Source : Globe & Mail

It's encouraging to see that some people are still ticked over the CRTC's decision to shut down the Quebec City radio station CHOI. Quite a number of people, in fact.

There was a wonderful photo in yesterday's Globe and Mail of an estimated 50,000 people marching in protest in Quebec City over that decision.

Fifty thousand people on a smoggy summer day -- marching to protest against a government tribunal's decision! I doubt if that many would show up in a single city marching to Save a Whale or Implement Kyoto or any of the standard pieties that summon protest to the nation's pavements.

I gather from reading the news stories about CHOI that it can claim an audience of only 380,000. I say "only" because if a radio station with that number of listeners can prompt 50,000 of them to the streets to protest against a CRTC ruling, then this is one loyal and devoted audience. NBC could have cancelled Friends at its peak (would that they had, and earlier as far as I'm concerned) and I very much doubt that out of the millions who gave their lazy eyeballs to that bland and witless smirkfest they could have called even 10,000 to the streets to "save" it.

Cancel Oprah and maybe 50,000 would march, but considering some of Oprah's programming, I think we would have to factor in an almost certain extraterrestrial participation. But this is the wildest fancy on my part. Oprah cannot be cancelled. Oprah can cancel us.

But with CHOI, pretty close to 20 per cent of its audience actually cares enough about the station, or -- equally as likely -- feels condescended to by the CRTC decision, to march to express their solidarity or outrage.

You may recall from a pervious column on this subject that 92 people complained to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission about the station. Let me do the mathematics. For (roughly) every person who lodged a complaint to the CRTC over CHOI, 500 took to the streets of the city in which it broadcasts to support it.

As I said at the beginning, I'm very encouraged by this because it shows an alertness to the value of freedom of expression on the part of those who protested. We have gone a fair distance in Canada to reverse the dynamic of freedom of expression, and this is a regressive and dangerous trend.

We are becoming a grievance-randy country. The right to a negative, the right "not to be offended," is more zealously pursued, and certainly more vigorously and professionally asserted, than the far more venerable, and utterly more central, right of freedom of expression.

In the Dominion of the Politically Correct, freedom of expression is subordinate to the pea-under-the-mattress test. In that saccharine fable, the prince found his princess because only one whose epidermis was so acutely hypersensitive that it could detect the infinitesimal nub under a mile-thick pile of pillows and padding could be his destined bride. Let me quote -- it is a masterpiece of expository pathos -- from its Solomonic text: "A real princess at last! Just think! She could feel the pea I hid under the mattress! Now, only a well-born lady could do that!"

In the new dispensation, the "well-born ladies" are running off to tribunals and rights commissions to set the limits of what is "offensive" or "hateful" or "abusive" and, as was the case in Quebec City, the sensitivities of 92 precious insomniacs outweighed the 380,000 who, apparently enjoyed -- metaphorically, of course -- a perfect night's sleep.

But let us give consideration to the 92. They complain of abuse or offence. If their complaints are justified, who will determine the question? Is it for the agency that holds the power to license or not to license -- the broadcast equivalent of the Keys of the Kingdom -- to act also as the interpreter or judge of what is or is not offensive or abusive or hateful?

Arnold Amber, president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, definitely got hold of the clean end of the stick when he argued that "hate-speech cases should be referred to the existing and comprehensive federal legislation and assessed with full legal rigour. The CRTC should not itself become an arbiter of hate speech."

We abridge, curtail or amputate freedom of speech only after the most searching of deliberation by the most eminent of minds in the most scrupulous of circumstances. It is, as we seem to so lazily forget, the cardinal element of the idea of democracy. It is, at core, why we shed blood in great wars, and why every year we pay heartfelt and profound appreciation to those who fought them.

It's a principle that should not be trumped by complaint forms, and certainly not one whose operation can be suspended by a remote tribunal working under a dubious and, in large measure, outdated mandate.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.

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