Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Committee members, the Mosaic Institute is grateful for the opportunity to participate in your deliberations on online hate. We recognize that your time is limited, and that you must be selective about the organizations you invite to appear. Thank you for including us.
Mosaic is a Canadian charitable institute that advances pluralism in societies and peace among nations. It operates through track two diplomacy and brings together people, communities and states to foster mutual understanding and to resolve conflict.
Over the years, we have convened Chinese and Tibetan youth leaders on peaceful co-existence on the Tibetan Plateau, we have assembled Sinhalese and Tamil representatives on reconciliation after the Sri Lankan civil war, and we have called together survivors of genocides to combat future global atrocities.
Fundamentally, our mission is to break cycles of hatred and violence by building empathy and common ground between peoples at strife. We have therefore seen first-hand how the speed and reach of social media have made it both a means of bringing us all together and a weapon to set us all at one another's throats.
The stakes are unutterably high. In our work with the Rohingya people, it has become clear to us that social media played a determinative role in spreading disinformation, fomenting hatred and coordinating mass slaughter, ending with the deaths of at least 10,000 innocent people and the ethnic cleansing of at least a million more. Canada is not Myanmar. Nevertheless, the ability of Parliament to contain and combat online hatred and incitement will quite literally decide whether people live or die.
It should go without saying that in a just and democratic society, there is no higher ideal, no greater ethic, no more sacrosanct imperative than freedom of expression. Peace, order and good government; liberté, égalité, fraternité; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—all are impossible without free public discourse. Freedom of expression becomes meaningless if it does not include freedom to offend, freedom to outrage and quite frankly, freedom to make an ass of oneself, although I'm sure that never happens in Parliament.