Juno News - Trudeau directs cabinet to regulate internet “hate speech”

The new Minister of Canadian Heritage, Stephen Gilbo, has a mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that lays out the government s priorities for the new minister, including regulating online hate speech. But there's a problem: there's no formal definition of hate speech in the mandate letter.

00:00:00.000 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has laid out his expectations of the new captain and for one

00:00:11.480 minister, the Minister of Heritage, regulating online speech is a key priority. In the mandate

00:00:17.380 letters given to ministers and made available to the public, the mandate for the Minister of

00:00:22.640 Canadian Heritage features a policy that really seems to be rooted in the online hate study that

00:00:28.300 the Justice and Human Rights Committee did shortly before Parliament rose before the election. This

00:00:33.560 is what the mandate letter says, I will expect you to work with your colleagues and through established

00:00:39.180 legislative, regulatory and cabinet processes to deliver on your top priorities. In particular,

00:00:45.720 you will create new regulations for social media platforms starting with a requirement that all

00:00:52.440 platforms remove illegal content, including hate speech within 24 hours or face significant

00:00:58.780 penalties. This should include other online harms such as radicalization, incitement of violence,

00:01:05.580 exploitation of children or creation or distribution of terrorist propaganda. Now this task falls on the

00:01:12.860 new heritage minister, Stephen Gilbo, a first-time member of Parliament who has a long-standing track

00:01:18.220 record in environmentalism. In fact, his official biography on the Prime Minister's website lays out

00:01:24.100 his role as leading the charge in the fight against climate change for several years and also founding

00:01:30.080 a large environmental organization in Quebec and working with Greenpeace. But now he's the guy that is

00:01:36.220 going to be regulating social media companies who don't remove content from the internet that the

00:01:41.660 government says they must remove. Now I want to make very clear that I don't think this is a problem when

00:01:46.980 you're talking about markedly criminal speech, like terror propaganda, like child pornography, like

00:01:53.300 incitement of violence. The problem is that also included, specifically named, is hate speech. Nowhere do we have a

00:02:01.700 cohesive definition for hate speech outside of the criminal code, except the government has tried to broaden

00:02:08.260 that. This is what happened at those committee meetings in the last spring and summer, when the government was

00:02:14.840 hearing from experts who said that things that are offensive about certain religions or ethnic minorities but aren't

00:02:20.220 criminal should still be prosecutable by the government. And this is going to be very dangerous. We had for a while on the

00:02:27.780 book Section 13, a law that allowed internet hate speech to be prosecuted by the Human Rights Commission, even if it fell

00:02:35.640 below the threshold for criminal law, which is very high and justifiably so. If you don't have a definition of hate speech that you're 1.00

00:02:43.300 prepared to make public, you are risking a threat to free speech. And this is where the government has flirted with in the

00:02:50.440 past. Nowhere in the mandate does actually defining hate speech appear. And this needs to happen before we can have any

00:02:57.740 significant regulation of it. Take a look at another item that was in the mandate letters. This one, part of the mandate for

00:03:04.120 bill Blair, the public safety minister, work with the minister of diversity and inclusion and youth and the minister of

00:03:11.460 justice and attorney general of Canada to combat online hate and harassment and continue to invest in resources to

00:03:18.660 counter the rise of ideologically motivated violent extremism and terrorist organizations. So we now have an online hate file that is

00:03:27.180 spanning at least four different ministers' portfolios and still no definition of online hate. And the devil is, as they say,

00:03:34.860 always in the details. If Canadians want free speech to be upheld, this definition has to lean on the existing criminal code

00:03:42.920 definition of online hate speech and not one that's created to encompass things that might be politically incorrect, things that

00:03:50.060 might be offensive, things that might be very difficult to hear or see people say, but are nonetheless protected by

00:03:56.800 free speech. And this means any work they do in this file needs to be followed very closely and very carefully. And the

00:04:04.300 opposition, who still controls the committees at this point, needs to not let this get by unchallenged. This is something

00:04:12.000 that True North will not waver on. As an outlet, we support free speech. As an individual, I support free speech. We are

00:04:18.820 going to be providing a voice on this and other matters as well that the mainstream media is not. We can't do this alone,

00:04:24.280 though. If you can chip in to support our efforts by joining my Heritage Club, there's a link in the description

00:04:29.160 box and it's very much appreciated. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.

Juno News - December 14, 2019

Trudeau directs cabinet to regulate internet “hate speech”

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