Bill C16 was passed. It legally mandates the use of any pronoun someone may demand when referring to them in a conversation. If someone asks me to refer to them as whatever they like and I refuse, they can lodge a legal complaint against me. There are so-called human rights tribunals that deal with these issues throughout the country and they will tell me I have to use the pronouns that are imposed on me by other people, irrespective of the reasons behind those demands or of my reasons to object to those demands. They might even impose a fine on me if I refuse. Regardless, any choice on my part not to comply can be considered to be contemptuous of the court which is a criminal offense. In other words, some speech is mandated: you have to say it or you might pay a hefty price for your lack of compliance. It is also the case in Quebec that law 101 forces shop owners to advertise in French. This applies to brand name and product names. If you include more than one language, which you may, you must make the French inscriptions bigger. If you have an Italian restaurant and you were going for a theme, too bad. You have to clutter the menu. Here, Second Cup is called "Les cafés Second Cup," because the brand name violates the law.
Some speech is mandatory in Canada. Who do you think you're talking with? I live in Canada.
What do you think is Bill C16? What do you think are affirmative action policies? What did you think Black Lives Matter was? What did you think Me Too eventually became? In Canada, liberals (the party) make a point of always having a cabinet with gender parity, even though women usually make up much less than half of the elected officials. When you apply for scholarships and research grants, you get special treatment if you either conduct research on First Nations or if you are a member of a First Nation. Must I remind you that all of this is funded using public money paid for by citizens? You have entire departments in universities paying six-figure income to professors in Canada whose entire career is built on playing identity politics. That is also paid for by taxpayers. There is also the continued fight for equal wages between men and women, always pushed forward under the assumption it's all about discrimination. What do you think is the conceptual environment from which this grows, pitting men and against women and complaining we have a patriarchal tyranny whereby men organized themselves to screw over women.
When I say that the left now seems to be involved in censorship, it doesn't mean people on the right have never tried that. Religious conservatives in Quebec pulled that in the period from 1945 to 1960. There was an actual list of forbidden books if my memory serves me well. And it's certainly not the left who thought videogames should be censored because they're violent in the more recent past. It is quite the irony, in fact, that the people who do the moralizing and want to drown out speech they dislike are not Christian fundamentalists, but radicals on the left.
Someone expresses an opinion and you just assume he's parroting right-wing talking points. How about you show a bit of respect to people and don't assume away their capacity to reach conclusions on their own? You know, at least until they start insulting your capacity to reason.
