Justice Committee on May 30th, 2019

[Naseem Mithoowani]

With respect to how we might encourage individual communities to identify and report hatred, I think the creation of specialized hate crime units within police forces is important. We know that, for example, in B.C., there are specialized police officers that work with Crown attorneys and that have become the experts in that area. As such, they do outreach with communities and have developed relationships of trust in which there's transparency and relationship building that has taken place. I think that's a model we can look to for other provinces and federally.

[Tracey Ramsey, NDP, Essex, ON]

Professor Emon, do you want to weigh in?

[Dr. Anver Emon]

Yes, please. I have a few remarks regarding section 13 on the combatting. What we found in developing our archive project was that at the Canadian national level, there are very few places through which you can actually have an articulated construction of Muslims in Canada.

Let me give you an example. Library and Archives Canada has this little archives concept to document the Canadian experience. It's a very vague and abstract documenting process that tends to water down the particularities of any community, but just the other day I visited LAC online and I chose its “browse by topic” category. When you do so, there's no category for religion. There is an ethnocultural tab that will take you to a page with a lot of white ethnic groups and some Asian ethnic groups. The only religiously identified groups there are Jews and Mennonites. Muslims as a category do not feature on this search function. One can, of course, use key search terms to find anything, including something about Islam and Muslims, but the LAC website does not purposefully and proactively document Muslims in Canada in a way that can engage a broader viewing public.

This is not just a federal matter. At the provincial level, the Multicultural History Society of Ontario's oral histories collection is also principally organized by ethnic groupings, though it does catalogue for two religious groups: Jews and Mennonites. If one were to look for Muslims in their photograph collection, for instance, one would have to enter the awkward phrase "Islamic Canadian", a phrase whose very formulation represents a fundamental ignorance about Islam and its adherents, who are called Muslim.

It does seem to me that we have a fundamental religious illiteracy or an illiteracy in our society about certain groups. Therefore, characterizing something as hate speech against a group requires us to first understand the group on its terms, but we do not have even the data architecture to enable that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Fraser.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

Ms. Mithoowani, I would like to start with you. You talked about the importance of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. You'd like to see it reinstated, although, as you explained, you understand there are limitations to that. It perhaps puts too much of an onus or burden on the individual bringing forward that claim. We heard earlier, on another day of testimony, that while that is true, section 13 has an ancillary benefit of also providing perhaps in some circumstances a moderating influence on people's behaviour.

Do you think that's true? Would that be another reason to reinstate it? It may be cumbersome at some points in time to bring forward complaints. It may also have the benefit of moderating some people's behaviour that would otherwise be unfettered to propagate whatever misinformation and hatred they would want.

[Naseem Mithoowani]

I do believe that. I also think human rights tribunals and commissions are well placed to deal with issues of hatred and discrimination. In Ontario, for example, our complaints were dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, because there's no provision within the Ontario code that addresses publications versus signs. The Ontario commission used its broader mandate to speak out against the article, calling it Islamophobic and pointing out the harm. That type of empowering of commissions to take on that work and to call out hatred is important to the targeted communities, I agree.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much.

Professor Emon, you talked about trying to “turn off the spigot” of funding toward funders of hate. I guess in the world in which we live today, we have international actors and other countries—Russia and China have been cited as examples—perhaps using online misinformation and propaganda to try to divide people in western societies. Are you considering them to be promoting this sort of stuff and funding it, or are you talking about other organizations? If so, who are they?

[Dr. Anver Emon]

That's a great question. So far, most of the research on these organizations promoting hate has come out of a number of research studies being done in the United States. There's a 2011 report called “Fear, Inc.”, and Christopher Bail's work, Terrified, which talks about fringe groups that have become mainstream. It identifies a number of organizations, philanthropically organized in the U.S. as 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, that philanthropically support and provide platforms for promulgators of hate. I would be delighted to provide a list of that to this committee subsequent to this meeting. I could also provide a number of links to trackers of hate in the United States.

What's been happening there, though, is that you do have a more concerted effort to track the funding of different hate speech.... The fact is that, as you and I both know, actual hate speech online is very cheap to put up, but there are costs, and those costs are diffused. The question, then, is who is funding it? We can find it, but we have to put our eyes and our attention to it. That's where I think with organizations like FINTRAC and others, given the whole-of-government approach you already have to track money laundering and anti-terrorism funding, you have the ability already embedded within Finance Canada to begin thinking about these [Inaudible—Editor].

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Just so I understand, is there an international...or at least amongst the western allies, for example, to deal with it in a collaborative fashion right now? Is that happening, or is it just individual countries doing it on their own?

[Dr. Anver Emon]

To my knowledge, I don't know of any organization internationally leading a campaign on online hate. The closest one is FATF coming out of 1989. It originally was focused on the war on drugs and money laundering. It's now focused on anti-terrorism financing due to 9/11.

It does seem to me that Canada, as a founding partner, could certainly take this issue up with them to begin thinking about expanding the ambit of the RBA model, certainly within the government but also with FATF, that as it tries to include, I would argue, social media corporations as part of the non-financial businesses, they also include it in their oversight policies.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you.

Professor Tworek, you gave a list of recommendations or some things for the committee to consider. We talk about all the negatives here, but I think your last point was about how we can maybe pivot toward a more positive conversation and support those constructive dialogues online. Can you give some examples of things that could be done to try to promote more constructive dialogue online? I'm assuming there could be some education dealing with young people, teaching them in school about perhaps respectful ways to engage online. Do you agree with that? Also, what more could be done in this fashion?

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

Yes. Let me give a couple of examples because it obviously has a broad range. Part of it has to do with the funding and architecture that Professor Emon already talked about, so I'll flag that as something that's a continual problem. The structures of funding we have in place right now make it hard to do a lot of the work that we're describing. There are two examples, though. I'll give some foundations, and researchers are working on these issues.

One example is civics, which many of you probably know from the mock voting that they do in schools. I've been speaking with them about how to create new materials to encourage students to engage in dialogue to understand that democracy is about respectful disagreement. We don't all have to agree, but how do we actually engage with each other in a respectful manner without dehumanizing a particular group? That's one example of a foundation that's inculcating and helping students understand how to disagree respectfully in different kinds of ways. Other foundations think about that, too.

A second example is of a researcher at Simon Fraser University, Maite Taboada, who is working through computational linguistics to look through over 600,000 comments on Globe and Mail articles. She's using that to understand what types of comments lead to more constructive dialogue online. That's not to say that any type of speech is then removed necessarily, but that we actually gain a better understanding of what types of speech actually lead to constructive dialogue.

We really need more funding to delve into that kind of research so that we can figure out how to encourage people to engage with each other in meaningful and respectful ways even if they disagree fundamentally on issues.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Very good.

Is that my time? Okay.

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all the witnesses. You've been very helpful to us in the course of our study. I really appreciate it.

Before we move out of the public meeting, we have the subcommittee's fourth report that the committee needs to approve.

It basically says that the subcommittee is going to meet again today after this meeting.

Is everybody okay with this report?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

I'm not hearing any opposition. The subcommittee will meet afterwards.

The meeting is adjourned.