That comment brings us to what I think is, with all respect, sir, the most dangerous and insidious issue in this area: people constantly talking of balance. That balance is usually tipped very much in favour of the thought police.
The chair of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Jennifer Lynch, last Friday published an article in The Globe and Mail. In it she argued the glories of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the need for balancing free expression. At the end of the article, she suggested that, really, Canadians cannot be trusted to exercise free expression, because if they did, if we let Canadians have free expression, then, God knows, lots of people might get their feelings hurt; so we can't allow free expression.
At the same time that this statement was made, the CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, released a discussion paper about the Internet. One of the members of the commission argued eloquently and very forcefully that the state should not regulate the Internet because of the great risk of imposing orthodoxy.
Let me suggest an aphorism. Now, I must confess that I'm not a great fan of Pierre Trudeau, but we all know his most famous aphorism, that the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. My aphorism is that the state has no business in the computers of the nation.