Thank you very much. I'm very honoured to have been asked to participate in your deliberations.
I am also appearing as an individual, but I do have some background in this area. I have provided you with a very detailed paper that I have written on this topic, and I hope you will have a chance to read it.
In terms of my personal involvement in the past, I was representing the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund twenty years ago in both the Taylor case and the Keegstra case emanating out of Alberta, which are the leading cases today in both the criminal law and the Canadian Human Rights Act's section 13. From that perspective, I'm very familiar with the legal background, as well as the factual background, of both of those cases.
Today I'd like to address basically three points. A number of the points that I could address have been addressed by the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Jewish Congress, so what I'm going to talk about first of all, essentially, is that hate expression is more than expression. Hate expression is a practice of discrimination that actually causes harm to vulnerable groups and to society. Those harms include both physical and psychological harms.
Hate speech perpetuates stereotypes and creates barriers to the social, economic, and political participation of the groups that it targets. It silences people, so it affects freedom of expression of others. It is proliferating and increasingly accessible on the Internet, which has already been mentioned, and it comes before you as an issue as hate speech is increasingly proliferating at an alarming rate. For example, 15 or so years ago, there was one hate site on the Internet. Today there are over 5,000 such sites. That's my first point.
The second point I wish to address is that hate speech targets women. Sometimes this group is not recognized as being targets of hate propaganda. It's important because women are not protected otherwise than in human rights legislation. I'm thinking particularly about lesbians. I'm thinking about black women and how they've been portrayed in hate speech. I'm thinking about aboriginal women and how they've been degraded in various forms of hate speech. I'm thinking about people with disabilities and how hate speech has promoted eugenics and euthanasia for this group of people. So I want to focus some of your attention, please, on women as a group.
Thirdly, I want to talk about the fact that the courts have recognized that this type of expression is more than expression. It amounts to the types of harms that we're used to recognizing in other forms and under a different kind of language.
Those are the three points I want to talk about.
First of all, over many years, Parliament—including yourselves—has identified equality as one of the most important underlying values and principles of a free and democratic society. In fact, the courts have said that equality is the genesis of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the charter. I think what they meant by that was that the rights and freedoms in the charter are not very meaningful if all Canadians cannot experience them, and that includes freedom to speak, freedom of speech.
The court has further told us that the charter itself must not be used as an instrument of better-situated individuals to roll back legislation that has as its object the improvement of the condition of less-advantaged individuals. I would suggest to you—and the highest courts in the land have agreed with me—that the government protection of equality and expressive rights in section 13 addresses this very point.
In other words, government has acted against discrimination and for equality by creating section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. In that sense, it's quasi-constitutional legislation, because it's equality-seeking, and in that sense it's of profound importance to Canada's fundamental basic values.
Now, the point on harm is one that I want to stress. Hate speech causes harm to society, it causes harm to the groups that it targets, and it also causes harm to individuals. Its reach has increasingly been expanded through the Internet, which section 13 expressly addresses.
With respect to women, when women are targeted, hate expression degrades and depicts them in ways that are specifically gendered. The harmful effects....
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