Thank you, Madam Chair.
This is the first time I'm speaking at this committee. I'm happy to be here. It's already proving to be a very interesting place.
It's good to see my friend Peter again. We had some good times at the public safety committee. This clearly is very much in the same vein.
Look, as Mr. Julian said, the motion by Mr. Champoux is something that we all think carefully about in terms of freedom of speech and how we ensure that we maintain that privilege in this country. To speak very personally, as a Muslim it's been a tough few weeks for a couple of reasons. One is that I represent a riding with a large Jewish community and a large Muslim community. The rise of anti-Semitic tropes, comments and commentary and anti-Muslim commentary, online and in person, has been really ramping up. At the same time, I saw members of my community participate in what I considered to be some pretty awful expressions of freedom of speech over the course of the last couple of weeks.
When we think about the context of freedom of speech and how hate speech factors into this, as Mr. Julian has rightly raised, I really do ask the question and wonder if we could think about this differently over the course of the next bit of time and have a real conversation about what freedom of speech really means in this country. What does this idea of hate speech mean? How do we situate ourselves in a place where people have the right to speak freely but also understand that there are implications to those comments when those comments are untrue or hateful or designed to cause harm to others?
I ordinarily would say, yes, absolutely, let's have a conversation about how we preserve this, but what it looks like today and what we are preserving I think is certainly worthy of a conversation. How do we ensure that there are guardrails around the consequences of what we say?
I would have a hard time supporting the motion as it stands today, but I do think that, over the course of the next however much time, perhaps we can find a way to move this into a conversation that allows us to remember and to confirm Canadians' rights to freedom of speech but also their right to live in safety and freedom without having to worry about the consequences of the freedom of speech of others to their own personal safety.
I will leave it there and offer that, while I don't know that I would support the motion in its current form, if we are open to having a discussion about what it might look like and how we might shape this into something different that achieves, hopefully, similar goals to what Mr. Champoux would like, then that's something that I would certainly consider supporting.