Juno News - June 18, 2019


Exposing the Liberal plan to censor the internet

Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Dean Stacey
No gun ban before election, but gun owners aren't in the clear yet Catherine McKenna has lost all credibility

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

169.61

Word count

1,094

Sentence count

42


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Online hate is a growing concern in Canada and there is no longer a legal protection for online hate speech under the Canadian Human Rights Act. In order to deal with this growing problem, the government needs to reinstate Section 13, which was struck down under the previous Conservative government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 After two months of meeting and testimony from nearly five dozen witnesses, the House of Commons
00:00:07.980 Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights has tabled its report in the House of Commons
00:00:12.640 on how to deal with the problem of online hate. Now the very premise of this study was that online
00:00:19.200 hate is a growing concern and that there's a void in law in Canada whereas once government had the
00:00:25.260 ability to prosecute online hate and now it no longer does. Among the report's nine recommendations
00:00:31.200 are some that should make any freedom-loving Canadian concerned. Specifically number seven
00:00:36.760 which says the report calls on the Government of Canada to develop a working group comprised of
00:00:43.980 relevant stakeholders to establish a civil remedy for those who assert that their human rights have
00:00:49.760 been violated under the Canadian Human Rights Act irrespective of whether that violation happens
00:00:55.820 online in person or in traditional print format. This remedy could take the form of reinstating the
00:01:03.360 former Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act or implementing a provision analogous to the
00:01:09.220 previous Section 13 within the Canadian Human Rights Act which accounts for the prevalence of
00:01:14.280 hatred on social media. The Section 13 reference there has been dead for about six years. It was killed
00:01:21.720 off under the previous Conservative government and I hope that it would be dead and buried forever.
00:01:27.160 It's a section of the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed the Canadian Human Rights Commission
00:01:32.280 to prosecute supposed online hate speech but not speech that meets the high threshold set out in the
00:01:38.920 criminal code. Speech that was at a much lower threshold one that the Canadian Human Rights Commission
00:01:45.240 would decide on its own and if you were defending yourself against a complaint by the Canadian Human
00:01:50.920 Rights Commission you didn't have the right to legal representation, you had to cover all your costs,
00:01:56.120 you didn't have the right to the presumption of innocence, you didn't have the ability to make truth
00:02:00.840 a defense and the complainant who didn't even have to be impacted directly by what you said
00:02:07.480 would have all the resources of the federal government at their disposal. Section 13 for over three
00:02:13.800 decades had a 100% conviction rate. 100% conviction rate for a provision that encompassed the very design
00:02:23.160 of censorship. That's what it did. In the later years of Section 13 it was used to prosecute bloggers
00:02:29.080 except the Canadian Human Rights Commission was actually going on to forums and posting content that was
00:02:35.720 itself offensive to try to bait other people into responding with something that might have been
00:02:41.800 equally offensive so that they could prosecute. This was an absolute sham, it was the very portrait
00:02:47.320 of injustice yet it purported to be standing up for human rights and now the liberals want to bring Section 13 back
00:02:53.960 except it's not enough just to bring it back the way it was. The liberals on the Justice Committee have
00:02:59.160 actually invested in it a desire to see even more power put into Section 13, specifically turning
00:03:06.600 social media companies into state enforcers. Here's another recommendation from the report.
00:03:13.560 That government establish requirements for online platforms and internet service providers
00:03:19.320 with regards to how they monitor and address incidents of hate speech and the need to remove
00:03:25.240 all posts that would constitute online hatred in a timely manner. This means that what the government
00:03:32.120 wants to do is actually empower social media companies and not just empower force them to make
00:03:38.840 determinations of what apparent hate speech is and purge it from their platform. So it's not even like
00:03:44.600 there is an adjudication panel that's taking place, shambolic as it may be, the government wants to make big
00:03:51.400 tech into state enforcers. Now there are a few different outcomes in this. Either government
00:03:56.440 will be able to go to tech companies and say delete that, delete that, delete that, or what's more likely
00:04:02.040 to happen is companies will decide we don't want to deal with the hassle of the Canadian Human Rights
00:04:07.400 Kangaroo Court so we're going to delete content on our own preemptively. And all of a sudden it is users,
00:04:14.200 people in Canada who want to post online, that are now dealing with state censorship enforced by
00:04:20.760 supposedly private tech companies. That's what's at stake in this proposed supercharged version of
00:04:27.720 Section 13. Now to make one point clear, with only a few sitting days left in the House of Commons
00:04:33.320 calendar, it's unlikely this will turn into any proposed, let alone passed law prior to the election.
00:04:39.800 But this does prove itself to be a precursor to something the Liberals may do if they are re-elected,
00:04:45.400 which is to take aim at free speech under the guise of hate speech. Except this report contains
00:04:51.880 no definition of hate speech. It says the government will have to figure that out down the road. The
00:04:57.160 fact is we already have a definition of hate speech on the books in Canada. The Criminal Code of Canada
00:05:03.240 is very clear on it. The Human Rights Commission can only fill a void if we want to lower the bar and
00:05:09.880 have a sub-criminal level of hate speech, in which case, speech is no longer free in Canada.
00:05:16.680 Unfortunately, this is a very real problem. The Chief Commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human
00:05:22.200 Rights Commission testified before this online hate study and he said unequivocally that there is
00:05:27.560 no unbridled right to free speech in Canada. Dean Stacey, formerly of the Canadian Human Rights
00:05:33.400 Commission, famously said during one case that freedom of speech is an American concept,
00:05:38.920 and something that he's not going to bother importing into Canada. The Human Rights Commission,
00:05:43.800 and by extension the Human Rights Tribunal, ingrained in their DNA is a fundamental desire
00:05:49.400 for censorship and a desire for speech to not be free. The Liberals want to give this body more power.
00:05:56.120 This is why it's never been more paramount to stand up for free speech, to fight back
00:06:00.760 against cultural political correctness before it becomes legally mandated political correctness.
00:06:06.680 True North is doing this when the mainstream media isn't. We can't do it alone though,
00:06:10.760 we don't get the government funding, we don't get CBC's $1.3 billion. If you can give us a few
00:06:15.960 dollars a month by joining my Heritage Club, please do. There's a link in the description box and you get
00:06:21.000 some goodies there as well as being able to stand up for what's right. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.