Thank you very much.
The honourable members of this committee are studying online hatred and what, if anything, the federal government can do to restrict it.
Before we can address how to fix the problem, we first need to ask where the problem comes from and who is best suited to fix it. In a certain sense, the dark corners of the web are a window into the dark corners of the human heart. Greed, lust, hatred, anarchy, covetousness and lies infect the Internet and our hearts as well.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing in The Gulag Archipelago, said this:
...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.... And even in the best of all hearts, there remains...an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
Charles Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship International, builds on this idea in his book Justice That Restores. He writes that there is no more urgent task than to restore the sense of community cohesion and to build a virtuous character into common life and that "without individual virtue, one cannot achieve a virtuous culture; without a virtuous culture, one cannot hire enough policemen to keep order.”
As Michael Novak has trenchantly observed, adapted to a Canadian audience, “in a virtuous culture” we have 37 million policemen and “in a culture that mocks virtue, we cannot hire enough policemen.”
Who is best suited to offer solutions to the problem of online hatred? I don't think the honourable members of this committee realize it, but you have already made a big step in the right direction when, just over a year ago, you amended Bill C-51 to preserve the protections afforded to houses of worship in section 176 of the Criminal Code.
Not only did you signal, rightly, that you care about the protection of vulnerable citizens in a state of prayer and worship, whether in a mosque, synagogue, temple or church, but you also preserved protections for the institutions that can inculcate that virtue in individuals so that we can have a virtuous society. If we want that virtuous society, we need to protect churches, mosques and synagogues to continue to preach peace, shalom, shalam. That's where the work against online hate starts. It is absolutely necessary for this committee, indeed all of Parliament, to understand this. Do not undermine houses of worship; protect them and expect good things from them.
However, I'm not suggesting that the state has no other role in combatting violence and the senseless slaughter resulting from seething hatred, as witnessed in New Zealand and Pittsburgh. The Hebrew psalms speak to the proper role of the state. Psalm 72 says of the king:
For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death. He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in his sight.
This psalm points to the God-given role of the state to protect from bloodshed and violence the weak and the needy, the vulnerable citizen.
The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans builds on this command. He says:
...the one in authority is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.
A clear application of this biblical passage to online hatred would be that the government does have a role in enacting swift justice to punish a wrongdoer seeking violence against another person or group of people. So where the vitriol of online hatred rises to the level of incitement to violence threats of violence, which are crimes under Criminal Code sections 264.1 on threats, 318 on advocating genocide, and 319 on public incitement to hatred, then the police must act swiftly to investigate, to arrest, to charge and then to prosecute.
Perhaps—and I put this out there as a thought experiment—one impediment to swift action and swift justice on the crimes of advocating genocide and public incitement to hatred are the unusual requirements that the attorney general's consent is needed to proceed. Perhaps, by removing those two subsections, we could increase the ability of police to pursue, without delay, action to stop such crimes from happening.
However, one word of warning that ARPA Canada wants to share is that we are very concerned about overzealous attempts to fix the problem of online hate. We co-signed a letter requesting the justice committee to study this issue with a good faith understanding that we would be able to raise legitimate concerns about what would constitute going too far.
We are very concerned about any attempt to reinstate a hate speech provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act. These provisions have been shown to be ineffective and often abused. They chill freedom of expression and are applied in demonstrably unfair way. Let me give you one example of what some commentators have described as politically correct double standards.
In 2003, in a case called Johnson v. Music World Ltd., a complaint was made against a record label for a song called Kill the Christian. The lyrics of the song were read into the record by the complainant, and included the following, referring to Christians:
You are the one we despise
Day in day out your words [comprise lies]
I will love watching you die
Soon it will be and by your own demise
...Satan wants you dead
Kill the Christian, kill the Christian
Kill the Christian, kill the Christian
...The death of prediction
Kill the Christian
Kill the Christian, dead!
The panel found that while the content and tone of the communication appeared on their face to be discriminatory, there was “very little vulnerability of the target group”, so there was no violation constituting hate speech. Yet three years later, in a case called Lund v. Boissoin, a panel found that a letter published in a mainstream newspaper in Red Deer, Alberta, that made disparaging remarks about homosexuality was in fact hate speech and ordered the writer to cease publishing in future in newspapers, in email, on the radio, in public speeches—including sermons—or on the Internet. The panel chair for both of those decisions was the same person: Lori Andreachuk.
Public policy discussions, I would argue, require as broad and as open an access to expression as is possible. Freedom of expression ought to be such that all citizens feel free to speak about all public policy issues as best they can. We can preserve that freedom, and we must preserve that freedom. By putting finite resources into hate speech codes other than the Criminal Code, the government potentially will distract from true hate speech that leads to violence. That’s a distraction that will not do much to curb the kind of violence we saw in Pittsburgh or in New Zealand.
To conclude, my requests would be as follows.
One, take seriously the protection of other institutions in society that can inculcate virtue in our citizens, including religious institutions.
Two, the state needs to demonstrate swift justice against these crimes. Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, “When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, people’s hearts are filled with schemes to do wrong.” This committee should consider removing the requirement for the attorney general’s consent to prosecute incitements to genocide and public hatred in subsections 318(3) and 319(6) of the Criminal Code.
Finally, we ask that we do not entertain incorporating hate speech measures into the Canadian Human Rights Act. This distracts resources from the more pressing work of preventing violence against vulnerable citizens.
Thank you very much.