Freedom of speech

A 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party was arrested in Britain after he made jokes about a local Conservative Party politician online.

The schoolboy, only referred to as Fraser, was arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home in the early hours of August 3rd. He was taken from his family home and searched in front of his neighbours, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, had a mugshot taken, and had a sample of his DNA taken. Meanwhile, two officers searched his bedroom, and he was pressured to hand over his phone for other officers to search.

The ability and right for citizens and media alike to record and share what they see with the public is an essential one. With the advent of video and photo capabilities being equipped on every phone and with social media platforms able to share the videos and pictures with millions of people, the public information landscape has been transformed. Now, though, there is a push being made by activists to illegalize taking pictures and videos of people in public and publishing them. This would be a terrible road to go down.

An Alberta judge has overturned a 2023 decision by the University of Lethbridge to cancel a scheduled lecture by former Mount Royal University professor Frances Widdowson.

In his Sept. 17 decision, Justice Christopher Simard of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench found that the university failed to properly take into account Widdowson’s Charter right to free expression when it cancelled her talk entitled “How Woke-ism Threatens Academic Freedom.”

RED DEER — Alberta’s highest court has struck the decision by a Catholic school division requiring a trustee to publicly apologize for a social media post that compared children waving Pride flags to Nazi Germany.

The issue erupted in the summer of 2023 and led Monique LaGrange to resign from the board of Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools after fellow board members voted to disqualify her.

The social media post, which LaGrange later deleted, featured an image of children holding Pride flags in a classroom underneath an image of children waving swastikas, with the caption “brainwashing is brainwashing.”

She was in the right.

Lisa Nandy announced last week that she is leaving X. That’s right, the UK culture secretary is leaving one of the biggest communications spaces there is – one that directly and indirectly shapes the culture she is meant to be engaged with.