Justice Committee on April 11th, 2019

[André Schutten, Legal Counsel and Director of Law and Policy, Association for Reformed Political Action Canada]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much. I would appreciate it if you would share the links to the two judgments you referenced.

[André Schutten]

Yes, absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Cameron, the floor is yours, sir.

[Dr. Geoffrey Cameron, Director, Office of Public Affairs, Bahá'í Community of Canada]

Thank you.

I would like to thank the committee for inviting my testimony today as a representative of the Bahá'í Community of Canada. I'm also appearing as a member of the executive committee of the Canadian Interfaith Conversation, a national body that seeks to foster and promote religious dialogue and harmony.

Bahá'ís, as members of a religion that has been Canada since the late 1800s and that has established communities in most localities in this country, are not the targets of online hate in Canada. However, this issue is of particular concern to our community first and foremost because of core teachings of the Bahá'í faith regarding the promotion of the fundamental oneness of humanity and the elimination of all forms of prejudice. Public or private expressions of hatred towards groups of people, whether online or off-line, are inimical to these beliefs.

We have joined with many other faith and civil society groups to call for the study of the root causes and potential solutions to the rising incidence of online hate that has been directly connected to violent attacks on particular groups. Women, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and racial minorities have been among the most recent targets of violence that was inspired by hatred spread online.

The recent attacks on Muslims at prayer at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; the van attack in downtown Toronto; the attack on Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the shooting at the lslamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City are all recent examples of killers who spent extensive time in digital worlds of hatred.

As Professor Richard Moon has found, “Hate crimes are committed most often...by individuals who have immersed themselves in an extremist subculture that operates at the margins of public discourse, and principally on the Internet.”

Sadly, this is also a problem with which Bahá'ís have first-hand experience in other countries. ln the most egregious case of Iran, a government-supported media campaign of defamation and incitement to hatred has been directly tied to outbursts of violence and murder targeting Bahá'ís. A similar pattern has begun to proliferate in nearby Yemen.

It is clear, then, from a growing body of experience, that the spread of online hatred targeting a defined group can lead individuals, who are perhaps already inclined to bigoted thinking, to act with violence.

What should be done about this problem? Any lasting solution has to somehow take into consideration the roles and responsibilities of individuals, groups, corporations and the institutions of government. With regard to government, I will refrain from commenting on the question of whether section 13 should be reinstated or whether the hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code are sufficient to prosecute cases of online hate. There is a delicate balance, as others have mentioned, to be struck between guaranteeing the free exchange of ideas in the public sphere and sanctioning those whose aim is not to advance truth, but to spread hatred. Clearly the government and, by extension, the courts have a role to play in prosecuting cases of hate speech.

lt is also increasingly clear that policy intervention by government is needed to mitigate the impact of the more egregious misuses of online social networks. Despite recent steps taken by Facebook and Twitter to remove certain accounts, government also has a role to play in regulating these online platforms. Any effective policy intervention must ensure national and local community involvement in determining the standards for online platforms. As David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on the freedom of expression, has urged, relying upon international human rights norms rather than the arbitrary judgements of commercial platforms is a better basis for the development of these standards. This includes delineating the rights and responsibilities of users, as well as safeguards to ensure that freedom of expression is not unduly curtailed.

However, government action by itself is insufficient. There is also a role for civil society in pushing these companies further in the right direction, beyond the letter of the law. One organization, Change the Terms, has called on tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter to take steps to curb the use of social media, payment processors, event-scheduling pages, chat rooms and other applications for hateful activities. There are concrete steps that can be taken by these powerful companies, which are accountable both to government and to the wider society, that can create a healthier public sphere for all of us.

Finally, there is an educational responsibility that falls to community leaders, teachers, families and parents. Changes in the attitudes, values and behaviours of individuals are a necessary part of the solution.

The online environment is ultimately a mirror reflection of our society. We live in a world in which prejudice against certain groups is propagated by many people, even those who do not intend to provoke violent reactions. Religious leaders have a particular responsibility to educate people, to promote fellowship and concord and not to stoke the fires of fanaticism and prejudice. Young people especially need access to education that teaches them from the earliest years that humanity is one family. They require education and mentorship that go beyond a simplistic condemnation of hatred or a set of dos and don'ts regarding their online activities. Youth need to develop a strong moral framework on which to base decisions about their online activities, about which content they choose to consume and share, and about how they use their powers of expression when communicating with friends and strangers online.

Any long-term solution to online hatred has to give due consideration to this generation that is coming of age in an information environment that is confusing, polarizing and indifferent to their moral and ethical development. From where do young people learn to express themselves, using language that is intended to educate rather than to dismiss or denigrate? As they seek to learn about social issues, how will they know the difference between intelligent criticism and hateful propaganda? What ethical tools and social support are we giving to them as they navigate the online world?

Answering these questions is a responsibility that falls not only to government; it is part of a response to online hate that we must all accept to carry forward.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to all members of the panel for your interventions.

We'll now go to questions, starting with Mr. Barrett.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all of the witnesses who are appearing today. It's important as we move forward in the study that everyone agree that we clearly denounce white supremacy and racism and intolerance directed to any group and denounce any hateful ideologies. I think in being aligned in that way we would have a very good basis to move forward.

To pick up on Mr. Cameron's comments on how we can encourage the reporting of online hate propaganda—because it obviously is going to take a whole-of-society approach to address this—the government can do what governments do. None of the major players are Canadian corporations, so we need to have their voluntary co-operation in a lot of cases to have any real meaningful effect, but really, as Mr. Schutten said, 37 million people working together will be more effective than any agents of government.

So how would you recommend that we encourage the reporting of online hate propaganda? I'll ask the four witnesses to answer that question.

[Alex Neve]

I'll begin by picking up on some of the findings that have come out of the extensive research we've done with respect to Twitter. I highlight Twitter not because we think it's the worst—and it's certainly not the only platform of concern—but simply because that is where our research has focused.

One of the very serious concerns we noted is that many people were reporting abuse—and in our report this was focused on women in particular—and the complaints were going nowhere. There was a profound lack of transparency with respect to the mechanisms that Twitter had in place, for instance, to address that. There was virtually no public reporting of the complaints they were getting, and this raised all sorts of concerns with respect to Twitter's own accountability.

Now, I totally agree with you that the challenge here is that these massive online platforms are not Canadian corporations. That does not mean, of course, that Canadians—individual Canadians and Canadian governments, whether federal or provincial—don't have a very important role on that side of things to keep the pressure on these online platforms to make sure that there is a real possibility of doing what you have raised and that something comes of it, so that there's actually a response and action taken with respect to legitimate online hate on those platforms and more public reporting from the companies themselves to demonstrate the extent of the problem and what they're doing about it.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you.

[André Schutten]

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.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Do I have any time left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

You have one minute left.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Mr. Cameron.

[Dr. Geoffrey Cameron]

Thank you.

I think the question of what to do with reporting is a secondary, in a way, to what exactly the standards are against reporting as evaluated. This echoes other comments on the panel.

As I mentioned in my testimony, I think there's a healthy discussion right now about the terms set by these online platforms for participation in them. I think there's a real need to reconsider what those terms are and for that reconsideration to be done not only in response to government regulation, but also in consultation with local and community groups and with reference to international human rights standards.

I don't think it's a simple technical issue, but a reconsideration of exactly what is acceptable and what the standards are that are used to evaluate acceptable speech on these platforms.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

You have 10 seconds.

Do you want to ask Mr. Mirakian?

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Yes, if he could—

[Shahen Mirakian]

Very quickly, I'd like to speak about the issue of cyber-vandalism and the reporting of that, which was something I brought up before.

If someone were to, on a hate-motivated basis, physically vandalize a structure belonging to the Armenian community, I would know how to report that fairly easily. If someone were to graffiti something onto my community centre, I know exactly who to phone from the police and how to report that.

However, if someone vandalizes or hacks into my website and replaces the content with the same sort of propaganda that they would have spray-painted onto my community centre, I have no idea to whom to report that properly. For instance, the website may be for a Canadian organization but hosted in the United States or in a different country. The perpetrators could be from anywhere in the world, and there's no way of identifying them. They have complete anonymity. We don't know if they've ever even entered Canada.

They may steal data from us. They've stolen email lists, for instance, and sent hateful messages to people on those lists. We have no idea, again, to whom that should be reported properly. There should be some information provided to community organizations on how to report these sorts of incidents properly. These should be tracked in the same way that physical vandalism has been; otherwise we under-report the incidence of hate crime in Canada.

I think that's one thing I would very much recommend, that the committee work with law enforcement, especially federal law enforcement—I think they're best positioned to deal with this—to figure out how this reporting should be done, and to which law enforcement agencies, and to ask them to prioritize dealing with these types of incidents as well.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

I'd like to note, for the benefit of the witnesses, that this committee made an amendment to a private member's bill of one of our colleagues, Chandra Arya. It gave the same protection, for example, to an Armenian community centre, which previously was granted only to churches, mosques, or synagogues, in the burden of establishing a hate crime.

We get what you said. Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Ehsassi.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of the panellists. I think you've been very helpful in identifying this huge problem that we have and that something has to be done about it.

Mr. Neve, we just heard from Mr. Mirakian that one of the problems we're having is that no one knows how to navigate their way through different online platforms. It seems to me that the leadership Amnesty has shown with respect to Twitter abuse.... I think in your response you were also alluding to that, that Twitter wasn't very effective in flagging online hate and being responsive to it. Have you found that some of the other online media tools have been more effective than Twitter?

[Alex Neve]

I wouldn't want to put ourselves out there as having done that comparison to the degree of rigour that I would feel confident in giving an assessment to you. I think what we're seeing, and I think I heard remarks in the earlier panel about this, is that there is starting to be a bit of breathlessness among many of the online companies in recognizing how vulnerable they are in this regard. Some of that I think is coming from the right place of recognizing that there's some real culpability and responsibility for their past approaches having led to very serious abuses and acts of violence. Part of it is obviously commercially motivated as well.

It has been slow with Twitter, and that's been frustrating and difficult. We are getting some pickup and some changes are slowly happening. However, I think much more pressure is needed, including from governments. I think governments need to go on the record with companies like Twitter with very clear demands and recommendations around this whole area of change and prevention and accountability and oversight.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Speaking of governments, we did hear earlier today about some jurisdictions or countries doing a better job in combatting online hate. Germany was one example that was provided. Is there any particular jurisdiction that any of our witnesses would like to refer to as an example that has the right regulatory or legal framework?

[Dr. Geoffrey Cameron]

Not to my knowledge.

[André Schutten]

I'd have to pass on that as well.

[Alex Neve]

I will too, but I will certainly follow up on that. Obviously, we have global networks that I can access. I would be very surprised if I came back to the committee with the gold standard anywhere. I think this is a challenge, and it's a challenge that pretty well every government is struggling with and still falling short on, but I'm sure there are some good practices that we can share with you.