New Government Hate Crime Initiatives Will Outlaw Linking To Hate Speech

 Joe Brean is usually careful about these stories, so though I don't see where anyone in the gov. has said this explicitly, I will assume he's got it right re the criminal code enhancements that will offset the repeal of Section 13 of the CHRA:

One of the Criminal Code enhancements Mr. Nicholson referred to is a minor tweak to the criminal laws against wilful promotion of hatred and public incitement of hatred, clarifying that “communicating” means communicating by any means, and includes “making available.”


It's less of a big deal then it sounds, and was originally proposed as clause 5 of the Bill C-51(Investigative Powers For The 21st Century).  It was explained here, which will have to do because I'm too lazy to write it up again.  My question, though, is how if at all the SC majority decision in the Crookes Case--which seemed to make it OK to link to defamatory speech if the defamation was not repeated in the linking post--will effect this.  After all, one can think of hate speech as group defamation.

More information will presumably follow, and I will be interested in seeing how closely if at all the legislation follows The Moon Report: a mandatory, nation-wide press council, anyone?

Government To Strengthen Hate Speech Provisions In Criminal Code

The clip is Brian Storseth's introduction of Bill C-304 to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.  The most interesting part is the last half, in which Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson asks the HOC to get behind the government's "forthcoming amendments to strengthen the hate crimes provision of the criminal code".  Shades of The Moon Report, which suggested transferring some powers from the CHRC to the police when it come to fighting hate crimes?

A few years back I wrote about what might happen if that report was implemented in full:

What would happen is that complaints dealing with the kind of material now handled by the CHRC under section 13 would go to the various police hate crimes units (whose workload, Moon suggests, would almost certainly increase). So, while nowadays Connie and Mark, or Mr. Boisson, might get a letter from a government bureaucrat, under the new regime they would most likely get a call from a nice policeman, and this would occur just as their websites (via section 320.1 of the CC) disappeared until said policeman could decide whether its contents met the standard. Since Freedominion occasionally hosts calls for Muslim genocide in its forums, it is almost certain that they would be getting such phone-calls, and might wind up looking at jail-time rather than a fine and rebuke.

And now maybe we'll see it happen.

Also of note, Tarek Fatah and his gang (the MCC) have apparently come out in support of C-304.

Brean On The CHRC

Not a bad piece by Joseph Brean in this morning's National Post. A few minor complaints. For example, contra Brean, the CHRC report does in fact address forum shopping, though not via suggested changes in the legislation:

Section 27(c) of the CHRA already provides that the Commission:

… shall maintain close liaison with similar bodies or authorities in the provinces in order to foster common policies and practices and to avoid conflicts respecting the handling of complaints in cases of overlapping jurisdiction;

Pursuant to this mandate, the Commission has initiated discussions with our counterpart provincial and territorial agencies through our collective organization, the Canadian Association of Statutory Human Rights Agencies. The purpose of this initiative is to work toward avoiding duplication of proceedings in the future

...and I am afraid I would not call any of the criticisms levelled against the agency by Canada's editorial board's as "sober". Witness this piece of shit from the Calgary Herald.

Richard Moon's comments from later in the story are especially interesting:

"This is my larger concern," he said. "That they [the CHRC] continue to call for what they describe as a dual approach to the regulation of hate speech, that is to say the criminal code and the human rights act. And of course, in order to kind of justify that, they have to define a distinct sphere, and a distinct role for the human rights act and the commission and the tribunal. It's unclear what that is. The only thing that really gets emphasized is that the criminal code prohibitions are about wrongful behaviour and intent is a necessary element, whereas the human rights act is not about whether there was wrongful intent or motive, it's simply about the effects or the impact of this expression on members of the community."

The problem is that, as a matter of actual practice, intent already is a requirement. The hate speech cases that have actually been pursued are "all so extreme in character that it is impossible to imagine that there is not wrongful or hateful intent," Prof. Moon said.

[...]

This is an emerging irony of Canada's messy hate speech debate. As Prof. Moon describes it, the more the CHRC emphasizes the seriousness of the hate speech it fights, "the more it looks like that should already be dealt with by criminal law, and not through the kind of process that's designed to deal with human rights complaints."

A couple of points here:

1) Moon essentially (and for about the 2nd or 3rd time) validates the CHRC's judgement in those cases it has forwarded to the CHRT (the Tribunal). In particular, he implies that the Warman cases would have, for the most part, met the CC requirement.

2) The response to the Moon report by the profoundly non-sober MSM has been to highlight his recommendation to repeal Section 13 and forget everything else. In fact, Moon suggests there (as here) that the powers now possessed by the CHRC/CHRT get redistributed to other agencies, particularly to police forces with beefed-up hate-crime squads(1). So, as I wrote earlier, while nowadays an Ezra Levant or a Marc Lemire

... might get a letter from a government bureaucrat, under the [proposed] regime they would most likely get a call from a nice policeman, and this would occur just as their websites (via section 320.1 of the CC) disappeared until said policeman could decide whether its contents met the standard .

And in so doing, Moon was anticipating Jessica Lynch's complaint from earlier in the piece that:

...when we look at the statistics, we find that there aren't a lot of specialized [police] hate teams across the country," Ms. Lynch said. "To cede, to remove our jurisdiction, would leave a gap that might persist for years or a lifetime because it would require numerous jurisdictions to step into a gap, and they may or may not be willing to resource that, etcetera, etcetera.

(1) And lets not forget his recommendation to establish a mandatory national press council.

All of which I've written a zillion times before. Is there any new news out there?

Your Daily Nazi: The Nazis Don't Like It!

The Moon Report gets a pan on Stormfront, and for obvious reasons. Hand over regulating this kind of material to the police, and you will wind up with more police on your ass, if you're a Nazi or other form of bigot.

Jonathon Kay: The Moon Report Is A Smorgasbord, And We May Pick And Choose Among Its Recommendations As We Please

The other day I predicted that, once the Speechys got past the news release of The Moon Report, their enthusiasm for it would began to wane. Well, it looks like a few of them have found their way into the body of the document and, indeed, they don't like what they're seeing.

Jonathon's Kay's response has been typical. Lets, he suggests, just reject all those aspects of the report we don't like:

Final upshot: Moon's basic idea to get rid of Section 13 is admirable. But one wishes that he had stopped there, instead of adding in all sorts of unfortunate ands, buts and howevers.

Presumably Mr. Kay would have The Moon Report land in Parliament 95% redacted.

But this will not fly as a political solution. For while the report advocates a repeal of Section 13, these "ands, buts, and howevers" have been added so that there would, theoretically at least, be no net increase in extreme hateful speech because of that repeal. In other words, they were added so that the groups that might be targeted even more extensively by bigots and hatemongers in the wake of a straight repeal, would not be so targeted.

Of course the Speechys don't give a crap about that but the government of the day which, as Kinsella notes, needs at least some support among the targeted groups to craft its coveted majority, has to at least pretend to.