Thank you. Certainly it has been the position of the commission.
As you know, we did table a special report to Parliament last Thursday, which we're pleased to provide to you as well. It really talked about the balancing, in saying that in virtually all jurisdictions there is a balance. While there is the fundamental right of freedom of expression, that does not trump other fundamental rights. In other words, they are all put on an equal footing. The courts, in interpreting that, have often talked about the need to balance, and when there are competing rights, to ensure that this is there.
As you may be aware, we had engaged Professor Moon to do a study on section 13 as well. Certainly in our special report to Parliament we have recommended that Professor Moon's report as well be given full consideration. On balance, after consideration of Professor Moon's recommendation and our broad consultations with those who wanted to make submissions and our own consideration of it, and having regard for the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Taylor and Keegstra, as an example in 1990, as well as Parliament's amendment of our act in 2001 as part of the Anti-terrorism Act to specifically include hate on the Internet as being part of our mandate, our report for consideration by Parliament recommends that both regimes be maintained, with some modifications, to clarify the definition of “hate”. It has always been our commission's view that it is only in the extreme cases that the matter should proceed further, and hence a decision in the Maclean's case. As you know, our commission dismissed that complaint, did not send it to tribunal. In fact, there have only been in our existence 17 cases that have been heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, out of any of those that came before us.
So what we're saying is that we have been adopting the Taylor test in our analysis at the commission level and only sending on those more extreme cases. We have also recommended, to clear any uncertainty, that Parliament amend our act to make it very clear that it's only those very narrow and most extreme cases that should be within our jurisdiction. Therefore, we would also be able to more clearly dismiss those cases that come before us that don't meet that threshold under section 41 of our act, which allows us to fairly quickly make a decision that it's beyond the jurisdiction of the commission, rather than having to go through a full investigation.