Thank you for inviting me to address this committee today.
My name is Morgane Oger. My pronouns are she, her, and hers. I am the founder of the Morgane Oger Foundation. We work to reduce the gap between Canada’s human rights laws and the experience lived on the ground of persons facing systemic discrimination, through advocacy, education, and legal means.
Hatred devastates.
Although this presentation specifically addresses anti-transgender hate, we believe that the basis of our argument applies equally to all types of online hate, regardless of the motive.
Hateful acts are devastating for the victim, who feels the rejection that she has difficulty getting rid of, and who often suffers a lasting psychological impact as a result of the trauma.
Neither insults nor the expression of divergent points of view constitute online hatred. It's the harassment. It's the incitement to discriminate. It's the deliberate publication of misinformation in order to deceive the public by giving people a sense of misplaced indignation. Hatred is meant to “pathologize” or demonize members of a community because they are who they are.
Hate propaganda acts by creating anger or disgust towards a person or group because of their identity. Hate speech incites discrimination or violence by any means available.
Canadian websites, such as The Post Millennial, Feminist Current, Woman Means Something, Canadian Christian Lobby, Culture Guard and Transanity, publish incitements to discriminate through misinformation in articles aimed at turning public opinion against the transgender community. Twitter and Facebook are awash with anti-transgender misinformation intended to justify anti-transgender discrimination.
During the 2017 B.C. general election, social conservative activist Bill Whatcott travelled to Vancouver with 1,500 flyers in hand, which urged people not to vote for me because I was transgender and for no other reason. He distributed them in the riding where I was contesting. The flyers had a photo of me, describing me as a biological male, and claimed that I was promoting homosexuality and transvestism. They stated that transsexuals were prone to sexually transmitted diseases and at risk of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and suicide.
After the election, I complained to the BC Human Rights Tribunal, which ruled in my favour in its March 2019 decision. Since 2017, Bill Whatcott has continued to engage in transphobic and derogatory harassment campaigns against me and others, focusing on a claim that he is being prevented from telling the truth that a man cannot be a woman. Whatcott’s campaign includes blog posts, trips to Vancouver to distribute more flyers, audio and video interviews, a series of social media posts and a number of articles.
Eventually the story was picked up on social and traditional media and took a life of its own, combining with other ongoing issues. Derivative articles stray further and further from the truth, and accusations proliferate.
The effects of Bill Whatcott's campaign against me continue. Two days after the ruling, Bill Whatcott came to a church where I was talking. His harassment is now mostly online and on the radio, but it doesn't end. It's never going to end. The truth is that what Mr. Whatcott did will never go away because it was widely rebroadcast online.
Because of Whatcott’s campaign, I had to teach my children to be wary of people. I had to ask them to keep an eye out for strangers. I had to explain to them why I had to do that. No mom wants to have to sit her children down and say to them that someone might want to hurt her or them because of who she is.
Shortly after the first Whatcott flyers and resulting wave of social media interest, I was attacked by a man who lunged at me at a political event. He tried to crash through a stroller with a child in it to get at me. Luckily, an undercover officer handled him without injuries, because by then, I was already under police protection.
Later in 2017, I was stopped in my back lane because of online commentary. A man, whom I didn't know, wanted to ask me about Whatcott. I was 20 metres from my home at the time, and the individual shared his displeasure. He expressed that what I was doing was wrong, that I should leave Whatcott alone, and that he and his church didn't like what I was doing.
In 2018, Whatcott announced in a Facebook video shot while hunting that he was coming back to Vancouver to distribute more flyers. He boasted about his shooting skills in the video. Vancouver police warned me and my children, and we had to upgrade our security precautions. He was in Vancouver for two weeks.
Due to the proliferation of claims made about me online, I now receive regular threats on the phone and countless threats online, some of them explicitly violent.
Because our provincial courts consider online publications to be a federal matter, and because section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was revoked in 2013, there are no human rights measures in Canada today governing hatred online. If Whatcott had restrained himself to only share his flyers online through Facebook, Twitter, or his website, my complaint against him at the BC Human Rights Tribunal would have been impossible.
However, in 2013 the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously affirmed the legitimacy of human rights legislation that restricts hate speech in its Saskatchewan v. Whatcott decision. Furthermore, the Federal Court of Appeal found section 13 to be constitutionally sound in 2015, after it was repealed in Canada v. Lemire.
The current gap in Canadian human rights law at the federal level enables the publishing of material on websites and social media that is prohibited from being publishing in physical form. For online hatred, the only remedy is a criminal complaint, which has a very high bar for conviction and can require special approval from a province's attorney general. Canadians need a civil recourse that effectively deals with hate publications that can reach wide audiences like they can online.
Bill Whatcott is quoted, in Oger v. Whatcott, as estimating that the online version of his flyer reached approximately 10,000 people. His future posts were widely distributed and cited in socially conservative circles in Canada and the U.S.
Another anti-trans activist, Meghan Murphy, has had over 100,000 views on her anti-transgender videos filmed in Vancouver, a city where, if they had been put to paper, it would have broken the law.
Dozens of articles on the website Feminist Current get 1,000 shares each as they eviscerate transgender women, specifically using disinformation to advocate against our existing rights.
Canada's gap in online hate legislation also has an impact outside of Canada. We have Canadian websites inciting anti-transgender hatred in other countries where legislation is being considered, for example, in the United Kingdom and Scotland right now, and this is originating from Vancouver. It is unbelievable that we are participating in preventing other people from accessing equality. Because of our legislative gaps in regard to online publications, Canada is exporting this anti-transgender hatred. We're inciting prohibited discrimination to other countries.
The Morgane Oger Foundation has some recommendations. First, we recommend that the Canadian Human Rights Act be updated to address online hatred and incitement to discriminate on prohibited grounds; second, that any online material that can be produced and then retrieved on demand for display in a browser or device should be considered in the same way as if published on paper. As we move away from paper, our laws need to adapt. Therefore, third, all social media platforms doing commerce in Canada should be required to meet or exceed Canada's human rights laws as they pertain to publications. Fourth, because display screens are the modern equivalent of paper, when they are fetching information stored on a media for the purpose of displaying it, they should be treated as publications. Fifth, publications based on the storage of material on a media for the purpose of displaying it on demand should be handled within the same jurisdiction to keep the cost of enforcement low. Finally, when an individual or organization publishes material or allows it to be published, or when the consumer is in Canada, Canadian hate laws should apply.
Thank you very much for your consideration today.
