Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and we thank the committee for allowing us to appear this evening.
My colleague Leo Adler, our senior legal counsel, will elaborate on some of our key points, particularly the legal issues. I just wanted to give a brief introduction.
You have our legal submission and some related documents, which I hope have made their way to all committee members.
I am not sure if everyone is acquainted with B'nai Brith Canada. We have been before your committee previously. It was founded in 1875, with a history of defending the human rights of Canada's Jewish community and Canadians all across the country. Together with our League for Human Rights, we advocate for the interests of the grassroots Jewish community and for their rights such as freedom of conscience and religion, rights that we know are important to all Canadians.
The point I wanted to make is that our comments will be consistent with testimony before several standing committees in the past year, including my own remarks to this committee on Bill C-51 on October 30 of last year.
We hope the committee will continue to bear in mind that Canada's most targeted religious minority, in terms of hate speech and hate crimes, is the Jewish community. Our comments are rooted in that fact. In particular, we are ever-mindful of the signals Parliament and the government send to our communities as amendments to various pieces of legislation take shape over time.
We followed the government's several initiatives to modernize both the Criminal Code and the national security framework, including plans to deal with provisions that are focused on expediency or efficiency. These aims must not supersede the essential prerequisites of fairness and balance, nor must they supersede the requirement for our publics to know, and for perpetrators to understand, the severity of penalties that would accompany advocating or promoting genocide or in any way supporting terrorism.
Our question remains a straightforward one: whether proposed changes taken holistically represent a weakening of essential provisions in the Criminal Code and other legislation that is perceived by the public and by law enforcement as meaning the government takes these offences less seriously. This is the context, and we have concerns with specific aspects of hybridization—as Mr. Adler will outline. Certain of these offences are very serious. Notwithstanding government assurances, how does this square with an implicit aim of affording Crown counsel greater discretion in how to proceed with less serious offences?
We believe that, in today's context, we must exercise great care in taking actions that can be misinterpreted, and the signal such a step would convey in today's environment where anti-Semitism, hate speech, and advocacy to serious crimes such as genocide remain serious challenges, if not in Canada then elsewhere.
Our hope is that the committee, in essence, will recommend that offences related to advocating genocide and offences that are terrorism-related are not hybridized and remain indictable. Mr. Ehsassi has already spoken eloquently today pertaining to the genocide point.
As opposed to hybridization, there are other steps that can be taken. Mr. Adler, again, will explain, but in April, B'nai Brith Canada published an “Eight-Point Plan to Tackle Antisemitism". Committee members will have that. One of our recommendations is to publish the Attorney General's guidelines for hate-related prosecutions. We believe more can be done in this area, including for other incitement offences.
While we recognize it falls outside the scope of this draft legislation, we must acknowledge that certain remedies that were contained in section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act are part of this overall equation. We accept that freedom of expression is important, but in the context of Bill C-75 the right of potential victims to be free from acts advocating genocide or terrorism and the threat of terrorism must be the greater priority.
Clear penalties help ensure this. We ask committee members to consider carefully the signals they would send by endorsing hybridization of those offences with which we are most concerned.
Thank you.