Juno News - May 12, 2021


Should human rights laws protect against anti-conservative discrimination？

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Bruce Bill C-63 Steven Guilbeault
2021 Meets 1984 The Zero-Sense, One-Dose Summer

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

173.05

Word count

2,199

Sentence count

133

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Andrew Lawton is joined by Bruce Pinnamaneni, a law professor at Queen's University, to talk about the need for political beliefs to be protected under Canadian Human Rights law, and why it should be extended to include political beliefs.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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.
00:00:00.820 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:08.360 We talk about stories all the time of people being fired or cancelled or losing some appointment
00:00:14.860 or subjected to some form of punishment that is oftentimes very real to them.
00:00:21.400 And the rationale behind it is that they believe the wrong thing.
00:00:25.440 And interestingly enough, in human rights law in Canada,
00:00:28.000 people have protections for virtually every aspect of their identity imaginable,
00:00:33.120 except for one, and that is their political beliefs.
00:00:36.520 Bruce Party, who is a fantastic lawyer, a law professor at Queen's University,
00:00:40.660 and you may remember him, he was a great panelist on our big tech censorship panel a few weeks back,
00:00:46.460 had given some remarks on this to the Canada Strong and Free Conference,
00:00:50.200 which he synthesized into a very great essay in the National Post.
00:00:54.120 Bruce Party joins me now.
00:00:55.960 Always good to talk to you, Bruce.
00:00:57.200 Thanks for coming on.
00:00:58.980 Thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:01:00.100 Now, you note in your column here that there are protections for sexual identity,
00:01:05.480 gender identity, gender, and in fact, in Ontario, even creed is protected.
00:01:11.560 It seems like, as I mentioned, every aspect of one's identity imaginable,
00:01:16.020 but beliefs haven't made it into any provinces protected human rights grounds.
00:01:20.740 Well, actually, there are several provinces that do list it in their human rights codes as a protected ground of discrimination,
00:01:28.820 but it really hasn't amounted to much.
00:01:31.700 And you'd be pretty hard-pressed to say that political beliefs are really, genuinely, robustly protected anywhere across the country.
00:01:40.460 Yeah, you mentioned something that I wanted to read here.
00:01:44.160 You said the baker must serve the transgender woman because his private shop is a quasi-public space,
00:01:49.980 but he can ban the guy in the MAGA hat and Twitter can censor right-wing speech because, after all, private businesses are private.
00:01:56.800 It does seem like we have a very significant double standard in when we say that, no, it's your business, you can do what you want,
00:02:04.080 and when we say, oh, no, no, no, if you open your doors to the public, you have to treat yourself like the town square.
00:02:09.940 That's right.
00:02:10.760 And you'll hear this argument all the time with respect to the big tech companies, right?
00:02:14.920 So Twitter, for example, is a private company, and so, therefore, it should be able to censor whatever views it likes.
00:02:23.240 Well, okay, but if you're going to go with that, then that theory, if you extend it, means that the baker can serve anybody they like
00:02:31.500 and the hairdresser can serve anybody they like and so on down the line.
00:02:36.240 So what I'm trying to get at is let's have it one way or the other.
00:02:40.960 Either everybody is protected or everybody is free to choose as they wish.
00:02:46.520 And the problem we have right now is it's sum of one and sum of the other.
00:02:50.780 And the sum of one is almost inevitably favoring and protecting those causes and identities championed by the left.
00:03:01.800 And the right is hung out to dry.
00:03:03.560 And they often do it to themselves, too, by saying, well, we believe in freedom to do what you want.
00:03:09.240 And I agree.
00:03:10.200 I agree with that.
00:03:11.340 I think people and companies should be able to choose as they wish.
00:03:15.880 But the problem is that that's not what we have.
00:03:17.980 And we have no prospect of getting there.
00:03:21.520 And so the question remaining is, do we extend the protection to political beliefs or do we just leave things in the mess that they are?
00:03:28.560 Yeah, you have identified this gap here.
00:03:32.160 You've identified the double standard.
00:03:33.740 And from that, the choice we have is either expand these protections to include political beliefs or strip away all of the other ones as they pertain to what people can do and who people associate with and who people sell as customers or sell to as customers.
00:03:48.940 Is your ideal version, though, that one, which is we actually kind of scrapped the whole thing?
00:03:53.820 Oh, yes, that would be my ideal.
00:03:56.220 My ideal.
00:03:56.760 So human rights began.
00:03:58.560 It's an excellent idea, right?
00:04:01.180 The idea is that people should be protected from an overbearing state.
00:04:05.940 I mean, we don't want people being thrown in jail arbitrarily or being subject to torture without due process in terms of, you know, prosecutions and so on.
00:04:15.560 Now, that's where the idea of human rights originates.
00:04:19.380 And it's a really great idea.
00:04:20.860 But the problem is that modern human rights have morphed into this other thing wherein some people can impose upon other people to recognize and validate their identities and beliefs.
00:04:36.200 And, yeah, we'd be better off without that version of human rights altogether as far as I'm concerned.
00:04:42.540 But the political problem is that's not going to happen.
00:04:45.920 There is no political party of any political stripe with the guts to take that step.
00:04:52.420 And so what we're left with is do we want to extend protection to political beliefs that right now are being subject to an awful lot of punishment?
00:05:02.760 One of the things I've always found about human rights commissions is that inherently they have to create some sort of a hierarchy of identity groups.
00:05:13.000 I mean, one of the most notable examples, I think it was a year or two years ago in, I want to say, Windsor, there was a waxologist from some salon that didn't want to wax a transgender customer.
00:05:26.220 But the reason was that the waxologist was a Muslim. 0.81
00:05:29.380 So all of a sudden you have her religious rights to not have to wax a man's genitals and the transgender person's rights to be recognized as, in fact, a woman.
00:05:39.840 And in these cases, there's no right answer once you make the government the arbiter of this.
00:05:44.920 The right answer, I would say, is, well, the transgender person should go to a business that wants her business and the waxologist should be able to say, I don't want your business. 1.00
00:05:53.540 But we as a society do not want to have these discussions on our own.
00:05:57.800 It seems like people have just welcomed in the government to be the arbiter in every single disagreement.
00:06:03.400 That's exactly right.
00:06:04.520 Exactly right.
00:06:05.080 And you'll notice that those cases that involve waxologists and transgender customers are actually avoiding the more basic problem, according to the logic of the human rights codes. 0.79
00:06:18.480 As soon as a waxologist says, well, I don't want to do not forget the transgender question. 0.99
00:06:23.780 I don't want to wax men. 0.98
00:06:26.120 I'm a woman.
00:06:26.960 I don't want to wax men. 0.98
00:06:28.420 Maybe it's because I'm a woman.
00:06:30.200 Maybe it's because I'm a Muslim. 0.92
00:06:31.360 But I don't want to wax men.
00:06:32.960 Now, before you even get to the transgender problem, that's discrimination. 0.96
00:06:37.660 On the face of the human rights code, that's discrimination.
00:06:41.080 You're not supposed to be able to discriminate on the basis of sex or gender.
00:06:46.500 So there's a lot of left hand, right hand, not really telling the truth about these things.
00:06:53.860 Because if you extended the logic to all cases, then we would all be locked down in terms of the choices we were able to make.
00:07:02.260 Now, one of the arguments I've heard in defense of some of these is that, you know, it's important to protect race and sex, but not political beliefs, as an example, because one is a choice and one's not.
00:07:15.600 But we also do see protection, you mentioned earlier, in a very narrow way of political beliefs.
00:07:21.060 Ontario protects creed.
00:07:22.920 Generally, religion is protected. 0.62
00:07:24.480 So things that are choices do have some level of protection under the current arrangement.
00:07:29.880 Well, let's go further.
00:07:30.880 I mean, there are other kinds of choices that are fully protected, and quite clearly so.
00:07:35.140 So let's go back to the transgender question.
00:07:37.200 If you were born a man and decide that you believe that you're a woman, that's protected because that's a listed ground of discrimination. 0.53
00:07:50.500 If you are a member of a particular religion, you believe in that religion, that belief is protected. 0.92
00:07:58.840 These are no more inherent characteristics than a belief in a political ideology.
00:08:04.020 And to say that a political ideology is, well, it's just a belief, and therefore it's not inherent, and therefore you can change it, is to suggest that, oh, well, we can require you to change the central propositions of your political or philosophical beliefs.
00:08:21.480 That's no more reasonable than expecting somebody to be able to change their religious beliefs.
00:08:26.200 And that's something that we would not require them to do.
00:08:28.140 And your point's a valid one, which is that if we can't strip this all away, if we can't get politicians to stand up and realize that we are robbing people of their right to run their business the way they want to, to live their life the way they want to, then we have to go the next step and say, all right, well, let's talk about real protection.
00:08:45.240 And a lot of people would roll their eyes at this, but there's voluminous evidence that people with conservative beliefs face discrimination in a multitude of areas.
00:08:55.940 In academia, you mentioned a couple of cases, in the private sector, in all sorts of areas.
00:09:02.240 So, yeah, if you want to talk about protecting minority views, well, it doesn't get much more minority than a conservative on a university campus.
00:09:09.000 You're not kidding.
00:09:10.440 That's absolutely true.
00:09:11.880 And it happens all the time now.
00:09:13.020 It's happening all the time.
00:09:14.700 And in many, most cases, people are not aware of.
00:09:18.300 You'll see the occasional case written about in the paper and so on.
00:09:21.160 And those are serious and wrong.
00:09:23.840 But there's a whole lot of things happening that people don't see.
00:09:30.140 Let's say this, though.
00:09:31.560 One of the objections to this idea is that the whole thing will become totally unmanageable, unwieldy.
00:09:37.580 The restrictions to be placed upon into the lap of employers would be untenable.
00:09:44.440 And, you know, in a way that might turn out to be true.
00:09:49.960 But my point is, look, if that turns out to be true, if that makes the whole regime so untenable that it sort of collapses under its own weight, that's a good thing.
00:10:03.060 Right?
00:10:03.200 So either way, it's a win.
00:10:04.940 Either it works and political beliefs are actually protected or it extends the human rights code idea to such an extent that the whole thing sort of collapses.
00:10:15.820 Either one of those two things is a win in my books.
00:10:19.100 Yeah, you raise a great point.
00:10:20.580 Conservatives should actually be on the front lines of trying to expand these commissions' powers just to bring about attention to how absurd a lot of them are.
00:10:28.800 I just want to pivot very briefly here, Bruce, because we've been talking on the show for weeks now about Bill C-10, which is the bill that will put the internet and internet content under government regulation.
00:10:39.800 Your perspective on this one I'm curious about because we know that the Federal Human Rights Act doesn't deal with, you know, what you do in your own business for the most part.
00:10:49.360 But it does deal with federally regulated areas.
00:10:52.180 And one of those is very key, which is the internet.
00:10:55.400 And that was where years ago there was Section 13, which regulated internet speech.
00:11:00.280 Is there a direct connection that we can draw between Bill C-10 and a lot of these things that you're talking about in a provincial context at the federal level with the online harms bill or online hate speech bill that Stephen Gilbeau is talking about wanting to introduce any day now?
00:11:15.800 Yeah, the problem is that Bill C-10 as it is currently constituted and probably the bill that hasn't arrived yet that you just mentioned will not be quite so straightforward as to simply ban discrimination in the way that I'm talking about.
00:11:35.320 What it does instead probably will be to give a federal agency the power to make arbitrary decisions about what's okay and what's not okay.
00:11:44.860 So that's the worst of all worlds.
00:11:47.160 Not only do you not have a list of criteria, you have taken the power of speech away from people and given it to the government to supervise.
00:11:56.760 But that's, you know, that's just bad news all around.
00:11:59.980 Well, well, I appreciate your voice on these matters always.
00:12:03.120 We'll have to have you back on once we see at long last the text of this online hate speech bill.
00:12:08.880 Although, you know, come to think of it, I think the proper position on this is that if we never see it, it will be a good thing for Canada and a good thing for free speech.
00:12:16.540 But nevertheless, we'll have you back on anytime.
00:12:18.360 Bruce, thanks very much.
00:12:19.860 And you can check out his National Post column about this political speech protection in the National Post.
00:12:25.560 Political beliefs must be protected from discrimination because cancel culture is winning.
00:12:31.560 Bruce, always a pleasure.
00:12:32.480 Thanks for coming on.
00:12:33.640 Good stuff, Andrew.
00:12:34.160 Thanks very much.
00:12:35.200 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:12:37.280 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.