Why Open Debate Matters More Than Silence
So, let me walk you through this piece as if we’re just talking about it right now, because it raises a point that feels increasingly relevant in today’s climate. The whole discussion started after Mathieu Bock-Côté, often referred to as MBC, appeared on Tout le monde en parle , one of the biggest Sunday shows on Radio-Canada. And immediately, a wave of outrage spread. People were saying the public broadcaster never should have invited him, that someone like him shouldn’t be given a platform, especially on national television at peak viewing time.
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Now, here’s the interesting twist: the author of the original text openly disagrees with almost everything MBC says. They come from a completely different world—educated and politically shaped in environments like Cégep du Vieux Montréal and UQAM, places where debate, activism, and questioning authority are practically part of the furniture. They even participated in major student strikes, the ones that marked 2005 and 2012. Ironically, MBC sometimes uses an old photo of this same person—fist raised, standing above a crowd—to represent what he calls the “radical left.”
So when this author says they’re far from MBC ideologically, it’s an understatement. Yes, they call MBC conservative. Yes, they say he’s intellectually dishonest and not genuinely interested in real democratic conversation. They even describe his rhetorical techniques as manipulative and regressive. But here’s the core idea they’re defending: in a democracy, everyone is supposed to have the right to speak—even people whose ideas we think are terrible.
And that point hits especially hard coming from someone rooted in left-wing activism. They remind us that many of the freedoms they fight for—freedom of thought, expression, belief, and political organization—have been forbidden or violently suppressed in other countries and in earlier periods of history. People holding similar ideas were arrested, surveilled, beaten, banned from teaching, punished simply for imagining a different world. Knowing that history makes them uneasy whenever society, whether left or right, begins demanding that certain voices be shut down.
Their argument is simple but powerful: it’s better to live in a society where even the so-called “fools” and “loudmouths” can speak, rather than a society where a central authority decides which ideas are permitted. Because once one idea is banned, it becomes dangerously easy to ban another. Strong ideas will hold up in open debate. Weak ones won’t. But the test has to happen in the open.
At the end of the day, believing in democracy means believing in people—their intelligence, their judgment, and their ability to hear something they dislike without falling apart. Democracy is supposed to feel risky, sometimes uncomfortable. That’s the point. It only works when everyone is allowed to speak, not just those who make us feel good.
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