Juno News - August 01, 2019


Hate crimes on the decline. Liberals pretending otherwise.


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

162.3722

Word count

794

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Hate crimes in Canada are on the decline, according to Statistics Canada, but a new report from the Justice and Human Rights Committee argues that online hate is on the rise. Andrew Lutton explains why this is not the case.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 When Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were elected, they promised evidence-based policy,
00:00:07.360 decision-making, and legislation rooted in evidence, not in ideology. I think most people
00:00:13.600 just kind of shrugged and laughed when he said it, not really believing it. But
00:00:17.560 what about when the evidence says the opposite of what the Liberals are trying to do? That's
00:00:22.800 certainly the case when it comes to combating hate speech and hate crimes. I've done numerous
00:00:28.240 videos on it. This report from the Parliamentary Justice and Human Rights Committee that calls on
00:00:33.960 legislating into human rights law regulation of online speech. But there's another dimension to
00:00:40.180 this. The very premise of that committee's study, the premise of this report, was that hate crimes
00:00:46.320 are on the rise. Let me read literally the first sentence of the description of this report.
00:00:52.840 With the rise of hate crimes reported to the police and the use of online platforms to promote hate
00:00:58.220 hatred, several groups have requested that this issue be studied by Parliament. Right there,
00:01:03.540 the very first words of the very first sentence, with the rise of hate crimes. Except that isn't what
00:01:11.160 the numbers are suggesting. And this isn't just some fringe study that says this. We're talking about
00:01:16.360 data from Statistics Canada. Despite the government ramp up in the fight against so-called hate, which it
00:01:22.600 doesn't define in any of its reports or materials, hate crimes are actually on the decline. The number
00:01:29.060 of police reported hate crimes decreased in 2018 by 13%, which is not an insignificant sum, going down from
00:01:37.000 2073 in 2017, which is a higher than normal year, to 1798 in 2018. Hate crimes against Muslims, according to the
00:01:46.600 report, were down the most with more moderate declines in hate crimes against other groups. And continuously,
00:01:54.360 the largest victimized group by hate crimes is the Jewish community. Anti-Semitic hate is once again the
00:02:00.840 most common type of hatred we see. Why these numbers are important is not to say that hate and hate crimes
00:02:07.560 don't exist in Canada. It's to say that anyone talking about them being on the rise or them being a clear and present
00:02:13.960 danger. Those terms were used by witnesses standing before the Justice and Human Rights Committee's online hate
00:02:20.600 study are not in alignment with what the facts say. What's worse is that we've allowed groups and political advocacy
00:02:29.080 organizations and commentators and pundits and yes, the Trudeau liberals to weaponize the fear of hate. To present this
00:02:37.240 image that Canada is a much more hateful and disharmonious place than it actually is and to use this as a way to
00:02:43.880 wedge in legislation that otherwise no one would go for. Look at the anti-Islamophobia motion M103. That
00:02:51.480 motion was put in because the government said, oh no, but hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise. And
00:02:57.720 that's why a lot of people were too terrified of criticizing it because they didn't want to be seen as
00:03:02.280 Islamophobic. And now we have a Justice Committee report where the premise is inherently disproven by the
00:03:08.840 government's own numbers. Yet still I haven't heard a peep from anyone in the government about it. So when
00:03:15.800 the numbers are saying that hate crimes are down and the legislation is saying that hate crimes are up, you
00:03:20.760 have to question where the agenda is. And unfortunately there is a hate industry in Canada, across the West, 0.65
00:03:28.040 organizations that make considerable sums of money by presenting this narrative. And one of the suggestions that
00:03:35.480 was actually put to the Justice Committee was that third party groups like Muslim groups or gay groups or groups
00:03:41.720 representing minority interests would become the entities to which hate crimes would be reported rather than police.
00:03:49.400 So these groups are ultimately seeking a budget and a mandate to do things that should be the work of law enforcement.
00:03:56.840 And this was actually one of the concerns that I had with the Justice Committee's findings.
00:04:01.400 They embraced that suggestion in one of the recommendations saying that people often feel more comfortable
00:04:08.360 reporting hate incidents and hate crimes directly to civil society organizations. So police forces should
00:04:15.960 work collaboratively alongside these so-called civil society organizations in data collection and more importantly
00:04:23.720 resources need to be allocated to these groups, to these organizations.
00:04:29.960 So what we have now is these groups and special interest groups specifically that stand to benefit
00:04:36.520 from the government presenting this narrative that hate is on the rise when we should be as a country
00:04:41.640 very grateful that it's on the decline. Do we have more work to do as a society? Yes, but that's not coming
00:04:47.240 about through any of the recommendations that big government is proposing. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.