Julian Porter QC gave a terse summing up for the defendants in the Maclean’s/Steyn Human Rights Tribunal in British Colombia:

Dr. Ayoub, calling on the American injunction, that you cannot cry fire in a crowded theatre. Oh yes you can, you must if in your considered view there is a fire. It is a duty to cry fire.

My previous post on these strange proceedings also referred to the familiar fire/theatre analogy.

Let’s work some further examples:

a)    X is a jerk. He calls "Fire!" in a theatre just to cause panic. Panic. Y is injured in the rush to the exit. He ought to have a remedy against X, with no obvious defence for X?

b)    X is a nervous type. He calls "Fire!" in a theatre because he smells smoke. But it is only someone furtively smoking. Y is injured in the rush and sues X. Can X defend himself by showing that he acted honestly from good intentions?

c)    X is a nervous type and calls "Fire!" in a theatre because he thinks he smells smoke. No-one reacts except the nervous Y, as there obviously is no fire. Y carelessly broke his spectacles earlier that day and as a result trips and hurts himself. Can he claim from X when his own weakness and negligence primarily caused the accident?

d)    Y thinks (incorrectly) that he smells smoke in a theatre and rushes to escape. He has been made nervous by a poorly made medication which has transformed him into a nerous wreck. He trips and injures himself. Can he sue the drug manufacturer?

e)    And so on.

The point of these examples is that they make us consider finely-grained nuances of Responsibility and Causation at the heart of our jurisprudence and therefore our civilisation.

It is a basic precept of Western law and morality that if X is to be held responsible for damage to Y, Y has to prove that he has suffered some damage and that X’s actions caused it, if maybe only as one contributing cause along with others.

See this classic and this gallop through the arguments.

Because such questions are so far-reaching and important – and subtle – they need careful handling in the courts, lest precedents set in one context have a ruinous wider effect.

In the Maclean’s/Steyn case we see exactly the opposite.

Opaque if any rules of evidence. No clear and accepted theory of causation. No serious attempt to assess damage.

And thus the possibility of a popular book selling well in Canada and elsewhere being summarily banned, in a banal and capricious way.

Some people talk about ejecting Russia from the G8 for its abuses of human rights. Maybe Canada should politely withdraw too?

One other Causation/Responsibility point.

Huge efforts have gone into trying to sue cigarette and gun manufacturers for the damage caused by their products.

The moral case here is that they have put on the market products which cause weakness of will thereby causing damage, and/or allow the weak-willed, the reckless and the dangerous to damage themselves and others.

Do those who favour such litigation also favour opening the way to the victims of Islamist terrorism suing extremist mosques for putting out vicious ideas and arguments which prey upon the weak-willed and/or reckless and dangerous, and thus provoke some of them to violence?

Some nice tight causation here, m’lud?

Bottom Line.

Back in real life, which causes the spread of greater fear and hatred and contempt towards Muslims in Canada, one of the most stable and mature democracies on the planet?

Those who write about the threat posed by Islamic extremists, albeit in a provocative way?

Or the actions of people like these?