You can't contrast rights and freedoms when the right in question is a right to free speech. If one has a right to a freedom, and a third party enforces consequences for exercising that freedom, then one's rights are being infringed.
Well if we are talking Canada with this point, it is not a right to a freedom of speech. It's a freedom to speak whatever you may want to speak. The wording of the 1st Amendment is quite different so I can see how the interpretation would vary.
The Canadian constitution states that everyone "has the following fundamental freedoms [...] (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."
I'll pose a couple of analogies to illustrate how I'm interpreting it:
If I wanted to tell my the CEO off at the company I work for in a grotesque manner, I'm entirely free to do so, but I'd likely lose my job. If he decided to fire back at me, HR would likely intervene to resolve the issue, but not before we're cordoned off to prevent further controversy. (I realize companies aren't quite analogues of countries, I'm taking a bit of a stretch for the sake of illustration).
If I picked a stranger out of a crowd and degraded him publicly, I'm free to do that as well, but I'd probably get punched. If instead of punching me, he decided to throw similar words back and a third person intervened to arbitrate and calm the situation down -- is my freedom then being imposed upon? What if the intervening individual was a police officer or a panel of people, or a body of interested people?
I see these things (like most things outside of technical fields) as far more gradient than binary, so I maintain a pretty strong bias, I know.
