Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Stéphane Sérafin. I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's faculty of law common law section, but I'm speaking here in my own personal capacity, so my views are my own and not those of my employer.
When I was first asked to speak before this committee, I found the framing somewhat odd. I was asked to contribute to a discussion, as the invitation said, “regarding the protection of freedom of expression and the means the government should have at its disposal to ensure its exercise.”
While there are always things the government can do to advance freedom of expression, most of what came to mind were instances in which government action had recently served to undermine it, sometimes significantly.
I could cite many examples, but I'll limit myself to areas within federal jurisdiction. Two come to mind here. The first relates to my own experience as a university professor, and it relates to government funding of research that increasingly prioritizes so-called equity, diversity and inclusion requirements over other concerns or to the exclusion of other concerns.
In the university context, federal funding agencies have, for some time now, created special funding categories for DEI-oriented projects, and they have increasingly, and perhaps more concerningly, mandated compliance or a commitment to DEI as a requirement of obtaining funding.
On the face of it, equity, diversity and inclusion sound neutral and incontestable, and everybody, more or less, agrees with equity in the sense of fairness. Everybody agrees more or less with the value of diversity and the value of inclusion, but beneath these labels are hidden ideological commitments to a particular understanding of what equity means, what it means to treat people fairly, what a particular understanding of diversity means and the particular types of diversity that are valued. So it goes with inclusion as well.
To the extent that these requirements are imposed in the context of funding, it's not straight up censorship, but it does incentivize research to take on particular orientations and provides a strong disincentive for research to adopt alternative orientations, including orientations that might challenge or somehow criticize the premises of the DEI commitments. That's the first area of concern.
The second is more directly pertinent to Canada's democratic culture. It relates to certain bills that are currently before Parliament, in particular, that would serve to regulate speech in a way that is not necessarily content neutral and, worse yet, may criminalize or impose sanctions on the expression of factually true statements to the extent that they are considered inconvenient for the advancement of certain political causes.
One of the two bills I have in mind here is Bill C-413, which is the private member's bill titled, tentatively, an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to the promotion of hatred against indigenous people. Most people would oppose hate speech. There's a particular concerning aspect of this bill in that it aims to target, as hate speech, or at least it could be interpreted as such, any conduct or any public expression of views that condone, deny or downplay the effects of the Indian residential school system.
The concerning aspect here is that these words—“condones”, “denies”, “downplays” and “justifies”—are all value judgments. We are here touching on the core of political expression, the core of democratic life in this country. To the extent that we are publicly.... Anybody who might inject publicly a bit of nuance in this sense, who might suppose to raise factually true statements, could find themselves criminalized.
The last one I want to raise is the online harms act, Bill C-63, and particularly the provisions that would add jurisdiction to the Human Rights Tribunal to prosecute hate speech complaints against individuals online. This is a civil complaints process that also raises significant chilling effects, in part because here, unlike in the other bill, it's not a criminal act and it's not a criminal sanction, so it could be prosecuted at the instigation of private actors as well.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
