From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Collin May

Targeting comedians is a sign of political insecurity

A democracy that fears its comedians is a democracy in trouble. That truth landed hard when Graham Linehan, the Irish writer behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd, stepped off a plane at Heathrow on Sept. 1, 2025, and was met by five London Metropolitan Police officers ready to arrest him for three posts on X.

Returning to the UK from Arizona, he was taken into custody on the charge of “suspicion of inciting violence”, an allegation levelled with increasing ease in an age wary of offence. His actual “crime” amounted to three posts, the most contentious being a joke about trans-identified men in exclusively female spaces and a suggestion that violated women respond with a swift blow to a very sensitive part of the male’s not-yet-physically-transitioned anatomy.

The reaction to Linehan’s arrest, from J.K. Rowling to a wide array of commentators, was unqualified condemnation. Many wondered whether free speech had become a museum piece in the UK. Asked about the incident, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended his country’s reputation for free expression but declined to address the arrest itself.

Canada has faced its own pressures on comedic expression. In 2022, comedian Mike Ward saw a 12-year legal saga end when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled five-to-four that the Quebec Human Rights Commission had no jurisdiction to hear a complaint about comments Ward made regarding a disabled Quebec boy. The ruling confirmed that human rights bodies cannot police artistic expression when no discrimination in services or employment has occurred. In that case, comic licence survived narrowly.

These cases reveal a broader trend. Governments and institutions increasingly frame comedy as a risk rather than a social pressure valve. In an environment fixated on avoiding perceived harm, humour becomes an easy and symbolic target. Linehan’s arrest underscores the fragility of free speech, especially in comedic form, in countries that claim to value democratic openness.

Comedy has long occupied an unusual place in public life. One of its earliest literary appearances is in Homer’s Iliad. A common soldier, Thersites, is ugly, sharp-tongued and irreverent. He speaks with a freedom others will not risk, mocking Agamemnon and voicing the frustrations of rank-and-file soldiers. He represents the instinct to puncture pretension. In this sense, comedy and philosophy share a willingness to speak uncomfortable truths that power prefers to avoid.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, noted that tragedy imitates noble actions and depicts people who are to be taken seriously. Comedy, by contrast, imitates those who appear inferior. Yet this lowly status is precisely what gives comedy its political usefulness. It allows performers to say what respectable voices cannot, revealing hypocrisies that formal discourse leaves untouched.

In the Iliad, Thersites does not escape punishment. Odysseus, striving to restore order, strikes him with Agamemnon’s staff, and the soldiers laugh as Thersites is silenced. The scene captures a familiar dynamic. Comedy can expose authority’s flaws, but authority often responds by asserting its dominance. The details shift across history, but the pattern endures.

Modern democracies are showing similar impatience. Comedy provides a way to question conventions without inviting formal conflict. When governments treat jokes as misconduct, they are not protecting the public from harm. They are signalling discomfort with scrutiny. Confident systems do not fear irreverence; insecure ones do.

The growing targeting of comedians matters because it reflects a shift toward institutions that view dissent, even in comedic form, as a liability. Such an approach narrows the space for open dialogue and misunderstands comedy’s role in democratic life. A society confident in itself tolerates mockery because it trusts its citizens to distinguish humour from harm.

In October, the British Crown Prosecution Service announced it would not pursue charges against Linehan. The London Metropolitan Police Service also said it would stop recording “non-crime hate incidents”, a controversial category used to document allegations of hateful behaviour even when no law has been broken. These reversals are welcome, but they do not erase the deeper unease that allowed the arrest to happen.

Comedy survives, but its environment is shifting. In an era where leaders are quick to adopt moral language while avoiding meaningful accountability, humour becomes more necessary, not less. It remains one of the few public tools capable of exposing the distance between political rhetoric and reality.

The danger is that in places where Agamemnon’s folly, leadership driven by pride and insecurity, takes root, those who speak uncomfortable truths may find themselves facing not symbolic correction but formal sanctions. A democracy that begins by targeting its jesters rarely stops there.

Collin May is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a lawyer, and Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, with degrees in law (Dalhousie University), a Masters in Theological Studies (Harvard) and a Diplome d’etudes approfondies (Ecole des hautes etudes, Paris).

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.

Death by doctor-assisted lethal injection, under the title Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), now accounts for over 5 percent of all deaths in Canada.

In November, Health Canada published the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, which tracked the expansion of euthanasia in 2024, with 16,499 Canadians receiving MAiD, amounting to 5.1 percent of the total deaths in Canada.

“The Government of Canada will continue its work to help ensure that the legislation on MAiD reflects the needs of people in Canada, protects those who may be vulnerable, and supports autonomy and freedom of choice,” the report asserts.

Health Canada noted that MAiD is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization and, therefore, “the number of MAiD provisions should not be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada in order to determine the prevalence (the proportion of all decedents) nor to rank MAiD as a cause of death.”

However, the government agency did admit that 16,499 people received MAiD in 2024, which amounted to 5.1 percent of “people in Canada who died.”

The report noted that that was “a small (0.4%) increase from 2023,” adding that “this percentage may change with final counts of deaths in Canada from Statistics Canada.”

Notably, the year-over-year increase was 6.9 percent, a significant slowdown from prior years, such as the 36.8 percent increase from 2019–2020. Health Canada suggested that MAiD provisions are beginning to “stabilize,” though long-term trends require more years of data.

According to the data, 95.6 percent of the deaths were Track 1, meaning those whose death was foreseeable, compared to only 4.4 percent being Track 2 requests, which end the lives of those who are not terminally ill but have lost the will to live due to their having chronic health problems.

“Although Track 2 provisions represented 4.4% of MAiD cases in 2024, they represented close to a quarter (24.2%) of all MAiD requests that were assessed as ineligible,” the report stated.

At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.

The report further revealed that 63.6 percent of the Canadians who were euthanized reported cancer as their underlying medical condition.

Currently, wait times to receive genuine health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for assisted suicide instead of waiting for medical aid. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.

Meanwhile, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world.

The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada; however, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.

Asked why it was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.