ETA: Reply to Roderick:
I’m not aware of a case like that, so can’t really comment. The bar is pretty high to demonstrate abuse of office by the Crown. One other factor is that our Crown prosecution and police services are by law non-partisan. No elected Crowns or sheriffs or chiefs of police. That’s by design, to ensure charging and prosecution decisions are not made for political reasons.
Yes, the weaselly overrides apply only to making and enforcing laws. A law can be argued in court that infringing on the constitutional right is “urgent” or an “important objective”. I used to joke that this is what allows us to have separate but equal(?) bathrooms for men and women, although I’m not sure how well that flies against today’s political correctness. More likely, I would imagine if there were a Patriot Act in Canada, or a modern equivalent of interning the Japanese (Something Canadians were no slouches at either) then current hysteria might cause the courts to override what should be obvious rights. It avoids the sort of extreme defence of rights that is routinely applied in the USA. (Although that didn’t stop them from interning Japanese or enforcing Jim Crow laws).
The other exception is when a provincial or government passes a law that they know blatantly violates rights (some of the charter rights) and want to immunize it against nullification. They can specifically state in the law that they are applying the “notwithstanding” clause - notwithstanding the charter right, this law overrides that right. Such an override must be renewed (passed by the legislature) every five years. Hence, the requirement in Quebec to use French rather than English in some situations overrides the charter right - for now. Ditto for the law against hijabs in Quebec.
The example of a crown prosecutor doing his own thing, IIRC, was when the movie “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” came out. I think it was the prosecutor in Sault Ste Marie that used an antiquated law and laid a charge of blasphemous libel against the theatre owner and the movie distribution company. It was widely ridiculed and the Attorney General(?) for the province stepped in and dropped the charges.
*Always look on the bright side of life…♫ *
Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the general guarantee of the rights set out in the Charter. It also provides that there can be reasonable limits on Charter rights, if they are “demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society”. (I presume these are the “weasel words” that md2000 is referring to.) In the Keegstra case, the majority of the SCC held that although the hate speech provision infringed freedom of expression, the restriction could be justified under s. 1 and therefore the offence was constitutional.
By comparison, in the United States, the First Amendment does not contain any such textual limitation: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech…”. However, the Supreme Court has tempered that absolutist language by the simple expedient of saying that some types of speech are not “protected” speech and therefore can be regulated by government without infringing the First Amendment. See the wiki article : “United States Fred Speech Exceptions”.
I mention this to point out that both countries recognize that there are limitations on free speech guarantees. The Canadian constitution does so by means of an express textual provision. The US constitution does so by a judicial limitation on the apparently absolute language of the Constitution, by the Court simply declaring that certain types of speech are not “speech” for the purposes of the First Amendment guarantee.
That Fred. Always with the speeching.
I knew someone would nail me on that. :smack:
There is no such law. If Peterson said there was, he is a liar.
At the time of a pertinent interview on the matter, the bill was supposedly in the process of being ratified. Also, I heard some Canadian hate-speech law had indeed been passed according to NPR/PRI/BBC.
Please see post 36 above, and the link to to wiki article given therein for information on the Pederson matter.
My understanding of the Peterson situation was that he initially faced a possible fine over the pronoun issue from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and under the respective provincial Code. And apparently this was enough of a legitimate issue that the counsel for the University of Toronto, Peterson’s employer, advised him that not only could he be fined but that the university, as his employer, could be found vicariously liable as well.
And frankly, from what I saw and read, those rebutting Peterson’s position were quite disingenuously dismissing his concerns with pedantry such as characterizing such a violation as “illegal but not criminal” because the penalty was limited to a fine but not imprisonment. Of course this ignores the fact that: 1) a substantial fine plus legal fees plus the potential negative consequences of incurring similar costs to his employer seems anything but inconsequential, and 2) Peterson had repeatedly stated he wouldn’t pay such a fine on principle and his failure to do so could in fact lead to imprisonment.
I’m certainly no expert on Canadian Law but I am pretty familiar with careful and deliberate lawyer-speak and weasel-words in general. And it was on full display by those who were trying to downplay the whole situation.
No, it absolutely was not. That is false. There is no law in Canada, and no bill being proposed, that has anything to do with making people use particular pronouns.
Canadian hate speech law has been on the books since Jordan Peterson was in elementary school, and it says nothing about using the wrong pronouns.
You seem like a nice enough person so let me be clear but not mean; you are one hundred percent wrong. Your understanding of the facts is totally erroneous.
This is wholly fictional. None of this happened.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission has no power to hear a complaint or to issue fines. Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Commission’s function is to advance human rights by developing educational resources about human rights and outreach to the community.
The Commission can institute a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, but the Tribunal is the decision/making body, not the commission. The Commission csn also intervene in a complaint lodged with a tribunal by an individual, if the individual consents.
The Commission can conduct an inquiry into an issue and make recommendations.
See the Commission’s web-page:
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/about-us/public-education-developing-culture-human-rights-2
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/about-commission/litigation-and-inquiry-strategy
Missed the edit window: the above post was in reply to Dirk Hardly at post 50. Didn’t realize there was a subsequent post taking it to the next page.
The other point to consider in the Peterson matter is that the Ontario Human Rights Code does not have a hate speech provision in it. Most of the provinces and the federal government do not have hate speech provisions in their human rights laws, which are civil in nature.
The issue is more properly considered under the general services provision of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which says that anyone providing services to the public must do so without discrimination based on any of the protected grounds: race, religion , sex, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and likely a few others.
Since universities and professors teaching classes are providing services to the public, they have to do so in a non-discriminatory way.
By way of comparison, what would we think should be the result under the human rights law if a Professor habitually referred to black students a “n——s”, Asian students as “ch———ks”, Jewish students as “k—-s”, women students as “girls” and white male students as “young gentlemen”?
Would we say that the professor was breaching the duty to provide services in a non-discriminatory way? Or would we say “free speech”?
Gender identity is a relatively new category, and people may not be familiar with it, but it has to be treated in the same way as other protected grounds under the Code.
Missed the edit window: want to make it clear that my example above is purely hypothetical and not aimed at any professor in particular. Hypothetical example to explore the contours of speech and the duty to provide services without discrimination.
A trivial example - I have a book from the early 90’s - “rec.humor.funny”. It basically reprints jokes from the usenet (good old days before WWW). It mentions that one particular joke (among a number of offensive jokes) cause a problem. (Basically, a joke that makes fun of Jewish people). It was followed on by being re-worked as an Irish joke. Someone complained.
This caused the University of Waterloo, a prominent Canadian university in computer science, to ban this usenet; while the American university hosts could not, because it would violate their constitutional guarantee of free speech. Simple and stupid, but this is the difference between real free speech and that which allows “reasonable limitations”.
But the “real free speech” takes away some of the voice of the people who are being diminished or denigrated by the “real free speech” because it biases the audience such that the diminished or denigrated people are simply not taken as seriously. This is part of why “reasonable limitations” are necessary to level the playing field.
Pity that neither Don Cherry not Donald Trump are participating in this thread, for each in their different ways may have ventured into the realm of willful promotion of hatred: Cherry by making a nationally publicized crack against immigrants that does not even come close to violating the law but was enough to get him fired, and Trump by repeatedly going on tirades against Muslims to the point that he could be accused of being a stochastic terrorist concerning the Québec mosque massacre. Where do you draw the lines between social disapproval, to restrictions on free speech, to criminal penalties?
I don’t think that there is a simple answer to this, but because I would not want the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater, I am OK with the difficulty that exists in figuring out when the criminal law should be enforced. The ever so frustrating fuzzy-wuzzyness (fuzzy-wuzzyosity?) of the wording of the criminal code provision results in the authorities tending to tread carefully when considering whether or not to press charges, while at the same time I expect that there may be many people who temper their statements because they do not want to get into conflict with this law. The uncertainty of the law plays a significant role in maintaining a practical balance – Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), s.391: Don’t be a jerk.
The problem with this logic is of course who gets to decide what is denigrating and diminishing and so deserves to be curtailed. Typically, it’s the establishment. In Quebec for example, wearing a religious symbol while employed by the government is considered “going too far”. (Let’s be frank - they were willing to hit Yarmulkes and crosses on neck chains if necessary to take out turbans and hijabs).
When I was in college way way back when, the Communist party (parties) had their information table on campus. One of their tenets was “We believe in free speech, but not for fascists”. If you asked how they knew someone was fascist, their response was “they are fascist if we say they are fascist”. It appears things aren’t much different today with odious right wing speakers being blocked on campuses across North America… but at least it’s not the government doing the blocking.
This is the point in the discussion where someone brings up the quote about “when they came for the communists, I did not protest…”
Or… the quote about pornography “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it…” which brings to mind an attorney general who insisted a stylized statue of Blind Justice be draped, a modern fig-leafing. It’s all subjective.
The thing that gets me is - of all the tripe and just plain stupidity the unwashed say about immigrants (by which they really mean - “immigrants who don’t look/speak like us”) the complaint “they don’t wear a poppy” is something I have never heard before. Where the heck did that come from?