Mr. Speaker, the bill before us today unfortunately threatens the preservation of our flourishing pluralistic society. I say this because we can only truly have freedom when every individual of every community is able to participate in the public sphere without fear of confronting violence. This is the purpose of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. It does not impose unreasonable limits on the freedom of expression. Rather, it is a balance of each individual's freedom to live in society without fear.
Hate speech insidiously reinforces prejudices. It is a practice of inequality that is inconsistent with freedom. That is, it inhibits individuals from reaching their own full potential, and therefore, I argue, inhibits our society from reaching its potential.
Disseminating messages of hate via telecommunications technology is dehumanizing. It reinforces prejudice, encourages hate, and may even prompt or be perceived to justify physical violence. Not just that, but messages of hate are themselves a sort of violence, a communication of widespread violence that causes harm to us all by dividing us through the act of dehumanizing others.
This is why it is necessary that we maintain section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The commission deals with hatred, not with criminal acts of violence, and gives society's most vulnerable minority groups access to a mechanism of defending their rights as equal human beings.
Religious minorities, women, queer folk, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, recent immigrants, they are the ones who are most often targeted by the dissemination of hate, and are often the people who suffer from multiple forms of systemic inequality, including poverty and exclusion from the legal justice system. They may lack the financial and legal supports to persist in a legal case, and in the meantime, without section 13, their victimization would be allowed to continue unhindered.
This is why we have the Canadian Human Rights Act. It provides precipitous protection from dangerous violations of human rights abuses. It would not exist if those who needed protection were already being effectively protected.
Section 13 protects against images, words and opinions of hate, which is to say racism, targeted discrimination, homophobia, and grotesque and misleading imagery or information. This is a kind of violence and we need to be able to say as a society that we cannot accept this.
There needs to be a balance struck between the principles of free speech and protection from hate speech and propaganda. This is why we have a tribunal to inquire into reported incidents.
The law is specifically structured to account for the moral grey zone that can occur in cases of hate. When weighing the rights and freedoms of one person or group against another's, there must be room for variance and for each case to be adjudicated in its specificity. The Canadian Human Rights Act, including section 13, is a vehicle for exactly that process. If we allowed it to be disabled by Bill C-304, in cases where violence is being perpetrated victims would be unable to protect themselves using the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
Freedom of speech is not an unlimited freedom. The pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization requires the balancing and limiting of other freedoms, in this case, that of speech.
This debate is about the balance of freedoms and duties that we have as citizens. Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act represents a duty that we have to other citizens to not limit their freedoms. That is, it allows for people to not be discriminated against and therefore to realize their own purposes.
This is a form of liberty, and it is precisely the act of balancing this liberty with the freedom of speech that gives us the opportunity to live as a truly free and pluralistic society.
Yes, the Constitution protects freedom of expression, but it also protects the safety and liberty for all. Hate groups terrorize, threaten, stifle public participation and target the most vulnerable members of society.
I urge members of the House to consider the needs and rights of their constituents who are targeted by hate crimes before voting in favour of this legislation.