LAWTON： The Justice Committee's Attack on Free Speech
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Summary
In this episode of the True North Report, host Andrew Lawton talks about Canada's lack of respect for free speech, and why the government has no mandate to censor online speech. He talks about the history of free speech battles in Canada, and what we need to do about it.
Transcript
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Good afternoon, Canada. Welcome to another live edition of the True North Report.
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For True North, I am Andrew Lawton here to talk about free speech.
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It's a particular bugaboo of mine, if I can use such a trite word,
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when government does not recognize this fundamental right.
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And let me say, I've got a lot of material to work with this week.
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So I'm going to be talking about some of the big battles that have happened
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and the way that, at the risk of just making it about complaining,
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I want to make sure that we have some prescriptions for the future,
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ways that I think we might be able to write this.
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But it's not going to be easy. It's going to be an uphill battle, but it's an important one.
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And I think that what we saw this week happen at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights
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So to start, thank you very much for tuning in.
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It's been about a week since I've done this last.
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Always fun to be live again, especially for me, an old radio guy.
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I like doing the short videos that we do where you really just hammer a point for four or five minutes.
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But I also love doing this where we get to really take some time, go into the issues,
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But I do want to talk about what happened in Ottawa.
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Now, we've been going at True North absolutely guns blazing on this, and there's a reason for it.
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And if you think it's overkill, I'll explain to you why it's not.
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And the reason why I'm covering it to the extent that I am, well, two reasons.
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The free speech battles in Canada have been not just the things that I'm most interested in,
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but they're ultimately the battles that got me into politics, and certainly that got me into talking about the cultural issues we face in Canada.
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So if you want a bit of a backstory on this, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is no longer there.
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It was repealed thanks to a private member's bill about six years ago by former Conservative MP Brian Storseth.
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Section 13 was the clause in the Human Rights Act that basically allowed the government to prosecute what it called online hate speech.
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So any content that the Canadian Human Rights Commission thought was likely to incite hatred,
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not did incite hatred, but was likely to incite hatred, and used electronic communications like a computer or a telephone,
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And the conviction rate was virtually 100% with this.
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The majority of the complaints were filed by the same person.
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And this was the type of issue that ultimately was responsible for Mark Stein going before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal,
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Ezra Levant going before the Human Rights Tribunal,
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And the one thing that I found fascinating about all of this is that we had in Canada,
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when this battle was waging about a decade ago,
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The Bloc Québécois was actually an ally in this.
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the Conservative Party of Canada was really at the front line of giving some political support
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to what people like Mark Stein and Ezra Levant and other advocates outside of the political realm were doing.
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And there was a lot of support from the media as well.
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People like Neil MacDonald, who's a left-wing guy at CBC,
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was very much in alignment with the free speech crowd on this.
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no, no, no, government cannot have a mandate to censor.
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So the reason I want to talk about that 10 years ago story is because we fast forward to the committee now.
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The Justice Committee, or Justice and Human Rights Committee, rather,
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The premise of that study was the idea that I disagree with, by the way.
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The premise of the study was that the repeal of Section 13 left a void in Canadian human rights law.
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Left a void, where government no longer has the ability to go after hate speech like it once did.
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Now, we can see a lot of changes in society in the last six years.
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The internet, social media, far more ubiquitous.
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The discussions about online hate are far more prevalent now.
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But that doesn't mean the actual repeal of Section 13 caused that.
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We still have a criminal code definition of hate speech.
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We still have a criminal code definition of hate speech.
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Any speech that runs afoul of it can be prosecuted,
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regardless of whether it takes place online or offline.
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So this idea that government has no jurisdiction over the internet is simply wrong.
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Government does have jurisdiction over the internet.
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Government has jurisdiction everywhere within the country of Canada, online or offline.
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So when people talk about needing something else, needing more legislation,
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what they're actually talking about is not a jurisdictional issue,
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but lowering the threshold on how hate speech is defined.
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That's what these people want, these advocates and these censors.
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They want to lower the threshold for hate speech back to what it was when Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was around.
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There have been just shy of 60 witnesses that have testified before this online hate committee study,
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And of the dozens of witnesses, I didn't tally exactly, but all but about six, I believe,
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were coming at this from a left-wing perspective or a left of Senate perspective.
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Now, some of them were just sharing personal experience they've had with hate.
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Others, though, were coming at it with recommendations to the government
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to not just bring back Section 13, but to bring back a supercharged version of it on steroids
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that gives the government even more power than it had the first time this motion was around.
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And I'll give you a couple of examples of this.
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You had people that were talking about the idea of online hate
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You had people that were talking about hate in the vague sense, but not actually defining it.
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So no one who said, yes, we need to regulate hate speech
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was actually working from a definition of hate speech that was disclosed,
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which brings us back to that age-old problem of who is going to define it and how.
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And why this particular round of discussions on this committee is so dangerous
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is because this time they're not just talking about putting in a section of law
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that allows the Canadian Human Rights Commission to go after people.
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What they're actually doing is talking about regulating social media companies as well
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so that social media companies are punished if they allow hate speech on their platforms.
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Now, I want you to imagine why this would be so dangerous.
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So let's say government has a definition of hate speech.
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And if you are charged by the government with violating that, whatever it is,
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whether it's a high or a low threshold, it doesn't matter.
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If you're charged by the government with violating it,
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you would, in a true democracy and in a true sense of due process,
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You could say, well, no, this isn't hate speech or this law is unconstitutional
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But imagine if all of a sudden the enforcer of that is not a government body,
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is not a court, but the enforcer of that is a social media company
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who's been forced by government to take a stand on this.
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companies that already are not entirely online with letting certain people speak freely,
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which is their prerogative as private companies.
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But now they're fearing government intervention.
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and you don't want to deal with some Canadian human rights bureaucracy,
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is to take a far heavier hand on censorship just to make the problems go away.
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And all of a sudden we're no longer talking about Facebook as a private company
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We're now talking about Facebook becoming an agent of the government.
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An alliance, and this is what Mark Stein pointed out in his testimony on Tuesday,
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And if you think big tech has enough power now,
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wait until it has gotten into bed with government
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in a way that these human rights bureaucrats certainly would want it to.
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I mean, I have sympathy for a representative of a Muslim group who says,
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look, you know, we've had our mosque spray painted.
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We're concerned about attacks like Christchurch.
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to people like that that went before the committee and said,
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I had no tolerance, though, and still have no tolerance for people
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that instead went to the Justice Committee demanding from the government censorship.
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Demanding government censor, demanding government empower censorship.
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And the worst offenders of this were the people in what I would call the human rights industry,
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the people who represent these NGOs that find a Nazi under every,
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And the absolutely most Orwellian and egregious testimony,
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and I'm going to read a quote from it in a moment,
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was actually from the chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.
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Now, the chief commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Saskatchewan,
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this is, it doesn't get more human rights industry than this.
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We're talking about a guy whose literal job is to find human rights violations,
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except in the absence of real human rights violations,
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you start going after people that are just speaking,
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and the offense of thought crime, as Orwell would say, in 1984.
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But I want to read, I want to read something that he said before the committee.
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Canada has no democratic tradition of unbridled free speech.
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Freedom of speech in Canada has always been freedom governed by limits recognized in law.
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There are numerous limits to free expression that are justifiable in a free
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He says any censorship is, quote, or sorry, any protection against this speech,
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any censorship is actually better than what he called, quote,
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the greater harm that flows from unfettered speech.
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So that man, the chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission,
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believes fundamentally that free speech should not serve as the basis for discussions about
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regulating the internet, regulating social media companies, regulating online speech.
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free speech does not need to be held up as the top priority.
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The Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms was invited to testify.
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And they sent one of their lawyers, Jay Cameron,
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who said that he was quite perturbed by the fact that the committee study didn't mention free speech.
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It didn't mention Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
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which affirms for Canadians freedom of expression.
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And he said that any study on this, on online speech, on regulating the internet,
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that doesn't mention free speech is concerning to him.
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And the liberals on the committee got their back up against the wall there.
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who's the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice,
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He's like, oh, well, no, we clearly know it exists.
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And he's like, well, I don't know you know it's there.
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And I listened to or read every single witness's testimony in this committee.
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And the number of people that were making free speech the priority
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in what they were putting to the government was about four.
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It was Jay Cameron from JCCF, Mark Stein, Lindsay Shepard, and John Robson.
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Now, there are a couple of other people that didn't have an anti-free speech message.
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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which I kind of go hot and cold on,
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they actually had, I'd say, fairly measured remarks.
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They were not fire breathers about free speech, but they were not anti-free speech, I'd say.
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And they weren't supporting a restored Section 13.
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the number that were actively and openly promoting free speech,
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But four that I'd say were strongly in that corner.
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And again, witnesses do not necessarily guarantee an outcome.
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So just because this is the tone of the witnesses doesn't mean this is what government will put forward in its report.
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And it's also worth noting that we're pretty much running out of time
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with the Parliament rising or the House rising in about a week's time.
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So it's unlikely that any legislation will come from this.
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But it will serve as the precursor if the Liberals are re-elected or in other eventualities as well to potential future legislation.
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So I've spent a bit of time there talking about the backstory of Section 13, the backstory of the committee.
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I want to get to what actually happened on Tuesday, because this was a profound example of why it is so important to talk about free speech in Canada.
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And what we saw at the meeting, which was supposed to be just a normal run-of-the-mill meeting,
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three witnesses coming at the end of a two-month-long study.
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These particular witnesses, as has been reported, were invited on the recommendation of the Conservatives.
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Most of the other witnesses were put there by the Liberals, but they were invited on the recommendation of the Conservatives.
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And what happened that I found so interesting was that it was going to be a different session than it ended up being with the whole Michael Cooper thing.
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And I don't want to rehash too much of the Michael Cooper thing, because I've done a column on it, I've done two videos on it,
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and I do want to talk about the partisan or cross-partisan element here.
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But in a nutshell, at a meeting, I think it was a week ago or two weeks ago, I can't remember the exact date,
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Michael Cooper was the Conservative Vice Chair of the committee, a Conservative Member of Parliament,
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was asking some tough questions of a witness from the Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council.
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That witness, Faisal Khansuri, made a comment in his opening statement linking mass shooters, violent shooters,
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Now, it was part of a broader point, but he didn't distinguish between extremists or hateful people
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and, you know, run-of-the-mill conservative pundits like me.
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He said, conservative commentators inspire mass killers.
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And Michael Cooper was, as a conservative himself, very right to want to stand up for conservatives there,
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you should be ashamed of yourself to Faisal Khansuri.
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But what he did that I think was very justifiable in the context,
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was read from a passage of the Christchurch Killers Manifesto,
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well, you know, I think this manifesto is great.
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He wasn't saying he supports it, agrees with it.
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He's saying, you can't say that this guy was inspired by conservatives,
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when here he is in his own words explaining that he deplores conservatives and conservatism
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China was the Christchurch Killers' favorite dictatorship,
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which is not the first time we've heard that line in Canada.
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But Michael Cooper does this, and he's instantly guilty of thought crime.
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He's violated the fundamental tenet of political correctness.
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The liberals, the New Democrats, start calling for his head.
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Andrew Scheer, the leader of the conservatives, says,
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we're going to get rid of him off of the Justice Committee.
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So Michael Cooper was no longer on the Justice Committee
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for what was basically going to be the last session of that committee.
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And I think that this is where, and again, I put a video out
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But I don't want to put the entire brunt of this on Andrew Scheer
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because what happened at this meeting was a farce and a debacle all around.
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So even without Michael Cooper, now there's a fear.
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The conservatives don't want to be doing anything that is even remotely controversial,
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but they're stuck with these witnesses, the witnesses they've already invited.
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And what ends up happening is there's an hour allotted for this, 8.45 to 9.45.
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What the NDP and liberals start doing is filibustering,
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coming up with ways that they can shrink that time to embarrass the conservatives
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and minimize or otherwise de-platform these witnesses.
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So right out of the gate, Randy Boissoneau, who's a liberal member of parliament from,
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I forget the name, I think it's in Edmonton riding, but I forget the name of it.
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So the whereas means that the premise of this is accepted as fact.
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He's saying, whereas the comments by Michael Cooper were harmful, were discriminatory.
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And he used another word that I can't remember,
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but he said discriminatory and disrespectful and harmful.
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be it resolved that we strike it from the record so that we go back and take an eraser
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and remove that Michael Cooper ever said those words from the official record,
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And this motion, which you know is going to pass,
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if the liberals introducing it, the liberals have a majority on committee,
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So a lot of what happens next is theatrical in nature,
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I was going to say it's important because there's a record,
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but now I learned the record is itself some malleable, flexible concept.
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But they do this, Randall Garrison, who's an NDP New Democrat,
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who's just an absolutely vile person for reasons I'll get to in a moment.
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And he says, and this is, and I look forward to the transcript coming out
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because what Randall Garrison said is that, no, no, no,
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But then he further said, well, it doesn't mean they have the right to,
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Or even that they should have the ability to have those ideas heard.
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And that was, I find, found a fascinating and unsurprising concept
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because the NDP has actually been trying to get people uninvited from this committee all around.
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But the NDP was trying to get Jordan Peterson cancelled from the committee
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when he was planned to testify a couple of weeks ago.
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He never ended up doing it, although he, I think, was responsible for cancelling that.
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They were trying to block Lindsay Shepard or make hay about Lindsay Shepard, it sounds like.
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So the NDP fundamentally does not believe the debate or discourse are important.
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Fundamentally does not agree with that idea that there should be any open debate or open discussion.
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The three Conservatives on this committee abstain.
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Now, this is something that doesn't change what happened.
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Whether they voted against or abstained wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome,
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but it would have made a monumental difference in the tone that they were sending.
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The message to Michael Cooper now, as I take it, and as a lot of Conservatives in Canada take it,
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is that the Conservatives are going to throw you to the curb if you are accused of being politically incorrect.
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We're not talking about a guy that made a joke he shouldn't have.
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We're not talking about a guy that legitimately said the wrong thing or was caught using some slur or whatever.
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We're talking about a guy who used a legitimate defense against what was, I'd say,
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a very disparaging and slanderous comment made by a witness.
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And it wasn't just the you should be ashamed part.
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Andrew Scheer in his tweets about Michael Cooper said, you know, to quote the manifesto,
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So there was nothing to do with Faisal Khansuri's Muslim faith in his exchange with Michael Cooper.
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But that was the narrative and that was what ultimately was accepted by Andrew Scheer
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and then the three Conservative members abstained.
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Randall Garrison then takes issue with the fact that this meeting is being televised.
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The reason the meeting was being televised was because Anthony Housefather,
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who's a Liberal MP and the chair of the committee,
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said that there was significant interest in this particular committee meeting.
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So he said to the clerk, hey, can we televise this?
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And the notice was put out Monday that this meeting would be televised.
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Now, I was one of the people I had actually asked the clerk of the committee.
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And I know Mark Stein, who was testifying, he had asked as a future witness if it was going to be testified.
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So there was legitimate interest in this being broadcast.
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And if you look at the number of people that are online right now talking about this, sharing the audio,
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discussing it, wishing there was video, people that were watching the video before the video was canceled,
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But Randall Garrison didn't want it given an audience.
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So he puts a motion forward that we've got to cancel the video stream.
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The motion not only passes with liberal support, but it passes unanimously with conservative support as well.
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And I had a very senior source in the conservatives who, on the condition of anonymity,
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but a reliable source, told me that this was a whipped vote.
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That the office of the leader of the opposition, that Andrew Scheer's office,
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directed the members of parliament on that committee to vote for that motion.
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Now, that means they would have known the motion was being made in the first place by the NDP.
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My source didn't get into the details of how or if that happened.
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This is just my own question that I think is relevant there.
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I mean, we saw that when the chips were on the table, this is the direction that things went.
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And a lot of people have said, well, no one's free speech rights were taken away
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because the testimony went forward and there's audio available.
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And that's a fair point that I wanted to respond to here because I didn't argue that anyone was censored.
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I didn't argue that it made the meeting not public.
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But it did make the meeting less public because it put a barrier up.
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It put a barrier up between the public, between Canada, and between what was happening on a committee about free speech.
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It put a barrier between Canadians and what was being said on a committee meeting about free speech.
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And it was also the way that it happened because the reason Randall Garrison introduced that motion was not just because, oh, well, you know, this is just a, you know, procedure.
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He introduced it because he fundamentally did not want people to be exposed to conservative ideas and conservative messages.
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And we saw proof of that when it was his turn to question the witnesses.
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It's about six minutes with which they can do anything, but they can ask the witnesses virtually any question.
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He says that he disagrees and does not respect anything that's said.
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He says that they're all wrong, that they don't live in the real world.
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And then he talks about his history as a gay city councillor and then as a gay member of parliament and threats and hate that he's received.
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He's actually watching the clock as he speaks and then at the end of it says, oh, Mr. Chair, I'm out of time.
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I turn it back to you without having asked a single question.
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But you've got three busy people that came a distance to testify on this committee to give their testimony on free speech and on online hate.
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Make it so they do not get a second of time in the period that the NDP can control.
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This is after Garrison tried to slow down and delay the proceedings, which he did successfully.
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These motions that were voted on, Garrison called for a recorded vote, which means instead of everyone saying aye or nay, the clerk has to go one by one and ask each MP how they vote.
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Doing so served no other purpose than to slow things down and delay.
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So by the time things got started, we're already about 20 minutes into where things should have been,
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which means that it did actually eat in to the time that would have been put towards the witnesses answering questions.
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Thankfully, the chair, who I actually like, Anthony Housefather, I think he's good as a chair, at least with this, the Jody Wilson-Raybould stuff, notwithstanding.
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But the fundamental desire by the left was that we do not want these people to have a right to speak.
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So there's a difference between this heavy-handed state censorship like you'd get in Pyongyang or like you'd get in South Sudan
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But just because we are not that does not mean we do not have the license to talk about the issues that we do face in a Canadian context.
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And even if parliamentarians are not passing laws that allow the government to beat down your door and say you can't say that,
00:29:01.900
So if Section 13 is restored, which has been the whole basis of this committee,
00:29:07.780
that would legitimately make state-mandated censorship the law again in Canada
00:29:13.860
for speech that does not meet the threshold of being criminal hate speech, of being threats, of being defamation,
00:29:21.500
But speech should be free right up until the point that it impinges on someone else's liberty,
00:29:28.460
which is why a death threat is not free speech,
00:29:31.320
why citing and invoking and inciting genocide is not free speech,
00:29:35.460
why defamation is not free speech, although that's civil litigation.
00:29:42.220
which the liberals use as justification to put more limits,
00:29:45.680
I'd say are excuses to why the rest of free speech should in fact be free,
00:29:51.120
because we already have the limitations that govern when speech goes over the line to take away someone else's.
00:29:58.480
Free speech needs to be preserved in Canada, and that's where we are.
00:30:02.700
And I want to just end on one final note here, well, two final notes.
00:30:07.200
One is about the topic, the other is unrelated.
00:30:13.080
And I want to explain something to a lot of people,
00:30:18.780
and I've personally received a fair share of nasty messages from people,
00:30:24.300
How dare you, a conservative, take aim at Andrew Scheer?
00:30:35.480
because I dared to take aim at an unprincipled decision by the conservatives.
00:30:40.360
I don't have loyalty to a particular political party.
00:30:48.260
I have loyalty to my God, my faith, my values, my family.
00:30:55.220
And I am a conservative, but with a small C, not a capital C,
00:30:58.500
which means that all more often than not align with what the Conservative Party of Canada is doing.
00:31:03.080
But my loyalty is to Conservative values that I feel Canada needs.
00:31:08.660
And if a Conservative Party is no longer championing Conservative values,
00:31:18.340
Now, again, this does not mean that I'm against the Conservatives.
00:31:22.460
This does not mean that I'm against Andrew Scheer.
00:31:24.140
I actually have a great deal of good things to say about Andrew Scheer.
00:31:28.220
And I know I'm going to get hit from the other people,
00:31:30.080
because I have had a lot of support in the last few days from people that are supporters
00:31:34.020
based on their Twitter and Facebooks of the People's Party of Canada.
00:31:43.040
I've sat down with Maxine Bernier to talk about his ideas
00:31:46.760
and also talk about the issues that I have with this party.
00:31:50.760
Now, I've actually been trying to do a sit-down interview with Andrew Scheer
00:31:53.820
for the last, I'd say probably about the last four months,
00:31:57.960
and it hasn't ended up happening for scheduling reasons.
00:32:02.140
I have no issue sitting down with Andrew Scheer and saying,
00:32:04.680
let's talk about what the stakes are for Canada.
00:32:07.000
Let's talk about the Conservative Party's approach.
00:32:12.780
and also talk about the issues that I might have,
00:32:15.240
which I would do with Justin Trudeau, with Jagmeet Singh,
00:32:25.060
which is what I've seen way too much of in the last couple of days
00:32:29.480
is the second that we allow our political leaders
00:32:34.800
because we've proven that our loyalty is blind.
00:32:40.520
Despite my frustrations with what he did, that continues.
00:32:45.720
Despite what may happen with vote splitting, that will continue.
00:32:50.840
This is not about my personal affinity or lack thereof of various politicians.
00:32:58.800
are never going to be shilling for one party or another.
00:33:02.560
We'll tell the truth, and that's why people have been supporting us.
00:33:06.420
We cannot establish our foothold as an independent media outlet
00:33:20.140
So I thank you for those who have given support.
00:33:24.120
this is not saying you shouldn't be able to criticize.
00:33:28.000
well, actually, I don't think what Andrew Scheer did was all that wrong.
00:33:48.620
but with you and with our own values and ethics.
00:33:51.160
And that's why we have so much support from across the country.
00:33:54.320
If you'd like to add to that support, please do.
00:34:05.300
and you support independent, free-thinking journalism.
00:34:12.600
say thank you to the men and women in uniform in Canada
00:34:34.840
There's no frame of reference that we have in 2019
00:34:37.900
for what it feels like at 17, 18, 19 years old,
00:34:44.620
are doing their, you know, gender studies degree,
00:34:52.800
Boys became men on Juneau Beach, Sword Beach, Omaha Beach,
00:34:59.120
Juneau Beach is the big one that we talk about,
00:35:44.560
Hundreds laid down their lives from Canada alone.