Justice committee  All in one minute?

Justice committee  I'll work backwards. I suppose that, because my principal recommendation was the repeal of section 13 and I had a limited time in which to write this, I did not give significant consideration to cost. Certainly, as part of my alternative recommendations, though, if the commission took carriage of the tribunal case, it would seem to me to make much more sense that there be some support provided for the defence of any respondent who was subject to a complaint.

Justice committee  With regard to the first part of your question, in my report, as part of my alternative set of recommendations, I did in fact propose that the commission have carriage, not just at the tribunal but at a much earlier stage, to take some of the burden off private complainants.

Justice committee  Certainly one of the things I do want to say to this committee is that if section 13 were repealed and we were to rely on the Criminal Code, I think it would be important to look at the Criminal Code and how it operated. There are a variety of issues, and I mentioned several of them in the course of the report.

Justice committee  Let me comment on that.

Justice committee  I don't. If truth be told, I wrote this report focusing on the role of the commission rather than the tribunal, and as I understand it, there is a degree of specialization within the commission itself. One of the difficulties--this is a practical difficulty, I can imagine--is that the number of tribunal adjudications under section 13 is very small.

Justice committee  As you may know, in my report, as an alternative, I recommended a series of amendments to section 13, the process related to it. In my view, however, none of those is adequate to correct what I think is the more basic problem with the overall system, and I hold on to the view that the more appropriate response is repeal of section 13.

Justice committee  In the spring. Last spring they invited me to do their annual lecture on either an issue of religious freedom or on human rights, and I opted to write on that issue.

Justice committee  I can ask the editorial board. I don't see why they would have any objection. You have, I understand, an abridged version of that, which was the lecture I actually presented last week. The coincidence of these two events is entirely that, a coincidence. Interestingly enough, it became rather public, to my surprise, after I was asked for a hard copy at the end of the public lecture, and I discovered that it circulated more broadly than I anticipated.

Justice committee  The view I took in my report is that we really ought to focus only on the most extreme forms of expression, and I sought to tie it to the idea of violence. In fact, I don't support the idea that it's necessary to demonstrate that violence ensues from the speech itself, but to signal the extremity of the speech at issue so that one could understand it is so extreme in character that it could be seen as supporting or justifying violence against a group.

Justice committee  Again, my view is that in practice I'm not certain that in any of the cases in which the tribunal found a breach of section 13 the result would have been different had there been an intent requirement. In fact, if you read those judgments, the language of intent often figures into the description of the speech and the wrong that occurs.

Justice committee  Thank you, and thank you for inviting me. I'm quite certain I won't take ten minutes, but it's always easy to underestimate these things. In a report I wrote for the commission, which was released last fall, I recommended repeal of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, so that the commission and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would no longer deal with hate speech, and in particular with hate speech on the Internet.