisionism. This is not a strictly left-right question.
October 25, 2009, 4:43 amAdam Maas says:
The essential problem with the idea of a ‘Canadian’ identity is that Canada is essentially a confederation of 4 different countries, each with its own defining character and none of those characters is really compatible with the others. You have the scots-irish Maritimes provinces who are essentially a transplanted UK culturally, Quebec and its progressive French culture, Ontario, which is pretty classically Progressive and whose character comes almost entirely from being ‘Not American’ due to the Loyalist origins of much of its population, and the Western provinces who are fundamentally a libertarian Eastern European-like country with a dash of Anglo culture.
How Canada has been governed has been decided almost entirely by Ontario and Quebec, who economically and politically dominated the country up until recently. This is why Canada has been significantly more Progressive than the US. The growing economic and political influence of the West is in the process of fundamentally changing the political character of the country though, and the West is in many ways much more culturally aligned with Flyover Country in the US than it is with the rest of Canada. Thus things like Section 13 of the Human Rights Act are now becoming significant political issues despite what once was near-universal support in Ontario and Quebec.
October 25, 2009, 9:42 amJoseph Slater says:
DB: OK, but my only point was that your point might have been a tad more convincing had you given some (or even any) examples of Canadians being “touchy” — especially since you were just reposting something from six years ago? And as others have pointed out, it’s hardly unique that folks laud influences they like from other countries but resent foreign critics. Again, Americans may be the touchiest of all about that.
Kazinski: Speaking of being touchy, thanks for the unwittingly ironic evidence of my point.
October 25, 2009, 10:42 amgem says:
Canada is a great neighbor. Which other country in the world would you rather have the U.S. share a border with?
October 25, 2009, 10:53 amDave N says:
You mean like “right-wing,” which is often used for the same purpose?
October 25, 2009, 12:06 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » From the Volokh Archives: Touchy Canadians -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by The Source, Bionic Liberal. Bionic Liberal said: Touchy Canadians? http://bit.ly/3Q3Au8 [...]
October 25, 2009, 12:17 pmCornellian says:
One of these years the useless and undefined term “left” will be abandoned. It has no agreed upon meaning and is used only to mean something the user doesn’t like.
You mean like “right-wing,” which is often used for the same purpose?
The purposes of these labels (along with their synonyms “liberal” and “conservative” is to replace any constructive, illuminating argument about an issue with pointless arguments about whether a position on that issue is “right” or “left”, “liberal” or “conservative.” In other words, the labels are a substitute for thinking about the issue.
October 25, 2009, 12:36 pmtroll_dc2 says:
This is a wonderful example of what can go wrong when you rely on purported authority from another legal system. Richard Delgado never persuaded a court in this country so far as I recall, and I don’t believe that the other scholars mentioned did either. Moreover, the quotation cites Doe v. University of Michigan, which STRUCK DOWN a campus speech code on First Amendment grounds. The academic writing in question was never translated into American free-speech law. To put it mildly, the Canadian court relied on a wrong interpretation of American law.
Morever, I wonder whether the Canadian courts follow the European approach of treating scholarly writings as primary sources of law. (I still cannot understand how the court could cite a discussion of the University of Michigan case without discussing the ruling itself.) If so, then the court in this case applied Canadian methods to American law discussions to reach a result that could not have been reached in the U.S.
October 25, 2009, 1:25 pmCornellian says:
Morever, I wonder whether the Canadian courts follow the European approach of treating scholarly writings as primary sources of law.
They do not. Canada is a common law country, like the United States, with the same hierarchy of law. Constitution, statutes, regulations and prior court decisions are law (in that order), everything else is a secondary source.
However, the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms only came into force in 1982, so the Canadian Supreme Court didn’t have a deep well of precedent to consult at the time of that decision and, for many other constitutional questions, that is still the case today.
October 25, 2009, 1:47 pmMartinned says:
Just for the record: most European courts only cite their own country’s supreme court rulings, the occasional ECtHR case, and very little else. The average French consitutional court (conseil constitutionnel) ruling, for example, is about 1½ pages long. Dutch supreme court rulings are a bit longer than that, but the extra space is mostly taken up with procedural clutter. German rulings can be much longer, like the Lisbon Treaty ruling which was more than 100 pages. But those rulings are very scholarly, and there can be no question of the BVerfG accepting any precedent from anyone, except their own, as even remotely binding, something that is quite clear from their language.
October 25, 2009, 3:22 pmPaul Horwitz says:
David, speaking as a Canadian, albeit a quite voluntary Canadian expatriate and, one of these days I hope, American citizen who prefers the jurisprudence of the First Amendment to Canadian freedom of expression jurisprudence, I have to gently take issue with your post and your gloss on it in the comments. I say “gently” because, like any generalization, it contains important germs of truth, and pointing to contrary impressions or anecdotes will not refute them. But I do think the picture is a little more complicated than you suggest, unless you are making an observation that is so specific by definition as to defy drawing any larger conclusions.
One distinction I would draw is between the reception of American law in the eighties and early nineties in Canadian constitutionalism, which was more apish and had much to do with the fact that many of the then-rising generation of Canadian constitutionalists got their start as American LL.M.s and were simply importing American scholarship in a fairly mechanical way in the absence of a more detailed sense of Canadian constitutionalism, and the treatment of American law today, which seems to me an era in which Canadian law stands far more on its own bottom. The wholesale and mechanical reception of American constitutional law in Canada today is far rarer, and for that matter the citation of American law and scholarship is more infrequent. Also, it should be said that to the extent there is still borrowing, the transplantation now is more complex; it’s not simply a matter of taking foreign materials in toto, but of grafting them on to a fairly developed body of Canadian constitutional thought. I may disagree with some of the currents of that thought, but the whole matter is more complex, I think, than the picture you draw.
Moreover, there is an increasing, although still minority, trend of thought in Canadian constitutional law, both of foreign origin and autochthonous, that criticizes some of the directions in Canadian constitutional law that you discuss, both as to general constitutional law method and as to freedom of expression. Indeed, there has always been a substantial opposition to views such as those stated by the majority in Butler, although now there are also interesting views questioning, say, the living tree and dialogue metaphors of Canadian constitutionalism.
I also, again without denying its existence entirely, would tend to disagree gently with your view that the left draws on American law and ideas freely when it serves its purpose and then accuses those who object to these ideas of being anti-Canadian. For one thing, it is vanishingly rare for someone in Canada to use the term “anti-Canadian.” For another, the leftists I know do not draw all that much on American thought anymore, and certainly not in a wholesale fashion; they draw on all kinds of sources of thought from all kinds of places, including the US, and I think they tend to do so in a more complex fashion than your description might suggest. Third, to the extent there are debates within and between the left and right about what constitute “Canadian” social values, which there certainly and legitimately are, I think they are more genuinely debates about those values themselves than they are debates about where the values come from. And those values, right or wrong (and right or left), really are Canadian in their own way; they’re not just borrowings from the US, and certainly don’t end up just being absolute twins of the versions that have circulated at various times in the US.
Again, my point is not that what you have said is not true; of course there are some Canadians who meet your description. Nor is it to agree with Canadian thought on these issues, although on my reading there is not in fact a Canadian consensus on these issues. It is rather to suggest, if for no other reason than that I would hate to have American readers assume otherwise, that it is not the whole story, even about the Canadian left, and it may not (does not, I think) reflect the rhetoric or thought processes of a majority of Canadian thinkers of any ideological stripe. I do think there are too many Canadians whose language suggests a reflexive wariness about or defensiveness toward Americans, but I think this masks a far more complex relationship among even those Canadians toward American thought, culture, and values, which is quite different in practice than that rhetoric might suggest.
Two last points on a long comment which I could have just slapped onto my own blog. First, although it was not fully my own culture, there certainly are aspects of Canadian culture and identity that have their own substance and go beyond the few things (gun control, say) that you mentioned. I’m sure you know this and were speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but certainly there can be thicker conceptions of Canadian culture and identity than this, and it is not right, although I also sometimes fall into this, to say that Canadian identity is just a negative space, let alone one defined solely by the United States. Second, in response to the commenters who suggested that Canadians believe in limits on rights while Americans don’t, or that Americans don’t believe on such limits except for those benighted elites who sit on the Supreme Court, this seems like a partially phony distinction. Many Americans and many Canadians may have different notional views of rights, although of course there is diversity on these questions. But in practice Canadians do believe that rights can overcome limits and do in many cases, and in practice Americans believe that rights can be overcome by limits and reach just that result in many cases, although sometimes by defining the rights in terms of their limits rather than engaging in explicit balancing. Both rights AND their limitations seem like pretty conventional and (notwithstanding the view that the Court has somehow imposed this on us against our will) perhaps inevitable aspects of liberal constitutionalism, in the US and elsewhere, although we can conceptualize these in different ways.
Sorry for the length of the comment. Best, Paul
October 25, 2009, 5:12 pmChrisTS says:
THAT.
October 25, 2009, 5:32 pmKevin P. says:
LOL, would you like some beer with your sneer?
October 25, 2009, 11:11 pmToday’s Lynch List « The Lynch Mob says:
[...] from The Volokh Conspiracy: From the Volokh Archives: Touchy Canadians: Originally posted Dec. 2003. Just came across it, and though it was worth reposting in light of [...]
October 26, 2009, 2:14 amJN Heath says:
JPG–
I don’t care about the statistical breakdown of Canadian attitudes about free speech, and if I did would not resort to La Presse or Le Devoir as resources. Like David I find it interesting that some of my Canadian friends defend speech restrictions that my U.S. friends find disturbing, with rationales that my U.S. friends would find laughable.
JNH
October 27, 2009, 8:34 amНадя says:
Сохранили нам кучу времени, спс.
November 26, 2009, 12:24 pmЯна says:
Мне бы и в голову не пришло.
November 28, 2009, 3:36 pmNan says:
можно зделать маленький сборник.
November 30, 2009, 4:05 pmАлёнка says:
Во это я понимаю, польза.
December 1, 2009, 10:38 pmRepeal 16-17 says:
Please provide a translation for the preceding four posts. Thank you.
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