Justice Committee on May 30th, 2019

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Mr. Barrett, I am going to answer you.

Number one, I stopped Mr. Cooper's time whenever I gave the floor to anybody else. Mr. Cooper's time was not taken away.

Number two, as you saw, I as the chair did not rule Mr. Cooper out of order whatsoever during the course of that time. Yes, people jumped in, and I see in the House of Commons, in the same way as at committee, people jump in and heckle, and it's unfortunate. It should not happen. I don't agree with it, but there was nothing that took away Mr. Cooper's time.

Again, I'm going to now move to the next questioner, and—

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Mr. Chair, I would respectfully ask for you to urge your Liberal colleagues to censor their interjections or please expect them from me for the duration of the meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you, Mr. Barrett. Again, I—

Ms. Ramsey.

[Tracey Ramsey, NDP, Essex, ON]

I'd like a point of clarification from the clerk, please, on if we are, as members of Parliament of this committee, entitled to weigh in with our opinion when we feel that we need to do so, respectfully through you, Mr. Chair. I would like you to confer with the clerk, please, and report back to the committee on whether or not we, as members of this committee, can intervene when we feel that it's important to do so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

I'm going to briefly suspend.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Order. I'm unsuspending.

The answer is actually no. The only right of a member is to raise a point of order and to draw my attention to something that would be a violation of parliamentary rules. Again, disagreeing, even disagreeing vehemently, with the speaker is not a point of order unless they breach parliamentary rules. That's just the rules.

Now I'm going to go to the next—

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Mr. Chair, this is not a question—

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Do you have a point of order?

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Yes, it's a point of order.

This is not a question of disagreeing. We're all obviously afforded the opportunity to disagree on any issue. This is a question of a member repeatedly, week after week, badgering witnesses. That is completely unacceptable.

Every single Canadian should feel comfortable to appear before our committee. There is no room for actually attempting to bully or badger witnesses. This is the second time we've seen this, and this is unacceptable.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Okay. I understand your point. It's a point of argument and, again, the proper procedure is then to amend the parliamentary rules to rule such type of badgering out of order. It is not my right as chairman, within the scope of how those questions were, to rule Mr. Cooper out of order.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

I take exception to being characterized as badgering anyone. I asked her a legitimate question on a definitional issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Okay, I—

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

I also raised it—

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

I understand, and I think we can again take these issues up in camera, if we want, following the meeting. I don't want to take further time away from the witnesses or the questioners.

Now we're going to Mr. Virani.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Chair, I think what we're trying to do is ascertain and come to some solutions on a very important issue. I think driving at the heart of the witness's substantive testimony is much more important than trying to ascribe whether an individual witness, in this context or any other, shares the opinions of anyone she may or may not have attended a rally with. Let's leave it at that.

I want to say thank you to all three of you for being here.

I want to say a specific welcome to Professor Emon, who is also a constituent and a member of the law faculty at my alma mater. I want to champion you and hold you up for the important work you have done on combatting Islamophobia, which has been a pressing matter, not just for the past two years in Parliament but going on for about two decades now, in the wake of 9/11.

Let's get to the substance of the matter, section 13. We've heard a lot about section 13. I have limited time, probably about five minutes and 20 seconds left right now.

Section 13 does not right now contain a definition of hate. It does not right now contain a threshold requirement. It also has a subsection (3), which exempts the service provider or the telecommunications network from any liability for the human rights violation.

Do you have any comment on those three provisions? Does it need a threshold of what constitutes an organized campaign? Does it need a definition of hatred? Should some sort of liability, in the human rights parlance, attribute to the Internet service provider or the telecommunications provider or the social media company as such?

That's open to all three of you.

Ms. Mithoowani.

[Naseem Mithoowani]

With respect to whether we need a definition of hatred, that has already been analyzed by the Supreme Court of Canada in various decisions. I think taking that definition, it doesn't need to be....

We already know that section 13 is constitutional in the way it's written now. I would hesitate to include a definition or a threshold, because we don't want to muddy the water. We have a good body of case law that clearly indicates there is a very high threshold for section 13. There is a test that tribunals use, which, as I mentioned, requires there to be hallmarks of hatred within a publication.

Those hallmarks of hatred are specifically chosen, because through history we have found, through sociological evidence and also through looking at past examples of dehumanization of peoples, that this type of rhetoric, these hallmarks are used. That's what leads to the dehumanization of individuals. Dehumanization of individuals then leads to discrimination, violence and hatred against them.

I believe we already have those tools, and we don't need to reintroduce them into the legislation. It's a constitutional provision, and the parameters of its use have been outlined by the Supreme Court of Canada.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Okay, I'm going to pause you there.

Professor Emon or Professor Tworek, do you have any views to add on those two issues?

Ms. Tworek.

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

Yes. I will make four points very quickly.

The first, in terms of liability, is the question of what USMCA will allow. There is a question mark over whether the CDA, Communications Decency Act, section 230, is embedded within the USMCA, which could potentially make it hard for Canada to deal with liability. That's still to be determined a bit, but I want to put that out there.

Second, we're now dealing with a different kind of Internet where we have both public and private. In terms of private groups, for example, we would need to say, think about what that message is that's forwarded to thousands of people. That's why I think it's very complicated to think about threshold.

The third point is that threshold is complicated because within the Internet, as people at Facebook and other social media companies will say, there are questions of volume versus intensity. If you reach 20 people, but those 20 people go and do something, do you weigh that against something reaching 100,000 people who don't really do anything with it? That's a very complicated question that I think needs to be left to case law.

Fourth, to re-emphasize what I said in my testimony, only a very, very narrow amount of hate speech is going to be dealt with through law. There are also broader categories of harmful speech. That's why I gave suggestions that were not necessarily specifically legal but rather whole-of-government approaches to try to deal with some of these issues.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Professor Emon, you could weigh in on this but also add into your response aspects of how we leverage those civil society groups in collecting the information, because some people have expressed concerns about bias. If people are more comfortable going to the black community with white supremacy complaints, granted, will you get an artificially inflated number? How would you respond to that concern?

[Dr. Anver Emon]

Let me go back and think about a whole-of-government approach. On the one hand, I would simply endorse many of the comments that Ms. Mithoowani has already remarked upon regarding section 13.

I wanted to clarify my invocation of the financial action task force implicitly linking online hate to the promotion of terrorism. While that will strike some folks as a stretch, I do want to bring a critical race lens to this analysis. Thus far, as we've been talking about online hate, we're really mostly talking about white supremacists and white extremist hate promulgation against minorities, racialized or religious ones.

In bringing a racial lens to this analysis, we have to ask ourselves whether or not we can also begin thinking about these online hate promoters as also promoting terrorism. That's why I bring up the special recommendations of the FATF. The FATF has a special category called designated non-financial businesses and professions in which there is no reference to social media organizations. I would simply suggest taking a look at that.

In terms of focusing on civil society grids, it's not my experience thus far in working with a number of Muslim civil society groups that there has been an inflation of attacks. What we do have, rather, is a better appreciation of how those attacks are understood and felt within the context, within a very thick, enriched context.

One of the limitations of law is that it has a tendency to flatten our experiences. Part of the challenge here and part of what we're trying to create at the institute in combatting Islamophobia is a thick narrative around what these attacks mean, how they're understood and how they resonate as hate.

I don't think that you get an inflation by reference to civil society groups in these communities. I think what you have is a racialized and particularized framework that gives meaningfulness to these attacks of hate and therefore allows us to bring them within the legibility of any legal framework.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Ramsey.

[Tracey Ramsey, NDP, Essex, ON]

Thank you all so much for being here today and for all the work that you're doing to reduce and combat hate speech in your respective roles. I really do sincerely thank you, because without a kind of pan-Canadian, over-arching federal framework.... The work that you're doing is so important because it's informing us, but it's also helping Canadians to understand how to combat it and to identify it and what is available in the law.

We really are struggling in this committee because this is such an incredibly large topic, and there are so many important areas. It's difficult to know what to start with and where to begin the work that's necessary.

I thank you, Ms. Tworek, for some of the examples you shared with us in terms of what's happening in Germany, because the other piece of this is social media giants. We had Facebook here. We were attempting to bring Mark Zuckerberg here this week, and we couldn't even get him to come before a parliamentary committee, so how do we engage with these social media giants who don't view themselves as belonging to one country? They're global. They're the size of countries. It's a very significant challenge to try to talk about any forms of regulation when, quite frankly, they're even resisting to appear as witnesses.

I want to ask you about how you think the social media giants such as Facebook could improve the way they handle hate speech on their platforms, given the volume you've mentioned that exists. I'd like you to speak to that. Then, I would ask our other two panellists, how are you informing or helping the conversation in your communities around reporting? How do you make some transparency around that?

I'll start with Professor Tworek.

[Dr. Heidi Tworek]

Thank you so much.

I actually testified before the international grand committee and was there to hear those hearings, so I'm very much in tune with that. One part of the puzzle is that international coordination, of which Canada is a key part as a co-chair. That committee has done a really good job of bringing together MPs from 14 different countries that represent over 400 million people, and still Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did not appear.

Let me say four brief things. The first is that in the German case it was a big fine that really enabled the social media companies to come to the table and start enforcing German law. Beforehand they said that they couldn't comply, but when big fines were on the table, all of a sudden they actually could.

The second part of this is that to handle the volume, they're simply going to need more content moderators. While some things are picked up by artificial intelligence, the reality is that most of this is done by humans. Just as a sidebar to flag, given the pretty awful labour conditions under which these people operate, which we in Canada should be concerned about from a human rights perspective—this is very psychologically burdensome work, and we have some evidence from journalists and others about how difficult this work is and how much PTSD the content moderators experience—the companies are going to have to pony up a lot more money to work with that.

The third element of this is that we need to find out where the content moderators who work on Canada are located. We don't even know that kind of basic information. My guess is that none of them are in Canada. They don't have any contextual knowledge about Canada, for example, about what is language that denigrates indigenous people or other marginalized groups in the Canadian context. That's another pretty simple thing on which we could ask for clarification. We can try to provide more context.

The fourth part of this then is the question of transparency and figuring out what we as Canadians need to know and whether that is under audit. I suggest that there are also very, very basic questions about how much of the hate speech we see in transparency reports and through social media companies is happening in Canada. The part of the German law that everybody, including Article 19 and other free speech organizations, praises is the transparency report that the NetzDG law mandates. That's something that everybody agrees on, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. I think that's certainly something Canada can take away, and I can provide very specific suggestions on what we could look for from those transparency reports. It would be much more meaningful than is what is in the NetzDG ones or in the broad global ones the companies release.

[Tracey Ramsey, NDP, Essex, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Mithoowani.