Juno News - March 10, 2024


Liberals’ hate speech bill poses biggest threat to the most vulnerable

Mentioned
Dwight Newman Andrew Lawton Show Bill C-63
Activist doctor misleads Albertans on Smith’s gender policies Canadian farmers are FINALLY RISING UP against the government!

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

159.59

Word count

1,955

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Bill C-63 is without doubt one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation the Trudeau government has ever proposed. It's a piece of legislation that could have a devastating effect on freedom of speech and freedom of expression online. In this episode, we talk to law professor Dwight Newman about why the bill is bad, and why it threatens marginalized communities.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 One thing we are going to be doing this week and in the weeks and months that follow, I suspect,
00:00:13.840 is continuing our coverage of Bill C-63. Now, make no mistake, I did a deep dive into the
00:00:19.940 Online Harms Act yesterday. This is without a doubt, and I do not say this with hyperbole,
00:00:26.080 one of the most, if not the most dangerous pieces of legislation, in my view, the Liberals have
00:00:31.800 presented. It is, I believe, flawed in its premise and certainly flawed in its application,
00:00:37.400 and it's going to have an absolutely terrible effect on free speech, not just as an incidental
00:00:44.260 effect, but by the very design of the bill. But I want to talk about this from a number of angles,
00:00:50.340 because it's one thing to say, free speech, good, censorship, bad, which, by the way, I agree with,
00:00:56.260 and sadly probably summarizes my show more than I'd like. But it also is important to look at how
00:01:01.300 it is bad and why it's bad and why this bill will have, in many cases, adverse effects,
00:01:07.140 even on the people it purports to be serving. And there was a fantastic op-ed in the Western Standard
00:01:13.600 that was written by, well, courtesy of the Fraser Institute and University of Saskatchewan law
00:01:19.300 Professor Dwight Newman, that talks about this. It's that Ottawa's online harms bill actually
00:01:24.680 threatens marginalized communities. I wanted to have Professor Newman on the show to unpack this 1.00
00:01:30.660 a bit further, and I'm very pleased that he took us up on the offer. Dwight, good to talk to you.
00:01:34.820 Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:36.400 Well, thanks. I'm glad to be with you here.
00:01:39.280 So let's first and foremost talk about why it is that it does. I mean, what's your premise here on
00:01:44.260 how marginalized communities may actually be harmed by this bill, which the government is
00:01:48.680 claiming is there to serve them and protect them?
00:01:52.180 Well, my focus and my comment is on particular parts of the bill. And one of the challenges in
00:01:58.040 talking about the bill is there are so many different things going on at the same time,
00:02:02.400 because there is the piece about online harms, and that warrants its own analysis, those parts of
00:02:08.780 the bill. But there are parts of the bill that aren't about anything online at all. And there,
00:02:14.180 they're either sneaking through provisions on hate-related matters generally, or those matters
00:02:22.480 are there to distract from the online part. I don't know what the story is, but they somehow
00:02:29.000 don't fit together. But the piece on hate is what I focused on that isn't necessarily in the online
00:02:35.580 context. And there, the creation of a freestanding offense that goes along with any other criminal
00:02:43.660 code offense, where there's a motivation by hate, and that creates an offense subject to life
00:02:51.420 imprisonment, is actually a very dangerous offense to create in this bill, and one that puts at risk,
00:02:59.020 even people from marginalized communities. Now, there's another step to get there. But that's quite
00:03:04.380 simply that if you create offenses in the criminal code, where there's vast discretion on what the
00:03:11.900 sentence is going to be, people are going to get caught up in that, that don't have representation,
00:03:19.020 or as much representation by lawyers, and be at more risk from those sentences, or the threat of
00:03:25.900 those sentences in the context of plea bargain negotiations. And those will be marginalized people
00:03:31.740 that are the very people that the government claims to be protecting.
00:03:35.420 I wanted to go back to the the bill itself here for a moment, and just explain this. Because I mean,
00:03:40.780 in the criminal code, again, I'm not a lawyer, but in the criminal code, you know, all of the offenses
00:03:45.340 that are criminal in Canada have an associated sentence with them. And these sentences are created
00:03:51.580 based on the severity of the act itself, which is why, you know, a mischief charge will have a different
00:03:57.500 potential sentence from a murder charge. So I'm correct in my understanding that what this bill would do
00:04:04.060 is add a separate, basically an add on component where if you've done anything else that has its own
00:04:11.020 sentencing guideline, and it is motivated by hate, that could be a life sentence. So that am I construing
00:04:17.660 that correctly? That's right. And so the example you gave is graffiti. So someone who commits vandalism,
00:04:24.780 which would never have a life sentence, if it was motivated by hate, could conceivably have a life
00:04:30.380 sentence for the motivation. That's right. So we normally draw a line between what are called
00:04:36.860 summary offenses and indictable offenses. That's just one line we could draw. The summary offenses tend to
00:04:43.020 have very much lighter punishment associated with them. Well, this new section of the criminal code will
00:04:50.060 say if you commit any other offense in the criminal code, or under another federal statute, I believe,
00:04:56.460 that you've committed also a separate indictable offense, if your motivation was one of hatred. And
00:05:03.660 I mean, I don't encourage, I mean, hatred is a terrible thing that we should all be fighting against. But
00:05:12.940 creating a separate offense here, that attaches on to even very relatively minor offenses, but now adds
00:05:21.100 the prospect of a life sentence with an attached offense creates a lot of risks and a lot of problems.
00:05:27.180 And the example I gave is sort of some young person that's old enough to be an adult for criminal
00:05:33.020 law purposes, but still not really mature. They go and write graffiti. They're caught up in some bad
00:05:41.900 ideas as a youth and they're accused of being motivated by hatred. Well, they're now subject to
00:05:47.820 a life sentence, potentially, that has no relationship to the severity of writing or painting graffiti
00:05:55.660 somewhere. There's a total mismatch that's created there. It's awful. And again, I don't want to
00:06:05.180 whitewash what are very serious acts. I mean, we've seen in the last few months alone, we've seen some
00:06:11.340 horrific acts of vandalism that have taken place against churches. There is the church that's been
00:06:16.780 burned in your province. We have also instances of targeting mosques and Jewish community centers. And
00:06:23.180 I think those should be prosecuted. Well, they should be prosecuted. But at the same time, I also have a
00:06:30.300 very significant issue fundamentally with adjudicating motivation in this way. And this idea that the
00:06:37.500 motivation fundamentally changes the crime in that disproportionate way you've just described here.
00:06:43.820 Is this really the only area of the law where we have this with the motivation having such a significant
00:06:51.180 distinction in how an offense is viewed? Well, I mean, other than the willful promotion of hatred
00:06:59.020 offense itself. But that isn't really even about the motivation still that ends up being about what it
00:07:07.420 is that's been done. And I mean, normally, we're looking at intention and the type of intention. And so
00:07:14.460 first degree murder is more serious than second degree murder, because of the intention, the pre planning,
00:07:22.220 the pre meditation, it's not exactly the same thing as motivation. This is an example where motivation
00:07:28.940 which is a vague thing to get at, is going to have a huge effect. And I think that's quite different
00:07:35.500 than what happens anywhere else I can think of in the criminal law offhand. But it is something that's
00:07:42.220 challenging to judge what is somebody's motivation. And it's transforming the nature of these. And I
00:07:48.460 gave the graffiti example, because it's actually one that's a genuinely lighter offense. I mean,
00:07:56.060 it's still something that should be prosecuted. I don't want to make light of it. The church burnings,
00:08:01.660 arson is a serious offense. And this government has sort of laughed that off in some ways.
00:08:09.820 And it's really disappointing to a lot of Canadians of faith that their religious places of worship can't
00:08:16.380 be protected. But when you are going to protect them, which I think should be done, the prosecution
00:08:24.860 should be arson, if it's arson. That's a serious offense, because it puts lives at risk. But it still
00:08:32.540 shouldn't necessarily be something that has a life sentence because of the motivation. And that's a very
00:08:37.660 realistic scenario. Some of the church burnings, probably there's a motivation there of a form of
00:08:44.060 hatred for the religious institution involved, or at least the argument could be made. That's where
00:08:50.460 we get into the complexities of how do you judge and describe motivation and say whether it's actually
00:08:56.940 hateful. And so that's a real example where this could come into play. And even there, with a more
00:09:04.140 serious offense, I don't think one should be adding on this additional offense with a life sentence.
00:09:11.180 And again, it puts, even if it's not something that someone would be convicted over, it puts immense
00:09:18.220 pressure on them then to plead guilty to another offense and give up their defense rights if they
00:09:25.020 don't have the means to fight this looming offense of life imprisonment successfully.
00:09:30.780 Well, and that is the crucial point I wanted to circle back to here, which is, I mean,
00:09:35.900 the Supreme Court did, I think, a lot to really dismantle reforms on sentencing that the previous
00:09:41.740 conservative government tried to put in, especially when it comes to mandatory minimums. But now you have
00:09:49.020 the opposite problem, where you have this just insane range that you could find yourself having
00:09:55.820 applied to you. And that leaves so much to just how good your lawyer is and how good your judge is.
00:10:03.340 And if you have a judge that wants to make an example of you because of these hate motivations, 0.88
00:10:09.740 or you don't have, as you've said, access to particularly good counsel, you're kind of screwed. 0.97
00:10:14.940 Yeah. Well, the legal system will try to provide guidance on that through the case law that builds
00:10:19.660 up. But it comes down to if you don't have access to enough legal counsel, you may not know that as
00:10:26.700 someone who gets caught up in things. And I mean, I do worry on sort of the, as I say, the wayward youth
00:10:33.100 that is involved in the graffiti offense. I mean, if someone's a long-term criminal and so on, I'm less
00:10:41.980 concerned that they might be under pressure to plead out. But someone who really shouldn't be caught up
00:10:49.180 in things could get caught up in things in problematic ways because of this offense. And it just, all of
00:10:56.060 these things also with the whole bill, the chill effects on people in various ways permutate out and
00:11:07.900 restrict freedom more than things first appear. And that's, that's something that needs to be thought
00:11:13.180 about in every part of the bill that one's looking at is, it's not just what's on the paper, but it's how
00:11:19.820 people are affected in their behavior in their day-to-day lives by what's on the paper. And it probably chills
00:11:27.420 a lot of things that are actually legal and legitimate, that people worry that they're going to be
00:11:34.060 caught up in because a lot of people are law-abiding Canadians and don't want to be caught up in a
00:11:40.460 criminal prosecution. Well, they're going to have their liberty restricted in a lot of different ways.
00:11:46.220 Yeah. Well, and you can't really blame them in that context. It was a great piece over at the
00:11:50.620 Western Standard, also available at the Fraser Institute website by Dwight Newman, professor of law
00:11:56.620 at the University of Saskatchewan. Dwight, thank you so much for your insights. Really good to talk to you.
00:12:01.660 Well, thank you. Good to talk with you. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:12:06.060 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news