Without a hand up his @$$, his mouth wouldn't open:
I have covered almost everything — except for the worst part of all. The limits that Western societies typically apply to free expression usually do have a danger component. We are ordinarily forbidden from threatening an identifiable person or group; we suppress some political symbols and ideas that we have found especially obnoxious; and you can certainly be imprisoned for shouting “fire” at the wrong moment if you could be shown to have intended gratuitous harm.
To compare that sort of regulated speech with the work of a schoolteacher in a classroom, explaining libertarian principles by means of some rude cartoons … well, it reeks of second-guessing a murder victim, doesn’t it? Samuel Paty probably knew he was facing some risk of reprisal, but shouting “fire” (falsely) in a theatre is forbidden because the fellow theatregoers are likely to be stampeded. Humans in the face of physical danger, especially a fire, become unreasoning beasts who will kill and crush their own kin to reach an exit.
That is to say, Holmes did have an improperly extrapolated point. The cry of “fire” in the wrong setting is more like violence than it is like a proposition or an assertion.
It is certainly not anything like any cartoon — unless you believe, as our prime minister might, that some humans cannot be trusted to behave non-violently if the doctrines of their religion are defied. (Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad are not actually judged by how “insulting” they are; the depiction itself is what’s objectionable to Muslims.) Maybe this was Trudeau’s real point, and I am deaf to a dog-whistle that Quebecers can hear perfectly well. Maybe he was just agreeing with Holmes that socialists belong in jail.
(Sidebar: it should be pointed out that this is the same snowboard instructor vaulted into power despite his love and his family's love of dictatorships, who supported the execrable Islamophobia bill, who defended the Boston bomber and rewarded notorious terrorist, Omar Khadr, whose idiot "wife" thought that puerile depictions of Christ were hilarious enough to put on a sweater, who has stymied every attempt to hide his and his family's involvement in a "charity" scam, who hides instead of answering direct questions, who bribed the press to be on his side, who, along with a criminal, is attempting to police the Internet, uses the military to "change" public opinion, and wants to unseal public documents as long as they are not related to the WE scandal in which he is deeply mired.)
Justin's prepared (undoubtedly) condemnation of free expression is on the heels of the murder of a French teacher who showed allegedly offensive cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammad.
One can dispense with the "lone wolf" description of the culprit or his ambiguous motive for the murder. One can certainly cast aside any notions that this was a random act not reflective of the actions of an entire culture. It has spawned the murder of three church-goers in France, an attempted murder of a Greek Orthodox priest and - more than likely - violence in Vienna. We are beyond the point of deflection from Islamism or even creating the fiction that all religions so needled will eventually resort to bloody violence. The past is prologue and Justin's poor attempt at deflection and defense only shows him up to be more of the fool everyone knows that he is.
The bigger issue is why only a handful in this country have pointed out that their leader is not simply stupid but categorically wrong on this front. Free speech means that everything is on the table, even things we find repugnant. The reaction to free speech cannot be be violence or censorship but more dialogue or a mature understanding of the material and who disseminates it. Justin may be a worthless apologist but his voters are either supportive of his selective approach to freedom of expression and why it definitely needs a place in Canada or something is on Netflix, a soon-to-be-taxed distraction from the larger issues of the day.
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