It’s almost become one of those things that Canada will forever be known for, like the beaver or maple syrup. For several years now, free speech in this country has been under severe and regular attack. Say or write anything that a self-anointed (left-wing) elite doesn’t like hearing or reading, and before you know it, you can find yourself before one of the human rights kangaroo courts, which put the Spanish Inquisition to shame and are one of the worst violators of human rights – not to mention common decency – in Canada. Sometimes you may also find yourself in an actual court of law.

These attacks on free speech have come in various forms and from different sources. Most of those “anti-free-speech grenades” have been lobbed by ethnic or minority groups who always try to make waves and make life miserable for the mainstream. Witness the witch hunt and show trial of Ezra Levant for printing in his then-magazine the so-called “Danish cartoons”. Or take the persecution of Maclean’s magazine for printing an excerpt from one of Mark Steyn’s excellent (and truth-telling) books. Sometimes, though, the instigators are not members of some “minority”, but left-wingers who enjoy muzzling and causing trouble for anyone who doesn’t believe in the disease that is left-wing ideology. More recently, for example, a blogger has been sued by a professional (pathological) troublemaker for linking to a site that’s available to anyone.

In a case not unlike the latter example, the Supreme Court of Canada is now called upon to decide whether linking to a site of the public domain can result in the linker’s being held liable for libel or not. Here too – duh! – it’s a lefty who’s sued a non-lefty, because he didn’t like it that the latter exercised his human rights.

This being Canada, where the majority of judges are lefties themselves, and don’t have much intellectual capacity for reaching common-sense conclusions, it would be dangerous to laugh this off as nonsense. For in this country, it is not impossible for a judge, or the robed individuals of the Supreme Court, to pass a completely ludicrous judgment without thinking about the consequences.

Imagine what would happen if the Supreme Court found in favour of the troublemaking plaintiff? No one in Canada would insert hyperlinks on websites, Twitter, Facebook, etc. ever again. All search engines would have to be disabled for users with Canadian IP addresses, because search engines contain all those “libellous” links as well. The Internet would cease to exist in Canada. As a matter of fact, Canada, where it sometimes feels like living in that era, would effectively catapult itself back into the Stone Age (and Stephen Hawking claims time travel into the past is impossible).

Every link one places somewhere could potentially result in liability for the poster of the link. Quite often, especially when linking to news sites, pages are updated, and when that happens, any link posted to such a page previously no longer links to the same page, technically speaking. The URL is still the same, but a journalist or editor may have added an entire paragraph, and this “latest update” may leave the individual who’s shared the link, say, on Twitter or on his or her blog liable.

There is an important distinction to be made, however. If a blogger links to another site about someone else and then goes on to comment on the content of such external page, he or she may well be guilty of libel – if the external site does include libellous content and if the blogger wrote about as if it were the established truth, i.e., without adding that magic word “alleged” or “allegedly”.

Similarly, a blogger could indeed be held liable if he or she wrote defamatory statements about another person (e.g., “Jane Doe is a prostitute …”) and then hyperlinked those specific words to a site with even more libellous commentary on the person in question. Then again, the blogger could be sued for defamation even without the hyperlink, because the comments on his or her own blog alone would already do the trick. But it does show that hyperlinks cannot, or shouldn’t, be a cause for action, because defamation derives from the offender’s own words, not from pointing a finger to someone else’s. If such finger-pointing were sufficient cause for legal action, every newspaper that reported on this case (and many others) and mentioned the names and circumstances of the two parties involved would be just as guilty of libel as that blogger.

The blogger whose case is now before the Supreme Court, however, didn’t add personal comments or observations to his blog post that contained the allegedly offensive link. In that respect, having the link appear there is no more harmful than when someone stumbles across it in Google search results.

Every taxpayer should be appalled by having to watch their tax dollars be wasted on this frivolous lawsuit.