It's a great question, because it's a question about accessibility. I dealt with it as a lawyer who is the ED of the South Asian Legal Clinic and has a whole heap of privilege behind me, so I can blast back, right? I can call the police and they'll take my call. I can do a number of things that I know my clients could never do.
I was able to counter it with my own commentary. With some of the comments, though, you just leave. We've become emotionally fatigued by it, to the point that you have to put your hands up and say, “I'm not going to engage”, because the engagement just leads to a snowball effect. The truth is that the emotional psyche of people who do this work with people from different communities—all of us—is harmed. I see it with my kids in particular.
The reality is that what we wanted to talk to you about today is that we don't have accessible solutions. That's why, when people talk over and over about civil remedies, administrative remedies, services that people can access for free to combat this and moving things out of criminalization, we are talking really about accessibility and access to justice. We want to look at those back-end mechanisms for people to combat that individual hate, but we also want you to think about the front-end piece, right? Why is it okay? Just as quickly as we went in this direction of online hate being okay, we can go in the direction of it not being okay. That takes our will. It takes our will to do that, and it takes our will to stand up, but it is really difficult.
One thing that I didn't get to say was that in Ontario we had an incredible ruling two weeks ago against two anti-Muslim advocates who went after the founder of Paramount Fine Foods. He got an award of $2.5 million in civil court. When I think about that case, I think, “If the clients I'd seen had the resources to access civil remedies, imagine the message we could send around civil liability for these cases.” I think about how we do have test case funding now, and we do have the court challenges program. Is there an opportunity at the federal level to expand those programs to have this kind of work done?