Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Chan, for being here today.
I also want to thank you for not trivializing—as some of our witnesses have done in the past—the impacts of hate speech on people's daily lives or ascribing concerns about limitations of free speech to people being too sensitive.
I have spoken to people in my own community who say that they are afraid to go to their synagogue or afraid to go to their mosque because of the violent events around the world and because those are being promoted locally.
I want to ask you a question about recognition of hate speech. I want to base that on something that happened in my own community recently. An event was organized on Facebook and also promoted in other media. I'm not signalling out Facebook here. That said, the speech was on—I'll put a blank in place of the name of a group at the beginning—“blank” harm to women and children.
People had trouble distinguishing that it was hate speech because of what was in that blank. If they had said, “Gay harm to women and children”, you would recognize that. If they had said “black”, “Jewish”, “Asian” or any kind of thing you put in there...but because it said “transgender”, the mayor of the local municipality said they could use public facilities because that wasn't hate speech. Your organization didn't catch that as a form of hate speech. It took a month.
I will give Facebook credit. The person who organized this is now no longer allowed to organize events on Facebook.