So to Speak

In an influential article from 1991, the legal philosopher Joseph Raz called free expression “a liberal puzzle” that we prize for mysterious reasons. If recent developments, including elections in the United States, are anything to go by, things have become less liberal and more puzzling. Cue some fundamental legal and social differences between Canada and the U.S. and their importance to our democracy — especially now.

There is an increasingly incoherent reluctance to protect some expressive activities (like protest encampments) while trying to wedge others (like hate speech and stealing stuff) into the sacred space of liberty. The transnational governance challenges created by the internet have made the task of regulating speech much more complex. Meanwhile, conflicts abroad expose deep rifts at home about unpopular speech, especially for universities and online platforms.

We need thinkers who can explain these rapid changes and propose policies that can effectively regulate private or quasi-private spaces, because they too serve as our collective commons. And we need them to do so while keeping clear the distinctions between Canadian and American law. In short, we are ripe for a book that can explain this complicated moment and move us forward. Unfortunately, Richard Moon’s The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression is not that book, though it does offer even-handed reflections on issues that merit our attention.

“Life and Death” is a red meat label to attract readers who believe that free expression is in its final throes or at least facing the sort of dramatic decline that would merit our collective efforts to resuscitate it. Far from being prostrate on a table, however, free expression leaps from the pages of this book in excellent health — squashing every other right it meets along the way. Freedom of association is still its handmaid. Freedom of religion passes through the free speech sieve so often that it loses most of its independent substance. And the right to peaceful assembly? A “poor man’s printing press.”

In the United States, the rights to free speech and to a free press emerged from their revolutionary crucible with remarkable force. Both occupy a lofty position in the American rights hierarchy as über-rights. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, says, “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That amendment brooks no qualifying words and offers no wiggle room or escape hatches. American jurists perform mind-bending contortions to justify limits on these rights while struggling to wrap themselves around the ossified structures of the doctrine of originalism favoured by conservative justices.

In Canada, section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” While the Charter is imperfect, it has benefited from two centuries of legal developments since the American Bill of Rights, including the rapid evolution of international human rights law following the Second World War. Canadian judges have described our constitution as a “living tree” rather than treating its interpretation like an archeological dig.

A useful illustration of the differences between the American and Canadian approaches to free expression is found in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc. and the events that followed it. Moon does not discuss the case, but it demonstrates how poorly the concept of free speech in American law fits a Canadian context.

In June 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a worldwide interlocutory injunction that ordered Google to de-index the websites of a company called Datalink, which was using those sites to unlawfully sell products making use of intellectual property belonging to Equustek. (Datalink had repeatedly violated court orders to stop selling the products.) The decision to uphold the injunction was unsurprising. Google nonetheless opposed the injunction’s reach, citing (among other things) freedom of expression and its own content-neutral character.

Even if freedom of expression were engaged, the court noted, the irreparable harm caused by Google in facilitating Datalink’s unlawful conduct would outweigh other considerations. So Google went shopping for an American court that would be more receptive to a free speech argument. In Google LLC v. Equustek Solutions Inc., et al., a district court in California duly prevented the enforcement of the Canadian order in the U.S., pointing to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” thus immunizing interactive computer services against liability from content provided by third-party users.

In siding with Google, the American court noted that public policy considerations — including free speech protections — are needed to promote the continued development of both the internet and a vibrant, competitive free market. With that victory in hand, Google brought the matter back to Canada, arguing that the injunction here should now be set aside. The judiciary remained unimpressed, and in 2018, the Supreme Court of British Columbia rejected Google’s arguments, affirming the ability of Canadian courts to protect the integrity of their own processes.

The point, surely, is that advertising stolen goods — an expressive commercial activity — does not transform into something that freedom of expression can grab hold of, despite its materialization through the internet, where critical thinking sometimes seems to dissolve along with well-established legal principles. The differences between the American and Canadian approaches could not be more pronounced. Yet Canadians — especially writers and those in the media who make their living thinking about free speech and why it matters — too often import the more muscular American varietal into the Canadian scene with little thought for the consequences or competing values.

American law treats almost all expressive behaviour as constitutionally protected free speech, with the result that everything becomes everything, everywhere and all the time (except, maybe, bodily functions, though I am not even sure about those, given Moon’s nod to the fuss over Andres Serrano’s 1987 photo Piss Christ). Lawyers will argue that Canadian law is similarly broad in its definition of free expression, which is true, but it is much more circumspect about reasonable limits on problematic expression.

Moon is a noted legal scholar of the right to free speech and free expression, and The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression is mostly an update of his extensive earlier publications, which focus mainly on Canadian and American law, with references to European and international law. The book starts with the conceptual foundations of freedom of expression and its adjudication. It explores the platforms that support expression, and it reviews the contours and contents of the standard speech categories, notably commercial speech, blasphemy, obscenity, pornography, compelled expression, and hate speech. But Moon wants his book to be more than just an update. He canvasses recent developments related to the internet and discusses the rise of misinformation, disinformation, and so forth — and what we should do about it. He also introduces an intriguing new conceptual approach: namely, the idea that freedom of expression is a “social right.”

Moon’s choice of term is puzzling. In human rights law, social rights are an entirely different species: they include things like a decent standard of living, adequate housing, and education. Social rights are usually not “justiciable” in countries like Canada, meaning that the courts defer to legislatures when it comes to government action involving long-term programming on social, economic, and cultural issues. Further complicating matters, social rights are “progressively realized,” in that legal obligations evolve over time. Countries can’t be expected to implement the necessary laws, policies, and programs — let alone reap their benefits — overnight.

Canadian courts have not closed the door entirely on protecting social rights, and there is a global push to strengthen them, though it is far from clear how or why social rights might help us solve the free speech puzzle. Indeed, after an introductory page or two, the term evaporates from view, except in a promotional blurb on the book’s back cover.

What Moon is really pointing to is that free expression and other Charter rights don’t fit the “individual liberty model and are better understood as social or relational in character.” Surely, though, both dimensions are necessary. Individuals are the focal point of human rights law. At the same time, social and relational factors structure and foster human development, while reflecting evolving human needs. The connections among social associations and their relationships to freedom and democracy are well developed in the literature.

Both individual and social dimensions are prominent in the arguments for the right to free expression that Canadian courts most often make and that help to structure The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression: truth, democracy, and self-realization (or self-fulfillment). Autonomy, another important dimension, is bound up with self-realization and focused on the individual. Matters of “equal concern and respect”— a principle the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin has described for how the government should treat all persons — are more social and relational in nature. Moon also refers to participation in public affairs, which the prominent British scholar Eric Barendt considers critical in his sweeping 2005 survey, Freedom of Speech. Barendt names suspicion of government as another argument for freedom of speech, one that has particular weight in the U.S. context. Democracy is connected to them all, in one way or another.

Free expression is aimed at truth seeking, which in turn contributes to democratic discourse. As Moon observes, though, appeals to authoritative sources like experts and “mainstream media” are losing traction in the search for truth. The internet has some responsibility for this, creating what Moon calls a “new landscape” that has accelerated and splintered information. (Meta’s recent decision to abandon fact-checking on its platforms will aggravate the problem.) But as Equustek showed, the underlying and long-standing legal values that prevent specific speech-based harms should not change, even if the technological and transnational challenges of regulation have. Calling lies, fraud, hate speech, or negligent misstatement (among the many exceptions to the right to free expression) “disinformation” or “misinformation” has just created generic terms that cloud over the harms that free expression can cause. They have not gotten us closer to solving the liberal puzzle, let alone sorting out the “truth.” One cannot help but wonder if they have obscured rather than revealed the new landscape.

Arguably, what has really created a new landscape for free expression is the threat of pandemics in modern societies and their effect on rights. The worst of the most recent pandemic may be in our rear-view mirror, but it is worth remembering how quickly fundamental freedoms and democratic institutions were suspended in favour of health and public safety. The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression does not address the impact of global health crises on freedom of speech and democracy or what might come next. This is a missed opportunity, given the book’s timing and the implications for the reframing that Moon proposes for the social and relational character of speech.

The relational aspects of truth seeking and the impact on individual rights are top of mind on university campuses. While they have struggled to centre free expression and academic freedom, universities have also argued that measures restricting free expression and academic freedom are needed to secure those very values.

Centring freedom of expression and academic freedom means that universities should be neutral when carrying out their missions, a point that has been argued forcefully by the McGill political scientist Jacob Levy, who has also said that universities are private organizations that often have compelling interests in regulating their members’ speech. Levy suggests that free speech protections that extend to public spaces and institutions do not apply to universities.

Universities may not be quite as exceptional as Levy thinks. It is true that academic freedom is not the same thing as free expression, but universities embed free expression into their academic freedom policies. As Moon points out, academic freedom may simply be the shape that free expression takes in the academic context if one strips out the application of the Charter. Moreover, Canadian universities are not entirely exempt from speech protections that apply to public spaces. The Supreme Court has said that “freedom of expression” means the same thing in the federal Charter and in provincial human rights legislation. Freedom of expression in the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, for example, also applies to private entities under provincial jurisdiction, including universities, a point that commentators often overlook.

What’s more, finessing the important tensions between rights and security allows all institutions — public and private — to argue that safety measures protect human beings and therefore rights. Governments use such arguments regularly. After 9/11, for example, the justice minister, Irwin Cotler, spoke to the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act, encouraging critics to change their thinking about those tensions: “What is involved here is human security legislation that seeks to protect both security and human rights.” But some public safety measures do infringe on human rights, and while a subset of them may be reasonable, others cannot be justified. Conflating rights with the reasonableness of their limits reduces the critical space for inquiry.

Canadian courts have also based arguments for free expression on self-realization, which is tightly bound up with autonomy interests and with values like equal concern, respect, and human dignity. It follows that the right to free expression will be weakened by speech that undermines these values; it will be weakened by a failure to consider other interests and rights as well. While free expression may provide democracy’s oxygen, oxygen alone is corrosive and combustible. It works better when combined with other elements. People will have different perspectives about which rights matter most, based on their own priorities.

Indeed, self-realization lies at the heart of every human right, not just free expression. Teachers may see the “right to education” as a priority both for individual self-fulfillment and for democracy’s wider project. Feminists, LGBTQ+ people, and various minorities may prioritize equality rights because stereotyping and discrimination restrict access to human rights, including fundamental freedoms. The refrain “Give me freedom of speech, and I will be able to secure every other right” rings hollow for those who have little access to the media or do not write for a living or whose aspirations to “every other right” have not materialized. That is why no one person’s or group’s rights, including free expression, should automatically prevail over those of others as a starting principle.

As early as 1993, with the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, international law has recognized that there is no hierarchy of rights. The Supreme Court of Canada has taken a similar position. Understanding the interdependency of rights has implications for the connections between liberty and equality. The social dimensions of equal concern and respect are often portrayed as antithetical to individual liberty interests, but they also have something fundamental to say about freedom.

Writing in The Atlantic, in 2017, about campus protesters’ demands to be both heard and seen, the political theorist Teresa M. Bejan described the ancient Greeks’ ideas of isegoria, understood as a claim to sameness or equality in accessing public speech, and of parrhesia, which correlates roughly to the freedom or licence to say whatever one wants. She observed that parrhesia has the stronger purchase in contemporary rights discourse, while those accused of deplatforming and “cancel culture” are arguing for isegoria: equal place and influence in universities that they believe are intent on denying them both. As Bejan put it: “Free speech for some, they argue, serves only to silence and exclude others. Denying hateful or historically ‘privileged’ voices a platform is thus necessary to make equality effective, so that the marginalized and vulnerable can finally speak up — and be heard.”

Isegoria differs from the “equality of ideas” embraced by First Amendment scholars like Robert Post, whom Moon cites. It cares about the people behind the speech and moderates access to free expression itself. Isegoria considers the relative positions of the speakers and their intended audiences. These are not things that the First Amendment was designed to deal with.

We do not have to go back quite as far as the ancients to see equal concern and respect in freedom’s DNA. The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty that Canada joined in 1976, guarantees civil and political rights “without distinction of any kind,” based on human rights grounds like race, disability, and sex. Similarly, Quebec’s Charter guarantees equality as a distinct right as well as the “full and equal recognition and exercise of” human rights and freedoms, “without distinction, exclusion or preference.”

Equal concern, respect, and human dignity are integral to defining limits on hate speech, a topic that occupies a sizable portion of The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression. Debates about regulating online harms have reignited passionate conversations about the relationships between free expression, hate speech, and equality. Moon himself has had a substantial role in this regard, starting with the hate speech wars that erupted in 2007.

Muslim law students led one of the battles in Canada’s hate speech wars, which lasted until about 2013, when they launched complaints about a number of articles in Maclean’s, including, as an example, one by Barbara Amiel from 2006: “Normally, a people don’t willingly acquiesce in the demise of their own culture, especially one as agreeable as Western democracy, but you can see how it happens. Massive Muslim immigration takes place.” Another Maclean’s contributor, Mark Steyn, predicted a global Muslim takeover, before clarifying in a subsequent issue of the magazine that what he had meant was not that “the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers.” He went on to cite such “livelier examples” of “contemporary Islam” as sex with nine-year-old girls and “hitting on the livestock.” Leaving aside the over-involvement with farm animals and pedophilia, Steyn’s articles were a recognizable and popular sub-genre of commentary after 9/11.

The law students believed that these pieces vilified Muslims and requested a meeting with Maclean’s, asking for a response authored by a writer of their choice. The editor-in-chief at the time, Ken Whyte, refused to print such a piece. According to the students, whom I interviewed for my 2013 book, Speaking Out on Human Rights: Debating Canada’s Human Rights System, Whyte arranged to have Julian Porter, one of Canada’s leading libel lawyers, present at the meeting. (I also interviewed Porter, who is married to one of this magazine’s board members.) Porter asked what legal avenues the students were considering. They were surprised by the question, because they had not thought of legal recourses. But then they did. Among them was a human rights complaint under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which, as it read at the time, made it a discriminatory practice to use telecommunications and the internet to expose people to hatred or contempt based on prohibited grounds of discrimination like race, disability, sex, and sexual orientation.

The ensuing human rights complaints generated an uproar. Previously, respondents to such complaints had been unsympathetic people like overt racists and neo-Nazis — not established media outlets. Meanwhile, some politicians who saw the electoral implications of a massive wave of anti-Muslim sentiment decided to ride it.

It is unlikely that a provision like section 13 of the CHRA would survive constitutional scrutiny in the United States, because Canadian and American laws have different responses to these issues. At that time, however, the distance between the two systems had narrowed considerably. The Canadian Human Rights Commission retained Moon to prepare a report on section 13. Given his writings on free expression and on the U.S. perspective, it was not unforeseeable that he would recommend its repeal, which he did when he issued his report in 2008.

Moon thought censorship of hate speech should be limited to speech that explicitly or implicitly threatens, justifies, or advocates violence against the members of an identifiable group and that equality rights bodies are not the right vehicles for managing conflicts with free expression. The Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed the complaint against Maclean’s and presumably hoped that the combined effect of the Moon report and the dismissal would appease its critics.

It did not work out that way. The right-wing blogosphere and media were jubilant. A frenzy of attacks ensued online and in print. Human rights commissions were called kangaroo courts, star chambers, and affronts to democracy. Some called for the end of the commissions altogether. Moon tried to address the inaccuracies about human rights commissions in a 2010 article, which he cites in his book. But, other than shunning Moon, whom they had so recently hoisted onto their shoulders, the critics of these commissions did not change course. Human rights advocates with whom I spoke at the time felt they were under siege. Several were traumatized by the onslaught and felt powerless to speak out against repeated inaccuracies. Eventually, Brian Storseth, a Conservative member of Parliament, tabled a private member’s bill to repeal section 13 of the CHRA. And when Bill C‑304 received royal assent in June 2013, Canada lost a key federal policy tool, leaving few options to address hate speech beyond the heavy-handed sanctions of the criminal law.

Meanwhile, a new legal challenge to hate speech regulation was wending its way through the courts. Section 14(1)(b) of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code prohibits the publication or display of hate speech related to protected equality grounds. In Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously upheld the province’s limits on hate speech as reasonable in a free and democratic society. The 2013 ruling eventually opened the doors to reintroducing the regulation of hate speech as a form of discrimination. Bill C‑63, the Online Harms Act, was tabled in 2024 and would re-enact a version of the old section 13 of the CHRA. Moon still opposes the idea, for reasons similar to those he stated in 2008. But much has changed since then.

Whatcott recognized that human rights commissions deal with conflicts between equality and other kinds of rights and interests. Expecting them to limit their investigations to equality rights alone misses the point that other rights are engaged with and embedded in equality claims: speech, for example, often provides critical evidence in equality claims. It may, in fact, constitute the discriminatory act itself. Moon’s approach, restricting hate speech regulation to extreme situations that threaten, justify, or advocate violence against identifiable groups, was not accepted by the court in Whatcott.

We have a stronger understanding of the damage that hate speech can and does inflict than we had even a decade ago. A 2021 report by a United Nations special rapporteur found that 70 percent of those targeted by hate crimes or hate speech on social media are minorities. Other UN reports have said that discrimination against minorities, as well as against women, girls, and migrants, creates vulnerability to hate propaganda, which encourages self-censorship and limits what its targets are willing to say publicly. Bill C‑63 would create a broad regulatory framework, with multiple policy tools, including but not limited to the CHRA, to strengthen the regulation of digital services and protect against harmful content.

On one hand, Moon worries that there will be too few complaints under the new section 13, but Bill C‑63’s broader framework would address some of these concerns. Better awareness of the issues and stronger civil society engagement would ensure broader scrutiny and participation, alleviating worries about selective prosecution.

Moon also has concerns about the opposite outcome, namely a deluge of human rights complaints. Yet there appears to be little evidence for these concerns given the history of section 13 (very few claims were filed until 2013). Of course, the Canadian Human Rights Commission needs to be properly resourced, something that governments of all political stripes have consistently failed to do. And given the prorogation of Parliament and the current popularity of the Conservatives — as well as a resurgence of the opposition to Bill C‑63 — re-enactment of the CHRA’s section 13 is now highly unlikely.

For now, let’s return to public participation as an argument for free expression, which Barendt, among others, considers to be the most easily understandable and most fashionable theory of free speech in modern Western democracies.

Moon’s chapter on access to state property and other public platforms focuses, largely, on the American public forum doctrine, “which gives individuals the right to access some properties (those that by tradition or designation are open to public communication) and not others (those that perform a function that would be significantly compromised by general access).” Here he explores the fiddly distinctions in American law among several types of public forums, distinctions that appear necessary because of the unbending language of the First Amendment.

In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected this doctrine in a case known as Commonwealth of Canada, noting criticisms from both Canadian and American judges and scholars. Several justices emphasized the significant differences between the two systems. That decision actually cited articles by Moon, though he suggests in his book that the court has adopted the public forum doctrine. Moon also refers to the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority case from 2009, about requiring a public transit system to place political advertising on its vehicles. He discusses it under the rubric of “designated public forums,” a subcategory of the American public forum doctrine. Confusingly, the court did not refer to or adopt the U.S. doctrine or any of its variations in its reasoning.

Access to public funding and programming for private organizations is a related and rich vein of inquiry for freedom of expression and public participation. Moon carefully reviews the leading Supreme Court of Canada decisions, including those that make it clear that people do not, as a rule, have a positive right to programs or funding. However, he omits one of the most interesting cases in this area, Canada Without Poverty v. Attorney General of Canada, decided by the Ontario Superior Court in 2018.

Canada Without Poverty is a small but mighty charitable organization, one of at least twenty-five progressive charities that the Harper government targeted starting around 2012. The Canada Revenue Agency began using a restrictive interpretation of the Income Tax Act to limit non-partisan “public advocacy” activities much more aggressively than any government had before. The CRA triggered punitive audits of the charities, leading to the possible (and devastating) loss of charitable status. Canada Without Poverty filed a lawsuit, arguing that the restrictions were a violation of freedom of expression.

The government and conservative commentators — in the latter case, many of those who were quick to defend hate speech on free speech grounds — argued that charitable status is a privilege. Organizations that did not wish to comply with the CRA’s interpretation could simply carry on and renounce their charitable status. This argument entirely missed the point: the type of expression under scrutiny — advocacy on issues related to legally recognized charitable grounds — is a kind of (non-partisan) political speech, the most highly prized form of free expression. The court held that the violation was unjustified. Justice Edward Morgan pointed out that the government appeared to have been unable to even articulate a pressing and substantial reason for the restriction.

Public participation was central to the case. According to a consultation report cited by the court: “The participation of charities in public policy dialogue and development should be recognized and valued, and seen as an essential part of the democratic process.” Because Ottawa had created a regime of tax advantages for charities, Charter rights had to be respected within it. The government did not appeal the decision.

The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is one of the four fundamental freedoms in the Charter, though it is among the most poorly developed Charter rights. Perhaps the expansive force of free expression simply pushes other freedoms out of the room. Kent Roach and David Schneiderman put it best in a 2013 article noted by Moon: “It may be fair to say that section 2(b) has colonized claims that might otherwise have been made” under other fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of peaceful assembly.

Freedom of assembly is far more than a “poor man’s printing press.” Because free expression and peaceful assembly are different rights, it is reasonable to assume that they mean different things. After stripping away free expression from peaceful assemblies, what remains is the right to occupy physical space and to confront the intended audience physically, directly, and proximately. Unlike freedom of expression, peaceful assembly often involves otherwise illegal activity like infringing on property rights, violating highway safety codes, or ignoring by‑laws designed to ensure safety and orderly conduct. That is partly why, over time, sympathy for protesters drops dramatically, often in inverse relation to the efforts of institutions and law enforcement to remove them forcibly.

Canadian courts have consistently failed to inquire into the content of peaceful assembly in any meaningful way, a phenomenon that was clearly in view with most of the injunctions sought in relation to the 2024 university encampments. Sorting out the boundaries between these vastly different rights requires courts and scholars to develop the right to peaceful assembly and its relationship to free expression more carefully.

Language is another critical element of free expression and public participation, especially in Canada. Yet in recent years, the Coalition Avenir Québec has systematically undermined English-language rights, particularly in post-secondary institutions.

The starting point in any analysis of those efforts is the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1988 decision in Ford v. Quebec, which challenged signage provisions in the Charter of the French Language. The court decided that compelling the sole use of French on commercial signs violated section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Nonetheless, Moon says, at the “limitations stage” of its analysis, “the court found that the compulsion to use French was justified.” What the court actually said about the limitations stage of its analysis was that the sections of the language charter requiring the exclusive use of French were “not justified.”

It is true, as Moon observes, that protecting French is a pressing and substantial objective, but the requirement of French alone on commercial signs was not proportional or rational. Given the centrality of language and identity politics in Quebec today and the devastating consequences for post-secondary institutions, it is important to be clear about how courts deal with reasonable limits in language cases.

Readers will extract a wealth of knowledge from The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression, but the liberal puzzle of free expression remains largely unsolved. The usual reasons for valuing free expression have stumbled badly. Truth and democracy are flat on their faces. Buzzy words like “disinformation” and “misinformation” continue to swarm around pointlessly — amassing considerable academic and cultural capital and displaying little ability to solve very much.

Despite what I see as its limitations, Moon’s book does help us understand parts of the puzzle more clearly. The Charter and human rights law more generally have fundamentally changed the Canadian landscape, and constitutional law in this country has evolved quite differently from that of our neighbours to the south. The Charter explicitly recognizes reasonable limits on free expression. All human rights are interdependent and interrelated. They all work together. Our distinct approach to these rights has been practical and balanced, avoiding the extremism that free speech has engendered in the United States.

The triumphalism and inflexibility of free expression have been part of the problem. If constitutions don’t bend, either they or the societies they serve will break. Thankfully, Canada’s legal traditions do not point in that direction.