Is Charlie Kirk's murder the end of civil discourse...

Are we even still able to have discussions with people who we disagree with politically?

They’ve caught Charlie Kirk’s killer. A 22 year-old man named Tyler Robinson has been arrested.

Robinson allegedly confessed to his father after people recognized him from video and photos released to the public, he has anti-fascist messages engraved on the bullets in the rifle and viewed Kirk as a fascist.

Those are the quick details. Right now though, I’m pondering a longer term and deeper question.

Can we still have civil discourse in North America?

Sure, Charlie Kirk’s assassination happened in the United States, but we all know that what happens in the USA doesn’t stay in the USA. We import, we ape, we copy what happens in American politics right here in Canada.

We had people celebrate Kirk’s murder including a now suspended University of Toronto professor of religion, a journalism professor at Thompson River University in BC, an employee of Legal Aid BC among many others. Kirk wasn’t involved in Canadian politics, maybe he came to Canadian campuses, but I never heard about it.

Yet, here were Canadians cheering the death of someone who held political views that were different from theirs in another country.

It’s despicable, but it’s been going on for a long time.

We have a desire in Canada to shut down political views that don’t align with our own, especially conservative leaning views.

I’m old enough to remember students at the University of Ottawa using fire alarms and blockades to shut down Ann Coulter’s appearance on campus in 2010. It was utter mayhem and most of the students there protesting couldn’t tell you why they didn’t like Coulter other than they knew she was American and a conservative.

I know that because I was there and talking to them at the time.

In 2017, there were attempts to shut down an event held at the University of Toronto put on by the U of T and York University Chapters of Students in Support of Free Speech. That event was scheduled to feature Jordan Peterson, who was still a U of T prof along with Ben Shapiro and John Carpay from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

The school administration was less than cooperative, protesters threatened to cancel the event and it nearly never happened.

Shapiro, a totally likeable guy if ever you meet him, was met with similar protests at UBC.

When I first met Glenn Beck in 2012, it was under heavy security as he spoke at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto. Not only was there a heavy police presence at that event, there was heavy private security paid for by Beck but also by event organizers.

This doesn’t happen when I go to events featuring heroes of the American left in Canada. There may be the odd person who protests them but there are no attempts to cancel them on campus, no pressure campaigns to have theatres cancel their bookings, no heavy security presence like there are for conservatives.

Kamala Harris is coming to Toronto to speak at Meridian Hall in November as part of her book tour. As much as there will be heightened security for a former VP, it won’t come close to what was on site for conservative writer and commentator Douglas Murray appearing at the same venue last night.

Cancel culture for conservatives has to end.

Conservatives are at least one third of the population and at times much more than that. Yet the radical left, people who think the NDP is too right wing, are the ones who hold sway in our academic institutions and in much of our media and they try to silence conservative voices.

Despite the Conservative Party taking much more of the popular vote than the NDP, in my experience covering federal politics, provincial politics in Quebec and Ontario and municipal politics in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa - plus occasional jaunts across the country - you are more likely to find more journalists who back the NDP than the Conservatives and most journalists are in the bag for the Liberals.

I’m tired of people trying to cancel me, people trying to say that I’m a fascist or some other horrible claim they want to make against me. None of it is true but it happens over and over again, including with commentary by people who don’t know me, or the others they denounce, but want to make uninformed political judgments.

This is reality, I won’t sugar coat it, but I also won’t say we should make it as bad for the left.

Instead, my message to them is to realize that just because you disagree with me, or those who support my views doesn’t make me evil, doesn’t make me a fascist, doesn’t mean I deserve violence or to be cancelled. It means that we have a political disagreement.

I’m a pretty well known conservative commentator but I have friends who are Liberals and New Democrats. I have friends from all walks of life and political persuasions.

Why?

Because at the end of the day, we’re all human, we have more in common than not. There are things that we simply agree to disagree on and then move on, and that is how it should be.

It’s how it must be for our democracy to survive.

So, let me turn this platform over to an unlikely candidate, Bernie Sanders. The longtime socialist and perpetual Democratic Party candidate put out a very good video denouncing the assassination of Charlie Kirk and called for everyone to allow for greater discourse not less.