Juno News - Liberals promise another internet regulation bill

00:00:00.000 so when the government talks about regulating so-called online harms what they're talking

00:00:14.360 about doing is regulating a different aspect of things that in most cases are already illegal

00:00:20.480 and why that's so dangerous in the context of its attack on hate speech is that we already have a

00:00:28.260 criminal code definition of hate speech which has a very very high bar because we realize that free

00:00:34.120 speech is supposed to be expansive and liberal and cover contentious offensive difficult and even

00:00:40.080 emotionally hateful things so when the government is talking about regulating and banning hate speech

00:00:46.340 they're actually talking about lowering that threshold and that brings us to this online

00:00:51.520 harms bill now the caveat here we have not yet seen the bill itself we haven't seen the text of it but

00:00:57.160 we have seen former versions of this and we know where the government has drawn its inspiration

00:01:02.880 from and the line they used when they tried to reintroduce section 13 of the canadian human

00:01:08.120 rights act in 2019 or 2021 it was rather was that speech that is fomenting detestation or vilification

00:01:17.840 now they try to say this doesn't mean we're tackling uh free speech it doesn't mean we're censoring

00:01:24.280 it just means if your speech that's uh doing if you you're purveying speech that's doing that

00:01:29.220 it's going to fall under this banner now we have a bunch of history from the canadian human rights

00:01:35.020 commission of going after speech that any reasonable person should look at as being worth protecting not

00:01:41.980 because we agree with it but because we agree with the fundamental and inalienable we're supposed to

00:01:47.300 believe anyway principle of free speech and in the canadian legal context and terminology freedom of

00:01:54.280 expression so let's talk about this in a bit more detail john carpe is the president of the justice

00:01:59.880 center for constitutional freedoms and joins me now and i should just clarify uh for those tuning in i

00:02:05.920 am on the board of the jccf although that has no bearing on my decision to invite john who i have had

00:02:11.620 on the show many times before he worked for me which i guess is technically true but not really

00:02:15.620 uh john always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today glad to be with you andrew so this is an

00:02:20.960 example again put the necessary uh you know caveats out of the way we haven't yet seen the bill but

00:02:25.640 we've heard the government describe it and we know what the government wants to do here and for a civil

00:02:31.400 liberties organization you must be looking at that saying this is the ball game right it it sounds like

00:02:38.420 a step in the wrong direction as you pointed out just a minute ago uh it is already illegal to

00:02:44.360 willfully promote hatred online as it is with a hard copy pamphlet brochure newspaper what have you

00:02:51.240 so it's already a criminal offense to willfully promote hatred against a group uh based on uh race

00:02:58.060 religion ancestry ethnic origin sexual orientation uh gender expression and so on and so forth and uh

00:03:06.520 that was upheld very narrowly by the supreme court of canada it was a four three split decision

00:03:11.200 so that's already illegal so what what i see here is the government stepping towards uh it's a small

00:03:18.180 step towards becoming a repressive regime and what one of the hallmarks of repressive regimes whether

00:03:25.040 it's today's communist china communist north korea whether it's germany italy spain in the in the 1930s

00:03:31.440 um whether it's the theocracies that are running iran and saudi arabia one thing they all have in

00:03:37.240 common is they all censor and the governments take it upon themselves to determine what is true or false

00:03:43.360 right or wrong good or evil and they will censor in the name of the public interest and the common good

00:03:50.140 uh because politicians never violate your rights and freedoms without offering some pretext they're

00:03:56.160 going to tell you it's national security it's fighting communism it's fighting fascism it's the

00:04:02.820 environment it's uh it's fighting a virus there's always a pretext for taking away our rights and

00:04:08.620 freedoms so this really looks like a step in the wrong direction one of the things i i want to not

00:04:15.180 to put you on the spot here but i'm curious about your take on it because the government has said in

00:04:19.120 the past that its definition of hate speech is going to be informed by the watcott uh supreme court

00:04:24.800 decision from some years back which we don't need to get into the details of the case but i i the supreme

00:04:30.160 court has not in canada always taken the strongest view on on freedom of expression and i want to

00:04:35.580 read a line from uh this particular supreme court decision truthful statements can be presented in a

00:04:42.300 manner that would meet the definition of hate speech and not all truthful statements must be free from

00:04:48.460 restriction that is a very dangerous line that the government is embedding in its approach to freedom

00:04:54.560 of expression which is that something can be true but you aren't allowed to say it well the watcott

00:04:59.780 decision weakened prior supreme court uh supreme court of canada jurisprudence on free speech that

00:05:06.520 that was better uh was it was not a good decision it could have been a lot worse um the problem with

00:05:13.260 hate speech regulation or even laws against it is that hate is an emotion that is in the human heart

00:05:21.020 it is subjective it is not necessarily a bad thing if it's directed against injustice or oppression or

00:05:29.140 falsehoods you know if you hate injustice then hatred can be a good thing but the problem with with laws or

00:05:35.340 regulations trying to govern hate is simply the fact that it's very subjective uh i could be listening

00:05:42.440 to somebody i could suspect that they might have hatred in their heart i really don't know

00:05:46.640 um you or i could be giving a speech and some of your listeners might subjectively feel that your

00:05:54.180 speech is hateful other people listening to the exact same speech think it's not hateful it's just the

00:06:00.020 expression of an opinion so you know rightly or wrongly we've we've got the law on the books to

00:06:05.480 criminalize willful promotion of hatred um we shouldn't go any further down the road of of having

00:06:11.820 governments regulate the internet and uh take away from the right of canadians to have full access to

00:06:17.920 to information and to a diversity of viewpoints well and that exchange is so paramount i mean just to

00:06:24.640 use a contemporary example i started off this show by talking about this back and forth between you know

00:06:30.440 israel and hamas about what happened in this hospital attack yesterday and you know a bunch of people

00:06:35.360 that are very sympathetic to the hamas cause are saying one thing happened it's only through the exchange

00:06:40.720 of these conflicts that we can interrogate and find out what the truth is and and i'd say in that

00:06:46.100 case i mean i would even say false statements are protected free speech in some context because

00:06:50.320 uh it is through the falsity that you can then establish the truth oftentimes and uh it's really

00:06:57.140 dangerous to me that government is trying to take that decision and take that process out of the

00:07:02.480 hands of free people because that's really what they're doing here they're making the canadian

00:07:06.640 human rights commission the arbiter of what you can and cannot say and by extension deputizing

00:07:12.420 tech companies to do that because that's the other part of regulating online harms is that

00:07:16.680 it provides a vehicle for government to go to facebook and say you shouldn't allow so and so to say that

00:07:21.400 you shouldn't allow so and so to post that well we've seen in the last three and a half years that

00:07:25.640 governments are very very effective at getting millions of of of private actors of private citizens to

00:07:32.980 enforce government laws you saw that with the the lockdowns and the vaccine passports where uh the

00:07:38.340 government didn't need to hire uh although they probably did hire a lot more people but they didn't

00:07:42.460 need to necessarily hire thousands of health inspectors because every movie theater owner every

00:07:48.560 gym operator every restaurant manager was an enforcement tool for the government to enforce these rules 0.98

00:07:54.100 and so this is what the government uh seems to be moving towards is to regulate these big platforms

00:08:00.700 and then they don't have to spend time effort or energy trying to shut down the andrew lawton show

00:08:05.880 or the weekly justice with john podcast because these big entities will do it for the government

00:08:12.120 you mentioned even false speech should be protected and and there's supreme court authority on that yes

00:08:17.840 part of that one aspect of that is we don't even know if a statement is true or false until after it's

00:08:24.960 been investigated and debated and and you've got two or three or four different opinions and they

00:08:30.600 clash and we look at the evidence so even a law that says you know we're making false statements

00:08:35.380 illegal um that we did have a law in the criminal code that was struck down in the zundel decision

00:08:40.780 it was illegal in canada criminal code offense to spread false news and the supreme court struck that

00:08:48.380 down and and said no uh we don't even know what's false uh until after we've had the debate

00:08:53.980 another interesting point is is that uh this is troublesome from what caught uh from that decision

00:09:01.660 where you know even a true statement could be hateful and could be illegal the criminal code of

00:09:06.400 canada in criminalizing the willful promotion of hatred says expressly that truth is a defense

00:09:12.840 so if you made some nasty comment about some group based on skin color gender whatever if that

00:09:20.980 you know if that statement happened to be true that would actually be a defense in a criminal

00:09:26.920 prosecution uh sounds like it's not going to be a defense when the uh human rights bodies get

00:09:32.380 involved yeah and that that's the big danger is all of a sudden we're taking a lower evidentiary

00:09:37.400 threshold and and also it's a civil proceeding so then you add uh the burden of proof aspect changes

00:09:43.360 from from criminal as well and the stakes are very high uh for people who will get their lives

00:09:48.240 dragged through the ringer we've seen what happens when these human rights commissions have had free

00:09:52.380 reign like the alberta human rights commission going after ezra levant and the bc tribunal going after

00:09:57.200 mark stein and you know to go back to something i i've talked about on the show in the past but kind

00:10:02.340 of just was swept in very quietly in canada and i think it was the last federal budget or two years

00:10:07.940 ago they reintroduced a criminal provision uh banning holocaust denial and and i think this is probably

00:10:13.900 the perfect example of where the free speech discussions go off the rails because i will say

00:10:20.260 on on principled free speech grounds i oppose this i find holocaust denial to be deplorable and wrong

00:10:25.880 but i do not think it should be illegal but the government will often use the emotional reactions

00:10:32.020 people have to certain speech as a way to really as a cudgel to justify banning it in the same way as that

00:10:38.900 uh mike ward case in quebec where uh you know yes it's difficult to stand up and say i defend making

00:10:45.440 fun of disabled 12 year olds but it's not that i defend the act of doing it it's i defend the right

00:10:50.980 to do it yeah but that's that that's where that's where the rubber hits the road incidentally i like

00:10:57.880 you i i find the holocaust denial to be vile vile speech it disgusts me and it outrages me and i actually

00:11:07.060 testified at a parliamentary committee to not amend the criminal code regarding holocaust denial

00:11:13.860 and the only reason for that is because the government should not be in the business uh of

00:11:19.080 determining historical truth or falsehood period it's not the role of the state and once you have

00:11:25.120 the government doing that on one issue uh that it grows like a cancer the other interesting thing

00:11:32.340 is that the groups lining up uh so far this is from a cbc story that i read the other day uh the

00:11:38.880 center for israeli and jewish affairs and the national council of muslim uh canadian muslims and

00:11:44.820 the chinese canadian national council according to this story want legislation to uh to regulate

00:11:53.700 and then arguably punish if you violate the regulation to regulate and punish websites and new emerging

00:12:00.140 platforms and if we go down this road if we take any step here the the the number of of groups lining

00:12:07.540 up what's going to happen is in instead of just engaging in debate and and explaining you know

00:12:13.340 based using facts and logic and evidence instead of making your case and trying to persuade people

00:12:18.220 instead of engaging in debate you're going to see more and more groups lining up going to government

00:12:22.440 and trying to get the government to shut up their opponents and that's that's fascism in practice

00:12:28.780 yeah and that's the the other part of this is that even if you fundamentally agree which i don't and

00:12:34.120 i i don't gather you do as well that there should be a limit to protect against hateful speech that is

00:12:40.600 lower than the threshold now the logical question is who do you trust to be the authority to determine

00:12:47.540 that and that is where we get i mean this is a government and i don't like going back to this but

00:12:52.260 this is a government that froze its political protesters bank accounts like this is not a government

00:12:57.360 that i trust with the switch to censor people's opinions and to censor people's expression of

00:13:03.360 those opinions and it's it's broader than that uh there's there's a lot of people applaud i remember

00:13:09.040 once i i saw a video clip uh bill watcott very outspoken uh social conservative activists who

00:13:15.840 articulates his viewpoint in ways that most social conservatives don't even like it but you know he's got his

00:13:21.760 free speech rights i saw him get arrested and handcuffed this is about five six seven eight nine

00:13:25.820 ten years ago he was at the uh university of saskatchewan or university of regina i forget which

00:13:30.760 and uh he was handing out pamphlets on on on campus and uh critical of of homosexual behavior

00:13:38.580 and um he was arrested and handcuffed and taken off campus in a police car and the group of students

00:13:46.620 applauded and i thought to myself you are very short-sighted because what if there is this

00:13:52.060 massive religious revival in canada and two-thirds of canadians are fervent believing devout

00:13:58.820 muslims christians orthodox jews whatever would these same students want a uh fundamentalist religious

00:14:07.140 government to have the power to censor their speech they don't think about that but they should

00:14:11.420 yeah very very well said john carpe president of the justice center for constitutional freedoms

00:14:17.600 always a pleasure john thanks for coming on today thank you very much andrew thanks for listening to

00:14:22.100 the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - October 22, 2023

Liberals promise another internet regulation bill

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