Canada’s law on hate speech is the embodiment of compromise

Good commentary by David Butt on Canada’s hate speech law:

For a prosecution to go ahead, all of these conditions must be met:

1. The hate speech must be the most severe of the genre;

2. The hate speech must be targeted to an identifiable group;

3. It must be public;

4. It must be deliberate, not careless;

5. Excluded from hate speech are good faith interpretations of religious doctrine, discussion of issues of public interest, and literary devices like sarcasm and irony;

6. The statements must be hateful when considered in their social and historical context;

7. No prosecution can proceed without approval of the attorney-general, which introduces political accountability because the attorney-general is a cabinet minister.

Even with these limits, the Canadian hate law still clearly curtails free expression. But the Supreme Court has not struck it down. Why? Four main reasons. First, our constitution protects not only free expression, but multiculturalism and equality as well. So to read the constitution holistically, we cannot permit one protected freedom to undermine other rights and freedoms enjoying equal status.

Second, the Supreme Court recognized the insidious impact of propaganda campaigns that gain social traction and incrementally dull our rational faculties and empathy. Perhaps paternalistic, but the court is saying sometimes we need to be protected from our baser and stupider selves.

Third, the courts have said that even if a hate speech prohibition is never used, it has symbolic value, like that framed mission and values statement on the wall of most businesses, that stares silently down at the workers while they work.

Fourth, hate speech has no redeeming value.

….So it may be that our hate speech law was a silent point of resonance with the values, not the legal obligations, that motivated the media outlets who chose not to publish.

Is that sufficient reason for our hate speech law to exist? Sufficient reason for a law that can impose jail for speaking out? If we take these questions back to our social media haunts, our office water-cooler chats, and our classrooms, freedom of expression in Canada will come out a winner regardless of how opinion is, or is not, divided.

Canada’s law on hate speech is the embodiment of compromise – The Globe and Mail.