The culture commissars at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) have revealed the iron first of state censorship with several deplorable recent decisions. Bad enough they denied a license to a new Italian language station in order to protect a Toronto station from a little healthy competition, but the flagrant act of censorship embodied by CRTC’s decision to refuse license renewal to one of Quebec City’s most popular radio stations (CHOI-FM) should have Canadians incensed.

If anybody should lose its license to operate, it isn’t CHOI-FM, it’s the CRTC, a group of censorial “culture guardians” more reminiscent of old Soviet values than those of a modern democratic country like Canada.

The commissars at CRTC, who believe it their responsibility to ensure Canadians don’t forget what their culture is, have forgotten an important bit of that culture themselves, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Right up front, under the heading “fundamental rights,” the Charter assures us that everyone has certain fundamental freedoms, including “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”

One has to wonder what it is about “freedom of the press and other media of communication,” that the CRTC doesn’t understand. True, the Charter does say that our rights and freedoms are subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” but it’s hard to believe that a few jokes about mental illness or the discussion of women’s breasts poses such a threat to our democratic society as to warrant termination of a popular station’s radio license.

If the CRTC feels Canadian guarantees of free speech are unpersuasive, perhaps they’ll be swayed by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 which states: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

If the internationalists at the United Nations can’t convince them, perhaps that icon of the hard left, Noam Chomsky might. Chomsky has proclaimed the value of free speech, saying, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

The acid test of free speech is not whether people espousing politically popular, uncontroversial issues are free to speak. It is whether we will live up to the spirit of Voltaire, who said, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it.

Freedom of speech is not discretionary in a democracy: it is central. It allows people to be the masters of their government -- rather than its servant -- because it allows them to point out the excesses or insufficiencies of government.

Free speech is also essential for the administration of good governance. If democratic decision-making is to faithfully reflect the will of the people, then the voices of the people must be heard and considered. Freedom of speech is also important to governments because when criticisms of a government are freely voiced, the government has the opportunity to respond to answer unfair comments and criticisms about its actions.

It is a stain on Canada that hundreds of thousands of Canadians resort to the theft of satellite signals because the CRTC denies them the right to purchase the broadcasts they want from abroad. It is a stain on Canada that our government treats us like we’re locked in adolescence, unable to decide what we want to watch, what we want to hear, and now, what we want to say. It is a stain on Canada that 300,000 Canadians, the audience of CHOI-FM, will lose the right to listen to what they enjoy, because of the complaints of 45 hypersensitive people who could always just change the channel on their radio.

At the Prime Minister’s request, our new Heritage Minister is formulating a plan to deal with the CRTC / CHOI-FM file. Here’s a plan, Madame Minister: restore Canadians’ right to listen to what they want to hear, watch what they want to watch, and say what they want to say. As broadcasts become internationalized on the Internet, the CRTC is destined to become a relic of the age when states thought they could control the free flow of information.

Save us the death throes of the CRTC by pulling its plug, and letting a million voices flourish.