Reporting on online hate is tricky, and I'll say two things in this regard. One is that the whole-of-society approach makes me a little less afraid of overreach into freedom of expression, in the sense that we see organizations like Amnesty International and others doing these big studies and investigations and so on, which I think is a good first step.
As far as individuals reporting on what they see online is concerned, the big struggle is that everybody has their own definition of hatred. We're seeing, I think more and more—I'll speak only of the Canadian context—that we lack the ability to disagree well. We don't know how to debate anymore. People who are online in particular are quick to throw labels, such as words ending in “phobe”—whether that's homophobe or Islamophobe or Christophobe, or whatever—to anything they feel uncomfortable with or they disagree with. That is stifling good, honest, rigorous debate about issues and ideas and policies and so on.
In the first panel, there was an idea of a universal button that you could click to report an online hate crime of sorts. It seems to me that's something that could be easily abused if we're not all in agreement, at least on a baseline, of what we mean by online hate.
I would agree with what we said in that initial letter that came to this committee about defining hate. That's going to be a very tough decision to make, but we have to do it right.