Safety Is Not a Tradition

Imagine a town meeting cancelled because someone has threatened to attack it. There is a danger to investigate, people to protect and a decision to explain. Now imagine the same meeting cancelled because its subject is contentious and someone might be distressed by what is said. Both decisions could be announced as matters of safety. They ask very different things of a free society.

The word cannot settle the difference for us.

I want public authorities to protect people. A child facing abuse, a neighbourhood facing violence or a hospital facing a cyberattack needs more than a lecture about liberty. Yet the power to protect can also close a meeting, silence a critic or make ordinary participation depend on permission. Its purpose does not relieve us of examining its use.

This is what I mean by saying safety is not a tradition. Safety is a necessary good. A political tradition also tells us who may act, where authority stops and how someone subject to it can answer back. Without those restraints, a promise of protection leaves the most important questions unanswered.

The burden belongs to power

The civic inheritance I want Canada to carry forward begins with a presumption: people should be able to speak, worship, associate and make lives together without first proving that their choices serve an official plan. Government must give reasons for restricting that freedom.

This inheritance has never been complete or evenly shared. Its failures give us reason to extend its promises and enforce its limits. They do not persuade me to abandon the idea that power owes the person an explanation.

Canada’s Charter gives this principle a concrete legal expression. It protects conscience, expression, peaceful assembly and association, while allowing reasonable limits prescribed by law and justified in a free and democratic society. Under the familiar Oakes framework, government ordinarily bears the burden of justifying an infringement: an objective important enough to justify limiting a right, a connection between the measure and that objective, restraint in how far the measure reaches, and benefits proportionate to its harms. These are demands for reasons, not an assurance that every dispute has an easy answer. Charter, sections 1–2; Justice Canada’s explanation of reasonable limits.

That burden matters most when the objective is compelling. A restriction can arrive attached to a real concern: violence, exploitation, fraud or insecurity. The difficult question is what the proposed power will do to people who have committed none of those wrongs.

Return to the imagined meeting. A credible threat may require police protection, a change of venue or, in an immediate emergency, cancellation. Treating anticipated disagreement itself as sufficient grounds for cancellation changes the terms of civic life. The speaker must now establish that others will receive the speech safely before being allowed to speak. Where protection is practicable, authorities should enable lawful participation. An emergency cancellation should remain a bounded response to concrete danger. If threatened hostility becomes a standing veto, those willing to threaten acquire influence over everyone else’s freedom.

No official can promise a public square without offence, error or conflict. The promise worth making is that people can participate under rules that protect them from intimidation and bind those who enforce the rules.

A safeguard worth insisting on

Canada’s recent telecommunications legislation offers a concrete example of why the wording matters. Bill C-8 received Royal Assent on 15 June 2026. Parliament’s legislative record.

The resulting telecom provisions allow security directions concerning equipment and services. The law expressly excludes lawful expression, persuasion and political debate from the technical interference it covers, and includes necessity and reasonableness conditions, reporting, oversight and judicial review. Orders are ordinarily published within 90 days, but the decision-maker may direct otherwise. Separate provisions govern prohibitions on disclosing an order. Those protections and exceptions belong in any honest account of the law. Telecommunications Act, sections 15.01–15.91.

The distinction between technical interference and political disagreement is precisely the sort of boundary I want legislators to write down. Securing a network should leave no invitation to treat an inconvenient opinion as a fault in the network.

Reading the statute cannot establish how well its safeguards will work in practice. That requires scrutiny of decisions, challenges and oversight. My concern is whether a person affected by a power can obtain a meaningful explanation and remedy, and whether the public can learn enough about its use to judge it. A carefully drawn power still needs institutions willing to hold it to its limits.

When care becomes control

There is a temptation within protection itself: to regard every unscripted choice as a problem waiting to happen. If avoiding possible harm becomes the governing aim, permission can gradually take the place of responsibility. An adult becomes someone whose life must be arranged so that fewer difficult decisions arise.

I think that is a diminished account of the person. We need room to exercise judgement, form loyalties, pursue uncertain work and discover that we were wrong. A society can reduce visible disorder while quietly making its people less capable of acting together without supervision.

My Christian understanding of stewardship gives this concern a further depth. A person has worth that no institution confers. Public office is an entrusted responsibility, answerable to a good beyond its own convenience or survival. People who do not share my faith can defend the same civic limits from their own convictions. Our freedom to disagree about ultimate things is part of what those limits protect.

This also places obligations on the person claiming liberty. Intimidation drives neighbours out of public life. Reckless accusations damage the trust that makes disagreement possible. Freedom has work to do: telling the truth, caring for people within reach, building things worth having and accepting responsibility for their consequences. Those duties lose something essential when reduced to compliance with an approved script.

Protection that can be questioned

The practical test is whether protection remains answerable to the people it governs.

An authority restricting ordinary activity should identify the harm it is addressing, explain why this particular restriction is needed and provide a workable way to challenge a mistake. The justification should become more demanding as the intrusion grows. An exceptional measure should come back for examination before habit makes it permanent.

Some security information genuinely needs confidentiality. Publishing a network vulnerability or identifying someone at risk can defeat the protection being offered. Accountability can accommodate this through independent scrutiny and public explanations that protect sensitive details. What matters is that secrecy does not allow the same office to exercise a power and become the only judge of whether it used it well.

Published accounts of how often powers are used, how long restrictions last and what happens when they are challenged help citizens evaluate more than assurances. A serious minority objection should remain available to those reviewing a decision. The losing argument may identify the very condition under which a useful measure becomes an abuse.

These are habits I want us to inherit and strengthen. They make government explain itself and give citizens something more substantial than confidence in whoever happens to hold office. I would want the same limits in place under a government I supported and one I opposed.

The civic question is what kind of life our protection makes possible. I want it to leave people able to speak, gather, worship, experiment and take responsibility for one another. Keeping that room open is part of caring for them. It is also something worth handing on.

Legal example checked on 2 October 2026 against the official consolidation current to 21 September 2026. This essay develops an earlier, dated argument: Canada, Look Hard at the Anglosphere, 16 October 2025.