Social Policy in Ontario

Alan Borovoy was a fighter for civil liberties to the end

Posted on May 16, 2015 in Equality History

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Canada has lost a remarkable champion of civil liberties and free speech with the death this week of Alan Borovoy.
May 15 2015.   Editorial

Canada has lost a remarkable champion of civil liberties and free speech with the death this week of Alan Borovoy at the age of 83.  < http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/05/12/civil-liberties-champion-alan-borovoy-dies-at-82.html >

Borovoy was best-known as the outspoken general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for 41 years, until his retirement in 2009. But long before he took on that job he was fighting for civil rights — everywhere from Halifax, where he spoke up for the rights of black people, to northern Ontario, where he was an early defender of aboriginal treaty rights.

He was a scrappy kid from a working-class Jewish neighbourhood in west-end Toronto. He took his inspiration from the progressive movements of the 1930s and 1940s, which made him a civil libertarian and liberal of the old school. In the shadow of the Holocaust, he came to believe that “the best way to protect the Jewish people was to promote greater justice for all people.”

As a lawyer and activist, Borovoy campaigned tirelessly for civil liberties and free speech. He and the CCLA were among the very few who spoke out in 1970 against invocation of the War Measures Act, which earned him a barrage of angry phone calls at the time. He was not one to compromise or just “get along,” and his conviction that even repellent speech deserves protection eventually drew him into clashes with others on the left.

Famously, he opposed the prosecution of notorious figures like neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel and the anti-Semitic schoolteacher Jim Keegstra under Canada’s anti-hate laws when others tried to silence or punish them for their views.

“We should not censor those making racist statements but censure them,” he told the Star back in 2000.

Eventually he came to believe that “extremists among equality seekers” posed a danger to liberal values by trying to use hate speech laws and human rights commissions to silence their enemies. The irony, of course, was that he had been one of those behind the creation of the Ontario and Canadian human rights commissions.

Borovoy won recognition and his share of honours, including the Order of Canada in 1982. But he was too independent and too often, in his own words, “perceived as some kind of a weirdo” to be fully embraced. The Star’s Carol Goar perceptively described him last year, when he published a memoir entitled At the Barricades, as “too disruptive to be a hero, too self-effacing to be a celebrity and too irreverent to be a national icon.”

That may have been true. But Canada would be all the better for more “weirdos” with the guts, principles and persistence of Alan Borovoy.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2015/05/15/alan-borovoy-was-a-fighter-for-civil-liberties-to-the-end-editorial.html >

Tags: crime prevention, ideology, multiculturalism, rights, standard of living

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