Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It was “other sanctions”.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Of course in some respects this is already happening. There may be situations in which it ought to happen more, but very often when a person of some standing in the community makes a racist statement, all hell breaks loose. People begin denouncing them all over the place. I think

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Of course you can't have viable free speech unless people are likely to be offended. It simply doesn't otherwise exist. But as far as the more, if I may say, metaphysical question you're asking, is there a right to freedom from hatred, that really depends on one's ultimate philos

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm sorry...?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, of course. The anti-hate section of the Criminal Code has created that right to freedom from hate.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No, for all of the reasons I gave earlier. No, because it's too vague and will lead to unwarranted restrictions on legitimate speech.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It would probably also be a very effective deterrent against using the human rights legislation at all, and I think that is just the problem with it. To say that there might be some remedy for costs isn't to say that the costs ought to follow the event, as is so often the case in

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Perhaps what I can do is work my response into my reply to Mr. Hiebert, in the interests of economy of time.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Have you ever. I'll just say one word about Germany. Pre-Hitler Germany had anti-hate legislation very similar to what we have in Canada now, and in the 15-year period before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And in the op

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I couldn't quite hear. You referred to the issue of something, and I couldn't hear what.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I am not one who thinks that a democratic society has any business determining what its citizens shall believe and thereby using legal sanctions to enforce it. Having said that, I'd be very much in favour of using numbers of other sanctions, if people make racially obscene remark

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In addition to everything else, you're attributing clairvoyance to me.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I appreciate where you're going with this. I would suggest to you that it may be overly influenced by a key fallacy, and that is that we either use legal sanctions or we do nothing when there are hate pronouncements. I happen to be of the view that there are many things that citi

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In that regard, while there have been numbers of situations that may not have led to prosecutions, or that didn't lead to convictions but did lead to some pretty unpleasant harassment of legitimate speech as a result of the anti-hate section of the Criminal Code as well, there ar

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm not able to tell you in the abstract because that engages my second principle. In the abstract I can't tell you what the limits of free speech are. I could give you a few examples of limits on free speech. You are aware, of course, of Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous injunction