Chris Selley: A francophone reporter had asked Trudeau for his thoughts on the Oct. 16 public beheading of middle school teacher Samuel Paty near Paris — an act of vengeance by an Islamist freak who was angry Paty had shown his class some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that inspired the 2015 massacre of much of the satirical magazine’s staff, as well as a fatal attack on a kosher supermarket two days later. The topic of the class had been freedom of speech. Fourteen people recently went on trial for those attacks. Charlie Hebdo republished the contentious cartoons in their honour.
This is what Trudeau had to say about it: “Freedom of expression is not without limits. We do not have the right, for example, to shout ‘fire!’ in a movie theatre crowded with people. There are always limits.”
And: “We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”
It’s a quintessentially Justin Trudeau response. And unlike, say, his vows to stand up to Chinese thuggery, it smacks of sincerity. But it’s an egregiously misguided response for the leader of any free country to proffer — and especially, I would argue, Canada.
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