Ezra Levant yesterday linked to a Seattle Times editorial that looked with sadness at its foolish neighbours to the north.

We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness.
. . .
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person … to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.

The Canadian idea of hate speech is less specific and more dangerous. Hate is like obscenity, about which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "I know it when I see it." The difference is that a ban on obscenity does not touch political discourse, and a ban on hate does.
. . .
Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.

To understand the full import of this editorial, some background needs to be kept in mind, I think.

The Seattle Times is the newspaper of record in one of the most notoriously left-wing Democrat cities in the United States.  Having lived there for four years in the late 1970s, I can attest that Wikipedia has it right:

Seattle's politics lean famously to the left compared to the U.S. as a whole. In this regard, it sits with a small set of similar U.S. cities (such as Madison, Wisconsin, Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts) where the dominant politics tend to range from center-left to social democratic. Seattle politics are generally dominated by the liberal wing (in the U.S. sense of the word "liberal") of the Democratic Party; in some local elections, Greens (and even, on at least one occasion, a member of the Freedom Socialist Party) have fared better than Republicans.

The journalistic voice of a hotbed of leftist American politics believes that Canada’s human rights codes have given unelected authorities arbitrary power to censor public discourse.  That says a lot.

h/t: Ezra Levant

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