From our perspective, we were pretty agnostic about whether section 13 at the time it was debated was tweaked to be responsive to some of the deficiencies inherent in the section, or whether, if it were abandoned, the Criminal Code provisions were provided with a more robust capacity to compensate for the loss of section 13. Essentially, the problem is the one that you referenced and that I think would be familiar to everybody on the committee. We are dealing with two competing imperatives. On the one hand is the desire to ensure that people can avail themselves of the freedom to express thoughts and ideas freely, without fear of persecution or prosecution however odious those ideas might be. On the other hand, unlike our American cousins, we recognize that there is a limit to freedom of expression. When it begins to encroach on the safety and security and well-being of others, that really constitutes a red line.
The challenge with section 13 was that it was both a sword and a shield. It was providing some insulation for those who really did have malicious intent and it wasn't offering protection to those who were the targets of toxic or vitriolic hatred. We had hoped that government writ large—it's not just a federal issue but applies also at the provincial and municipal levels—would come forward and demonstrate a real political will to pick up the slack from the loss of section 13. In fact, I think Richard wrote to the attorneys general across the country, calling on them to adopt a more aggressive posture in terms of considering and acting upon potential hate crime activity, which would be able to compensate for the loss of section 13. Frankly, that hasn't been our experience. There has been some, but not enough. If we were to return to a section 13 kind of model, we would want to ensure that there were provisions with respect to evidence, and also with respect to the onus of ensuring that it was not a SLAPP or vexatious kind of lawsuit, that really would protect the ability of individuals and groups to articulate ideas even if they didn't meet with a uniformly positive response.
There were a number of other things that I think the committee could look back to in the testimony given by a variety of different stakeholders and that could offer a solution. What is clear, however, is that government writ large has to be able to employ useful tools, tools that do make a distinction between freedom of expression and freedom from hate, as they proceed along this line.
I know this is straying just a little bit from your question, but what we should note is increasingly the call from social media providers, the platforms that we are all talking about ubiquitously, who themselves are struggling to figure out what the lines are and where they should be intervening and what should be their response to things that appear online. I think there is a signal that they're looking for leadership from government to help provide them with the guidance necessary for them to put into place, whether it's human resources or algorithms or what have you.... The numbers are staggering. I have reviewed some of the stuff from Facebook alone in terms of the hundreds of millions of posts. It's hard to wrap your head around the idea of monitoring and responding to that volume of information.
On clear guidelines from government, I'll return to the issue of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. One of the benefits that it provides a government is that it offers a clear definition. You can then use that as a template for the algorithms you are going to put into place and the word searches you are going to use to trigger closer scrutiny and so forth.
If we were to do this across the span of looking at those specific things to which different communities...whether it's LGBTQ or the Muslim community, the Bahá'í, and so forth, I think that would go a long way in being able to entrench the kind of distinctions on freedom from hate and freedom of expression that everybody around this table I suspect is rightly concerned about.
Thank you very much.