Section 13 study falls off the agenda
FEDERAL POLITICS / Hate speech repeal not a priority as committee resumes
Dale Smith / National / Thursday, March 18, 2010
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(Cailean VIII, Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)
The Commons justice committee had started a study on Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act in the previous session of Parliament, but the government's decision to prorogue killed the committee — and the study.

Now that Parliament has come back and the committee has resumed, is the study going to come back as well? Not necessarily.

"We had a meeting of the steering committee last week," says Liberal justice critic Dominic LeBlanc. "This didn't come up."

Section 13 of the CHRA governs the transmission of hate speech over telephone and internet. There have been calls to have the section repealed in favour of freedom of expression, seeing the provisions as contravening the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As well, opponents of Section 13 argue that it establishes a lower threshold for offences than the two hate speech laws that appear in the Criminal Code. (read more about Section 13 in Xtra's achives)

"We'd sort of begun to scratch the surface [of the study]," says Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber, a proponent of repealing Section 13. "We'd had two or three days of hearings, and heard from the human rights commissioner, and of course from Ezra [Levant] and Mark Steyn. On an unrelated hearing day, we heard from a recent appointee to the human rights commission tribunal — we were just speaking to her, or confirming her appointment."

Rathgeber had stated his intention to revisit the issue when Parliament resumed, and he mentioned that the committee had a mechanism to adopt the evidence previously heard.

The NDP's justice critic, Joe Comartin, has heard that Conservatives on the committee want to resume the study, but they appear to be giving it no priority.

"Given the backlog of bills, and other work, studies that we're doing on organized crime, I have a hard time quite frankly seeing us doing anything more on that at least in this year, and I expect an election sometime this year, so I think it probably is not going to go anyplace."

LeBlanc sees the utility of the study but isn't about to make a priority of it either.

"We're going to wait to see what the government wants to do," LeBlanc says. "My view was that there was a very legitimate basis for some human rights commission review with respect to Section 13. We've heard evidence about how we can perhaps increase some of the procedural protections, but you're certainly not going to see the Liberals leading a charge to re-open that at this point, and if the government decides to let it go, that certainly would be fine with us."




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Reader Comments


 
why is no one talking about this?
hmmmm you'll notice that it is almost invariably women who are apppointed to these "commissions". One of the dirty little taboos in canadian society is that we never get around to discussing how one group - affluent, privileged white females - are the self-defined (and self-congratulatory) arbiters of what qualifies as "good" speech and what qualifies as "bad" speech in canadian society. Canada is a declining nation - though the rot isn't evident to everyone just yet - in large measure because white vaginas of a certain vintage have taken it upon themselves to serve as the thought and speech police of contemporary canada. Their power, tragically, is immense: they get to destroy lives without regard for procedural scruple; they get to impose arbitrary fines upon low-income canadians who say things of which they disapprove; and they get government sinecures permitting them to fly around the world on the public dole - where they can hob-knob with dictatorial regimes and devise new ways of throttling free expression in a nation that needs more ideas aired, not more ideas killed through self-censorship and intimidation. Well, Brazil seems like a nice place to live, maybe Australia, too.
blaine, london ontario
03/19/10 10:43 AM EST
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why aren't people talking about this? part II
it should have read "how one group - affluent, privileged white females - IS the self-defined" instead of "how one group - affluent, privileged white females - are the self-defined" in that second sentence. Sorry, my bad. Nonetheless, I think my sentiments are clear - and i am still wondering why people don't make more of a fuss over this stuff. Are they really that anaesthetized - or scared?
blaine, london ontario
03/19/10 8:33 PM EST
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Politically Correct
Careful there Blaine, there's nothing to debate here. Here's how it goes, you don't need to know anything or think about it. It's the trinity of the sociopathic behaviour of an oppressive power structure believing itself pacifying what haven’t hurt anyone in Canada - that is, free speech. The infantilization of a society tends to go hand in hand with the feminization of the system. You can say anything, the counter-argument will be the same. All they care about is anti-sexism, antiracism, antifascism. Why is something right or wrong? Certainly not because of evidences based on rational taught. No time for this, you’re either a fascist or a racist or a sexist… or a mixture of the three. White women are mostly liberals, white men are mostly conservatives… So it’s not exactly hip right now to be a white male in North-America, it tend to make one guilty until proven innocent. Why do you think a guy like Michael Moore blames the “stupid white man”? Cause that’s where we’re at now, we’re shifting gears to again blame the conniving white man. If only they voted like minorities and women, we’d all be happy now, wouldn’t we? They’re fascist mostly because they disagree, because they voted for Bush, Harper, Sarkozy, etc. They’re sexist mostly because they don’t have a vagina. They’re racist mostly because they are white. They’re guilty and the rest of the world is their victim, they’ll always have to appease for it. Obviously, Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn are of Jewish origin, so it’s all the more amusing that they are the ones fighting this fight. I mean, they’re not your prototypical while male. If we are to be truly post-racial and stop making it about gender or skin colour, this victimization-worship culture will need to end.
Joël Cuerrier, Châteauguay Québec
03/20/10 3:59 AM EST
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The real lobby behind this movement
Since the responders to this article clearly don't know the back story on this issue, I thought I'd post some links. There is no doubt that there are problems with the wording of Section 13, and even the CHRC's own report on the matter acknowledged the need for revision. But this issue is being driven by the Conservative Party, who passed a motion in October (http://ezralevant.com/2008/11/conservative-party-votes-overw.html) vowing to get rid of Section 13 altogether. That's right. Not revise it. Eliminate it. Now here's what that law was designed to protect us from: http://www.signmovies.net/videos/signmovies/index.html (click on the video) http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=496305 (read the comments on page 2) http://www.christiangallery.com/atrocity/aborts.html (scroll down to the lists of crossed-out names) For the record I do not advocate any of the positions espoused on the sites I have linked and I consider most of them to be criminal hate speech. I am providing this information for educational purposes only, as I am permitted to do under Canadian Human Rights law. These groups have huge followings headquartered in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The fact that they don't have political power in Canada is proof that the law is working--not that there's no need for it. They hate human rights law and they have been working nonstop to convince the people in the Conservative party stronghold ridings that they are fighting censorship rather than attempting to legalize hate. In Alberta they're winning and they're gaining ground here too.
not safe to say, anywhere Saskatchewan
03/22/10 1:09 PM EST
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why they must go
to the last poster: these examples you cite are already dealt with under the Canadian Criminal Code; they're called sections 318, 319 and 320 of the CCC. Put these individuals through a genuine legal process that involves proper legal procedures, rules of evidence, cross-examination and the presumption of innocence - and where legal aid can be provided to them as they need it (in our gawdawful HRC system or racket, the tax payer picks up the tab for the plaintiff whilst the defendant must pay for his or her own legal counsel). I also should add, as Ezra Levant has mentioned previously, that these HRCs have been properly accused of entrapment (see Richard Warman - a lawyer who has made many, and I do mean 'many,' thousands of dollars hauling ordinary working-class canadians before human rights commissions). In a sane political culture, these commissions would not exist - and you would not be defending them. Don't damage the lives of ordinary canadians just because a bunch of vaginas at your local detachment of the human rights machine decides that joe-blow, living in a box in penetanguishene, has bruised their feelings. And don't let unethical swine like Warman, a fellow who has enriched himself at the expense of less-fortunate and vulnerable canadians for years, distract you from the real issue: in a society with an actual functioning criminal court system (with actual laws and guidelines and procedures), we don't need arbitrary human rights commissions around staffed by censorious nitwits who can't bear hearing another perspective from another human being. Again, HRCs represent the vaginafication or feminazification of our society.
blaine, london ontario
03/24/10 12:24 AM EST
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