Hard to have sympathy yes-- but freedom of speech/expression is still freedom of speech. Regardless of how tasteless it is, and should be protected..
Is this where to draw the line? I'm not sure, but it is not the case that absolutely any “joke” is costitutionally protected free speech.
It doesn't matter what you or I think about the examples I gave above. It only matters what the government thinks. And if they think any or all of those are harmful concepts, then by using your reasoning any speech invoking those concepts would be controlled by the government.
That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed. It's impossible to draw lines on which ideas are allowed to be expressed and those that aren't, without running into this hazard.
The thing Canada mostly considers illegal is saying something like "hey everybody, you should hate/kill X because they're {Native American, gay, old, disabled, etc.}!" with a specific X that people might then go and kill.
It's not even that we don't want to protect that speech as speech; it just seems to lead directly to hate crimes being committed a non-negligible proportion of the time. So we make hate speech itself illegal, to try to stop the hate crimes early.
These are complicated questions. But this is what case law exists for. The US, for example, allows one to speak of revolutions “in broad terms”.
> That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed.
Allowing absolute freedom of speech is self-defeating. Yes, now the government can't hurt you, but your opponents can use their “free speech” to silence you. It's not healthy for a democracy, and this is why no country on earth has absolute freedom of speech.
I'm interested in some examples of this. At first blush this statement reads to me as a "marketplace of ideas", which is a feature in my opinion. But I could be interpreting your statement wrong.
That's speech.
The legislature and the judiciary do.
Regardless of where they derive their power from (democracy, monarchy, whatever). Constitutions exist to provide limits on even the power of the current majority to change fundamental aspects of governance. The U.S. Constitution for example, requires a very high bar before alterations can be made, precisely to avoid even democratically-elected representatives from making changes, even where those changes would enjoy popular support.
And it's hard to say anything about this joke without actually hearing it. Maybe the comedian has some useful funny things to say about Treacher Collins syndrome?