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by pmiller2 1860 days ago
Stop being pedantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Char...

Edit because I'm apparently only allowed like 5 comments a day: Refusing to spend 30 seconds to find out that "yes, there is a roughly equivalent right to free speech in Canada" is just lazy, if you didn't know that, or pedantic if you did. Which would you rather be?

3 comments

I didn't search for the Charter, not because of laziness, but because I'm an american immigrant to Canada and I'm familiar with both the Charter and the Constitution, and a chunk of case law surrounding both. Americans thinking that their Constitution will protect them up here is an extremely common misconception, and for example, a witness who says "I plead the fifth" will get laughed out of court (and perhaps into jail).

I would submit that pedantry is the very basis of law, and happily accept that label in this context. But "that's a law in a different country" is hardly a minor detail.

This might be a particularly sensitive topic for Canadians right now as there's a lot of extremely negative culture leak up from the states including anti-mask/vax protestors that repeat conservative US talking points. It's extremely common to see people toting "Masks are against the 1st Amendment" up here so I imagine a fair amount of the pedantry you're perceiving here is actually just misdirected frustration over false information spreading through fringe groups we have to deal with.
Pushing back against "the first amendment" being a shorthand for "freedom of expression" in a Global context is not being pedantic.

Especially interesting in a thread where the people bringing this up as a violation of freedom of expression are advocating for a border-free internet without local oversight or government control over content.

Do you want an international decentralized internet or do you want a defacto US culture internet?