Justice Committee on May 28th, 2019

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thanks very much.

I'm going to go to Mr. Suri and Mr. Hussain right away, and then to Ms. Moore. I have a minute each for you, Mohammed and Faisal.

We heard about what you want changed in the Criminal Code and the CHRA.

Mohammed, what's the effect of online hate on you, your family, and the people you represent, the Albertans you represent?

[Mohammed Hussain]

I actually think the consequences of that hate.... Let's face it: I'm someone who goes to the mosque regularly. I'm there in the evenings. I'm there on Fridays as well. After January 29 happened, after Christchurch happened, and the youngest victim of Christchurch was actually a three-year-old boy,... I take my kids to the mosque with me. Did I think about it? Was I worried about it before I went in? Yes, I thought about it. Did I quiver? Totally.

This is me I'm talking about. I constantly live in fear of this because I have a young daughter who plays hockey, who may or may not decide to wear a hijab and so on, but she's a visible minority. She has a very visible last name as well, so how is she going to be treated? What adversity is she going to face?

Let's face it: men don't see the brunt of it. A woman wearing a hijab does. A Sikh person with a turban does see consequences of this online hate. It's very real.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Faisal, I'll ask you the same question.

[Faisal Khan Suri]

I definitely second what Mohammed was saying. It is so prevalent now in terms of the hate that we see now and how social media are being used to propel that hate to get it into the hands of people. We have WhatsApp group messages coming through looking at not only the Quebec shooting incident but also the Christchurch incident and the synagogue incident that happened in Pittsburgh. Before it even hits Facebook or Twitter, automatically word of mouth goes out and it's viral because you get a message on WhatsApp. People start living in this fear: Should I go to the mosque? Should I go to the playground? Am I going to be pulled over to the side by so-and-so?”

There was an incident that came to our attention in which a mother was dropping her kids off at school in one of the areas in Edmonton. Somebody had just driven by in a red pickup truck, and actually the intent of the truck driver was to ask for directions to get to someplace. However, the mother, along with the two kids, were just sort of caught up in this gamut of emotions from what they saw at Christchurch, and they felt that seeing a truck pulling them over, they didn't know what to do. It had absolutely nothing to do with this.

That's where we come in, to educate people to the fact that they can't live like that. That is not the intent. It is not the intent of Alberta or Canada at large. We can't let fear take over our own personal sanctuary that we live in.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I need to pause you there, Faisal. Thank you both for the leadership you demonstrate in Alberta and across the country.

Ms. Moore, what helped you go from overt hate to realizing that what you were doing was wrong? What helped you make that conversion?

[Elizabeth Moore]

It was a slow process for me to come to the realization that what I was doing was wrong. I wish I could give a cookie-cutter thing and say, “This will work for everybody”, but I think everybody comes into a hate group as an individual and they leave as an individual with their own unique experiences and terms.

In my case, I ended up connecting with some filmmakers who were making a documentary about the racist right, and I was part of that film. When they'd interview me, they were starting to ask me questions like “Well, how did you feel about this? What did you think about this? Do you agree with what this other person said?” The questions were about this other scene that we'd filmed. Having a camera in my face and having these people who were not part of the racist movement actually being nice to me, for lack of a better term, and listening to what I had to say made me feel some accountability finally. They made me actually stop and think. Because I was so busy doing things, just having a moment of pause, having a moment to stop and think, really made a difference for me.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you very much.

I need to pass my time to Mr. Virani.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Actually, there's no time left.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I thought these were six-minute rounds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

No, we're doing four-minute rounds. We are late. The good news is that Mr. Virani has time in the second panel.

Thank you very much, everyone. I appreciate your leadership in your communities. You all make a difference for the people you speak for and you were very helpful to the committee.

I'm sorry to have interrupted the panel, but I really appreciate your testimony.

I'm going to ask the members of the next panel to come up quickly, because we're running very late.

Thank you. The meeting is suspended.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

We will reconvene this meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights as we deal with our next panel on the topic of online hate.

We welcome, from the Federation of Black Canadians, Ms. Dahabo Ahmed Omer, who is a board member in charge of stakeholder relations.

[Dahabo Ahmed Omer, Board Member, Stakeholder Relations, Federation of Black Canadians]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

We also welcome Mr. Akaash Maharaj, the chief executive officer of the Mosaic Institute.

[Akaash Maharaj, Chief Executive Officer, Mosaic Institute]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

From the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, we have Mr. Bradley Galloway, research and intervention specialist. Welcome.

As well, returning from the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, we have Ms. Shalini Konanur, who is the executive director and attorney, and Ms. Sukhpreet Sangha, who is a staff lawyer. Welcome.

[Sukhpreet Sangha, Staff Lawyer, South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

We're going to go in the order of the agenda, so we'll start with the Federation of Black Canadians.

Ms. Omer, the floor is yours. You have eight minutes.

[Dahabo Ahmed Omer]

Thank you. Good morning.

Please allow me to acknowledge that we are gathered here this morning on land held by the Algonquin people who are the original stewards of this territory, which they never ceded. As representatives of over one million Canadians of African descent, many of whom were displaced by the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, the Federation of Black Canadians is of the belief that Canadians must continuously do such land acknowledgment as part of the national reconciliation with indigenous sisters and brothers.

Allow me to begin by thanking the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for inviting me to address you this morning. My name is Dahabo Ahmed Omer, and I'm the stakeholders' lead on the board of directors of the Federation of Black Canadians. I'm here to speak to you in favour of amending the Canadian Human Rights Act. This is to provide legislators, law enforcement and marginalized communities with more effective instruments and mechanisms to stem the explosion of hate crimes and terrorism.

As you're probably aware, there has been a horrendous spike of hate crimes in Canada. Stats Canada just recently released the latest report on police-reported hate crimes in Canada, which shows a 47% increase in reported hate crimes. Black Canadians not only constitute the group most targeted by hate crimes by race and ethnicity, but the recent increase in hate crimes has been largely, although not exclusively, a consequence of more hate crimes targeting people of African descent.

If you're a black Canadian and you happen to be a Muslim and a woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, there is an even greater risk of being targeted by hate crimes. This intersectionality of hate is poorly understood and is also a very important part of the equation. Based on the federal government's 2014 “General Social Survey: Canadians' Safety”, we now know that over two-thirds of people targeted by hate crimes do not report them to the police. The most often reported explanation for this is that they get a sense that if they do report the crime to the police, the report will either not be taken seriously or the accused will not be punished.

From a black Canadian perspective of communities suffering from over-policing, carding and other forms of racial profiling, that fear becomes even more heightened. Even right here in the nation's capital, there was recently confusion with the Ottawa Police Service over whether or not the municipality has an actual hate crime unit. This feeds into the perception of law enforcement's indifference.

It is important for the federation to stress that this explosion of hatred that has been described so far actually mirrors the proliferation online. CBC's Marketplace recently revealed a whopping 600% increase in hate speech by Canadians online. We also know that over 300 white supremacist groups are operating in Canada, using the web not only to promote hate and concoct deadly attacks but also to infiltrate our trusted public institutions.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a 2018 Angus Reid poll showed that 40% of Canadians feel that white supremacist attitudes are a cause of great concern.

Hate is currently undermining public safety for marginalized communities such as mine while also threatening national security. This is made clear by a recent report by the military police criminal intelligence section that reveals white supremacist infiltration of the Canadian Forces by paramilitary groups that use the web to recruit and spread hate.

With terrorist attacks on the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec; recent vandalization of black, Muslim, Jewish and Sikh places of worship; and the global context of coordination among white supremacist groups worldwide, more and more Canadians of all backgrounds believe that the time is now for Parliament to act more forcefully and deliberately against hate, which undermines public safety and transnational security.

Canadians expect their Parliament to take stronger action to prevent hate crimes that threaten public safety across the country.

The Federation of Black Canadians is aware that there is a tension between respecting freedom of expression, as protected under section 2(b) of the charter, and regulating hate speech online, as well as the prospect of technical solutions to reporting and monitoring hate speech or designating legitimate source and news sources, yet based on the lived experience of so many people across Canada who look like me, the federation believes that the lack of civil restrictions on dissemination of hate communicated over the Internet, the most prevalent and easily accessible mechanism of public communication, is a matter of grave concern.

The Canadian Human Rights Act stripped of section 13 is not a tool for the 21st century. When one considers that almost all Canadians under the age of 44 communicate online, that's why it's imperative that all political parties and independents come together in the spirit of consensus to restore section 13 of the act, which constitutes the only civil hate speech provision in Canada explicitly protecting Canadians from broadcast hate speech on the Internet.

The burden of proof required by section 319 of the Criminal Code is so high that, in and of itself, it leaves the most vulnerable populations, including black Canadians, subject to the proven harms associated with hate speech without providing a viable mechanism for recourse.

This becomes yet another systemic barrier to the inclusion, well-being and safety of black Canadians, among so many other groups targeted by hate. While the right to freely express oneself is fundamentally essential to a functional democracy—and trust me when I say this, because my country of origin is Somalia—the protection of the minority communities from the real harms associated with hate speech and online hate is demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. It is only when Canadians feel safe, protected and respected within our society that Canada can flourish and advance as a democracy.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you so much.

We'll now go to the Mosaic Institute and Mr. Maharaj.

[Akaash Maharaj]

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.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Akaash Maharaj]

Any abridgement of freedom of expression must, therefore, be only the barest minimum necessary to preserve the dignity and security of citizens.

We believe that Canadian laws defining illicit hate speech are sufficient for that purpose, and the scope of proscribed speech need not and should not be expanded further. Legal, regulatory and social media frameworks fall short, not in defining hate but in identifying it and quarantining it before the virus spreads and wreaks its damage.

We do not underestimate the scale of the challenge that legislators and social media firms face. During the two and half hours set aside for this hearing, there will be 54 million new tweets and 4.7 billion new Facebook posts, comments and messages.

For your consideration, here are our recommendations.

First, social media firms must, either voluntarily or under legal compulsion, adhere to a set of industry standards on the speed with which they review reports that posts violate Canadian anti-hate laws or their platforms' own terms of service. For example, the European Union standards require firms to review a majority of reports within one day.

Second, social media firms should be required to have specific conduits to prioritize complaints from trusted institutions about offending content. A complaint from a children's aid society, for one, should be treated with immediate concern.

Third, there must be financial consequences for firms that fail to remove illegal content within a set period—penalties severe enough to make the costs of inaction greater than the costs of action. Germany's network enforcement act sets fines as high as 50 million euros when illegal posts stay up for more than 24 hours.

Fourth, social media firms should be required to publish regular transparency reports providing anonymized information on, among other issues, the performance of their machine learning systems at automatically intercepting proscribed posts; the speed with which firms respond to complaints from victims, trusted institutions and the public at large; and the accuracy of their responses to complaints as measured by a system of third party random sampling of posts that have been removed and posts that have been allowed to stand.

Fifth, social media firms must be more forthcoming in revealing the factors and weightings they use to decide what posts are prioritized to their users. They must give users greater and easier control to adjust those settings. Too often social media platforms privilege content that engages users by stoking fear and hatred. A business model based on dividing our communities should be no more acceptable than one based on burning down our cities.

Sixth, Parliament should enact the necessary appropriations and regulations to ensure that CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment have both the mandate and the means to identify and disrupt organized efforts by hostile state and transnational actors who exploit social media to sow hatred and polarization amongst Canadians in an effort to destabilize our nation.

Seventh, Parliament should consider legislative instruments to ensure that individuals and organizations that engage in incitement to hatred bear vicarious civil liability for any violent and harassing acts committed by third parties influenced by their posts.

Eighth, the federal government should fund school programs to build young Canadians' abilities to resist polarization and hatred, and to cultivate critical thinking and empathy. The best defence against hatred is a population determined not to hate.

Finally, especially in this election year, I would put it to you that parliamentarians must lead by example. Everyone in this room knows that the guardians of our democracy are not ministers but legislators. We look to you to stand between our leaders and the levers of power to ensure that public office and public resources are used only in the public interest. More than that, we look to you to be the mirror of our better selves and to broker the mutual understanding that makes it possible for a vast and pluralistic society to thrive together as one people and one country.

During the upcoming campaign, you and your parties will face your own choices on social media: whether to campaign by degrading your opponents, whether to animate your supporters through appeals to anger or whether to summon the better angels of our natures. Your choices will set the tone of social media this summer more decisively than any piece of legislation or any regulation you might enact. I hope you will rise to the occasion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

We will now move to the Organization for the Prevention of Violence and Mr. Galloway.

[Bradley Galloway, Research and Intervention Specialist, Organization for the Prevention of Violence]

Good morning. Thank you very much for having me here today. I appreciate the invitation.

My name is Brad Galloway. I'm working as a research and intervention specialist with the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, which is located in Edmonton, Alberta. My main goals there are to take part in up-and-coming research, specifically on the far-right extremist movement in Canada, and more specifically, as of recent times, looking at the online dynamics of far-right extremism.

I often weave in my own personal lived experiences with the far right in Canada, as I spent 13 years within that movement in Canada, mostly at the beginning, in the offline context. However, I spent about 10 years operating also in the online context, so I know a lot about this online activity from an insider's perspective. I've used a lot of my experiences in taking part in some academic research as of recent times.

I'm also working with Life after Hate, which is another group that is similar to the Organization for the Prevention of Violence. We're looking at doing interventions and helping other people leave extremist movements. Some of those initiatives will definitely include looking at ways to build on online intervention strategies to intervene with people, and also providing resources for people who want to leave these types of movements.

It is my belief that communities are formed on shared ideas, experiences and cultures. ln order to distinguish and define themselves, groups compare themselves to others in positive and negative ways. It is in the latter that problems might arise.

A healthy, culturally diverse society is one that respects, accords dignity to and even celebrates the differences between cultures and communities. However, when groups start to distinguish and compare themselves in a negative manner to other groups on grounds such as race, religion, culture, ethnicity and so on, there is a potential for destructive and abiding conflicts. This leads to an us-versus-them mentality.

lt is in this sense that hate and extremism are interrelated phenomena that exist along a continuum of behaviours and beliefs that are grounded in this us-versus-them mindset. The perpetuation of associated rhetoric can create an environment where discrimination, harassment and violence are viewed by individuals as not only a reasonable response or reaction but also as a necessary one. When this is left unchecked, deepening, sometimes violent divides within society can undermine who we all are as Canadians and fray the social fabric of the country.

For the last 30 years, technology—first telephones and later the Internet—has played a crucial role in the growth of the white supremacist movement throughout Canada. Early versions of hate speech online in the 1990s and 2000s were being distributed through automated calls and websites. For example, the Heritage Front, a white supremacist group, had automated computerized calls spouting racist information. Other examples included the Freedom-Site network and the white civil rights hotline.

Beginning in 1996, we then saw the emergence of online discussion forums such as Stormfront, which notably was one of the first white supremacy websites and is still very active today. Stormfront was the first of this series of online far-right platforms and was used to communicate and organize.

Today we see more activity on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Gab, though most of these conventional forums still exist and are often used in conjunction with the new platforms, inclusive of apps. Often content removal or regulation are suggested to mitigate such sites and platforms. I would say that they both have their upsides, but they are very much faced with many challenges, both legal and ethical.

More with regard to the present, extremist groups and individual influencers promote social polarization and hate through available technology and are highly adaptive to pressing demands by law enforcement, governments and private social media companies.

Further, online hate speech is highly mobile. I would argue that these hate groups, and organized hate groups specifically, are using this mobility to further their transnational hate movements. Even when this content is removed, it finds expression elsewhere. Individual influencers are adaptive at finding new spaces.

If content is removed, it often re-emerges on another platform or under the name of a different user. Often the rhetoric and the networks move from established networks, where counter-speech can occur and where journalists and law enforcement are able to easily track their activity, onto platforms where detection is more challenging and where what are often termed “counter-narratives” are harder to deploy.

There are a multitude of examples, both domestically and internationally, of individuals who are promoting hate being kicked off one major platform—for instance, Facebook—only to move to either another major platform such as Twitter, or any host of smaller platforms, such as Gab or Telegram. Today’s online space is a more dynamic, immersive and interactive multiplatform online space than has ever previously existed, when there were only a few forums or a few telephone lines.

Influencers and propagators of hate distribute through multiple interlinked platforms. This new dynamic has demonstrably had an ability to mobilize hate-based activism and extremism, especially for lone-actor, violent extremists such as those who perpetrated the Tree of Life synagogue and Quebec City mosque attacks. The individuals who carried out these attacks did not necessarily engage directly with ideological influencers or a networked group, but they were mobilized based on the hate they felt and the sense of crisis they saw stemming from an opposing group.

What is the solution? I don't think there's any golden ticket solution. However, we believe that ultimately the first step in prevention and countering the propagation of hate speech and extremism is awareness, beginning with a better understanding of the nature of hate crimes and hate incidents online and off-line. We need better data on who is most targeted by hate and what the intersectional dimensions of targeting are—as in black, woman, Muslim who wears the hijab—and where these things take place. We need data on whether certain public spaces, like public transit, or certain public platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, are more conducive to hate speech and harassment.

In order to do this, there needs to be more incentive for victims of hate crimes to come forward. Often there is stigmatization, fear and skepticism around reporting a hate incident to the police. These issues need to be constructively challenged and mitigated through a multisectoral approach.

A recent example that I found is the proposed bill SB 577 in the state of Oregon, where they are also dealing with a rapid increase in hate crimes. This new bill requires law enforcement agencies to refer alleged hate crime victims to a new state hotline that is staffed by the Oregon Department of Justice, which connects callers to local mental health services, advocacy groups and other useful resources for crime victims. This allows victims to be in a safe, understanding environment while moving forward with a multitude of resources to address their hate experiences. It provides victims with some more resources and could increase reporting.

Online parallels are easy to imagine. Already some American non-profits are creating online resource hubs for people who have been doxed and had their personal information exposed. These resources could be repurposed and redeployed to address the issue we’re talking about today.

Many witnesses have likely discussed the legal challenges associated with changes to legislation. With the time I have left, I would instead like to touch upon some efforts that could occur further upstream of hate speech that don’t require legislative change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Mr. Galloway, I'll just let you know that you already exceeded the eight minutes. I'll ask you to wrap up relatively quickly. Thank you.