Canadian Customs are Revenue is back to its old tricks: books ordered by a gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver are being opened, inspected and confiscated at the Canada-US border [there is no word on whether the pages are getting stuck together]. Like Glad Day bookstore in Toronto, this shop has had a running battle with the federal government on to what extent the state has the power to do this; and in particular, are gay and lesbian bookstores being unfairly targeted by these seizures. A little over a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the bookstores and set guidelines limiting what could be seized by government agents. Apparently, these rules weren't clear enough and we're all back in courts, at great expense to the business owners and, of course, the taxpayers, who are paying all of the government's expenses and some of the bookstores, via the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.
I believe freedom of speech is the cornerstone of a free society, and thus I'm firmly against government imposed censorship. However, the Canadian constitution allows for limitations on rights if the need is demonstrable in a "free and democratic society". Setting aside then that basic issue, we should ask: who should be decides what should be censored, and how should this decision be made? The Canadian government has pushed the decision as far down the bureaucratic chain as possible, to individual Canadian Customs offices. This policy is deplorable, as the decision making behind limiting any right should be both transparent and accountable. If books are to be stopped at the border, it should only to be check them against a government go/no-go list, or to decide whether they should be on that list at all. The decision of what is on that list should be made at the ministerial level, be published for all to see, and be challengeable. Of course, the current policy is in place exactly for the opposite reason -- to make sure the dirty decisions are kept as far away from politicians as possible and to ensure the difficultly of challenges. This must be changed.
It's worth adding that many of the lesbian and feminist groups associated with these types of cases are no friends of the freedom of speech, despite the rhetoric one may hear. It is maintained that women being whipped by other women is fine if the intended viewers are disenfranchised lesbian viewers, but a similar picture is not be suitable for the male readers of Penthouse. I won't get to far into the theory of this, but the thought is that rights should be applied asymmetrically, depending on the relative "power" of the audience and the "intention" of the "text". Although they do not state it in so few words, this would make private corporations -- gay and lesbian bookstores -- the gatekeepers to censorable material of this sort, which is as odious to me as low level government functionaries doing so.
