What if he adds, “And I happen to agree with it”?
Crime now?
You can get into trouble in Canada for far less than that. Have a look at Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals. They have the power to haul anyone up in front of them - all it takes is a complaint by a citizen that another citizen has promoted ‘hatred’ against some group.
Recently, these tribunals came under a lot of heat because they pursued two cases against popular authors. Ezra Levant was hauled up in front of them for printing Muslim political cartoons - the same ones that caused a furor in Europe. At about the same time, Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine were charged for publishing a chapter from ‘America Alone’, a best-selling book in the U.S. Both of these defendents decided to fight it out in the media, causing a lot of negative attention to be brought on the conduct of these tribunals. The charges against them were eventually dropped because of all the heat.
Until then, the tribunals had a conviction rate of 100%. Everyone brought before them was found ‘guilty’, and subjected to fines, permanent limits on their speech, and other punishments.
The Tribunals do not operate under the normal rules of a court. Defendants have very few rights. The people running them are not judges, and not necessarily even lawyers. Mainly, they’re political activists and bureaucrats. They’ve been caught doing things like posting hate speech on message boards, then charging the owner of the message board with promoting hate speech if he doesn’t immediately remove it.
Here’s a reasonable overview of the issue.
so do you oppose libel and slander laws? laws making it a crime to utter a threat? how about insider trading laws that prohibit a person from talking to another person about upcoming business activities?
Do insider trading laws restrict the speech? I thought it just restricted fraud due to special knowledge and maybe required public disclosure of information that was inadvertently disclosed privately. I’m looking over the wikipedia article someone who is reading this knows the laws better. If I disclose information on tomorrow’s stock price, am I punished for disclosing it or for not making a public disclosure?
They were dropped because they lacked merit, not because of “all the heat.” The panels took a look at the evidence and said “Nope, not seeing the evidence” and tossed the cases.
Bullshit. Ezra Levant saying something does not make it true.
There are legitimate reasons to question the scope and power of human rights tribunals but you’re doing yourself a great disservice by employing bullshit.
I have to agree with RickJay–this is simply not true. The behaviour of the tribunals can sometimes seem out of line, but they deal with many more issues than just hate issues. And, as might be expected, not all complaints (they are “complaints” to a human rights tribunal, not “charges”) are upheld (not “finding someone guilty”). I’ve certainly had to read through enough human rights tribunal decisions to know that things do not always go the complainant’s way. Certainly, the tribunals are bound to investigate complaints, but if the complaint has no merit, it will be tossed.
It may seem like there are many semantic distinctions in what these tribunals do (i.e. “complaints” not “charges”), but they are there for a reason–a tribunal is not a court, and if anybody involved in a complaint doesn’t like what a tribunal says, they can appeal to a real court for a judicial review of the issue. A tribunal’s decision isn’t necessarily final and non-appealable.
Just to restate, what if this guy had said, “The Bible says that homosexuals should be executed, and I happen to agree with it”? Should he be hauled before the tribunal?
Funnily enough, Ezra Levant is apparently a walking piece of crap. I’ll have to ask my husband, Jim, for the details. He and Ezra go way back, to Jim’s University of Calgary school newspaper days.
The Canadian hate crimes refer specfically to “identifiable groups” and therefore the hate speech would not apply to something as general as “murderer”.
Actually, I think he would be in the clear.
Sam Stone - Um, wow. Your understanding of the Canadian Human Rights tribunal system is stunningly inaccurate.
Free speech (actually freedom of expression) is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but similar to UK laws it recognizes that there may be limits, mostly stuff that’s been hammered out in case law.
Most are similar to U.S. laws. Remember the U.S. freedom of speech is not absolute either , not by a long shot. It exists so that people may voice opinions of dissent against their own government without fear if being arrested for it, so there are definitely limits on free speech in the U.S. Threats, libel and slander, yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater, child porn. etc. In fact with all sorts of new “anti-terror” laws, you have to be more careful than ever!
The hate speech thing is relatively new, and I think seminal case law was in the 1990s when the Supreme Court decided that James Keegstra did break the law with hate propoganda for willfully promoting hatred.
Can you offer a correction for those of us down South?
I’m glad he knows as much about Canada as he does the US.
Well, the particulars have already been mentioned. To sum up:
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The claim that the tribunals had a “100% conviction rate” is a simple and outright lie; Sam is repeating something Ezra Levant said, and Levant was lying. They did not.
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The claim that the case against Macleans magazine was dismissed “because of all the heat” is absolutely false. It was dismissed because the case didn’t hold up to scrutiny and so the tribunal threw it out.
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Human rights tribunals do not hand out “Convictions.” They are duly constituted tribunals that focus on complaints related to matters of discrimination and human rights issues, almost invariably when mediation between the two parties fails to resolve the problem. They’re basically very low courts for deciding a certain type of tort case. They cannot imprison anyone. They are subordinate to federal courts and any decision they make can be appealed to provincial or federal court (and, eventually, to the Supreme Court of Canada if it gets that far) just like any other tort case.
Yeah it is the National Post, but it quotes, Monette Maillet, director of legal advisory services, as saying (I’ve included the context);
So, it appears she isn’t arguing with the 100% figure put forth.
Oy! The National Post (righty).
The CHRT isn’t a criminal court. They can’t “convict” anyone. They can only make recommendations that are favorable or not to the respondent, and since most of what they do is based on discrimination cases, worst case scenario is that the respondent will have to pay a fine or compensate the complainants (like if you were demoted from your position due to race).
It looks like there is one particular advocate who is going after the easy targets. This one lawyer has brought forth all but two of the 13 hate speech cases that have made it as far as the CHRT. He goes after neo-Nazi groups and collects their messages for a slam dunk.
Even then, in the most recent “finding against the respondent” the CHRT denied a financial penalty or compensation, and basically told the complainant (the lawyer) he was a jackass.
Your timing is off by a decade or so.
I was poking around the CHRT’s website and a few other sites and it looks like hate speech laws goes back at least as far as the late 1970s. Although there is a lot of new stuff that cropped up with the rise of the internet and I don’t know when the CHRT was created, so maybe they were the ones who took over hate speech issues in the 1990s.
How does what I said differ from what he said drastically enough, in your opinion, to make it a criminal matter? In fact, on reread, I can’t see any different between what he said and my hypothetical…
This bears repeating. The original function of these tribunals was to provide a forum where discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, physical disability, etc. in matters such as housing, employment, education and suchlike could be addressed; and remedies generally were designed to either make things right or compensate the person discriminated against. Creating these tribunals freed up the time of the courts. For the most part, when the system works to address the issues it was designed to address, it works pretty well.
Problem is, that there are people who see these tribunals not so much as tools to rectify proper claims of discrimination in housing, employment, and education (among other areas), but as a recourse when somebody says something they didn’t like or that they feel smears some group, as when Levant’s magazine published the Mohammed cartoons. This is generally not what the tribunals were meant to address; but which they increasingly find themselves addressing. I’m unsure why.
Perhaps the solution is to codify just what the tribunals are supposed to address, and specifically exclude such things as fall under the Charter’s freedom of expression provisions. If a complaint is submitted that complains about what is said in the media (for example), the tribunal then has the authority to deny the submission; and can refer the complainant to the regular court system where the free expression/hate speech principles established in Zundel and Keegstra and other similar cases can be used to resolve the matter.
Oh! Oh! :: raises hand :: I know this!
Firstly, I think Mr. Crayons may be mistaken to some degree. I think the area is far too grey and a big-picture context is required, not just a single statement.
Hate speech is wilfully trying to incite hatred. So it’s not saying “The Bible says kill 'em, and I follow the Word to the letter.” It is knowingly and deliberately trying to encourage others to hate a specific identifiable group. Like say the difference between manslaughter and murder, the victim is dead either way, but one requires actual willful intent for it to be the crime of murder.
That’s the role of the CHRT, they examine stuff on a case-by-case basis. In his case, based on the fact that the guy disregards Biblical teachings when it suits his own purposes, it invalidated his claim that he was essentially witnessing.
Thirdly, you don’t just get dragged in front of the CHRT for opening your big mouth and voicing an unpopular or non-PC opinion. You can actually be a total racist dick, for example, and spew all sorts of vile crap. It tends to get a little dicey though, when you willfully start trying to get other people to be racists too.
Personally, if I wanted to incite others, I would use mime, just to be safe!
I think part of the reason the CHRT is getting stuck with these cases is in part because information much more expansively than before. Like the Michael Richards racist melt-down got recorded and disseminated world-wide before he even left the club. Seriously, I think it’s the internet. Media has been so globally integrated, that stuff know one would even know about is getting attention.
So the guy who used to only be the town loon, where only the locals would hear his rambling and say “Oh, that’s just crazy Larry. Don’t pay any attention to him, he’s a dick.” Now these fringe loons can plaster themselves all over the internet and get the media’s attention, and suddenly someone like Richard Warman (the lawyer in my previous post) who has decided he is the Champion Against Hate Speech will jump all over it.