Section 13 Human Rights Commission Act

Last night, January 10th, I attended a meeting put on by the Centre for Israel
and Jewish Affairs. It was a debate on section 13 of the
Human Rights Commission. Richhard Warman favoured keeping
the section and Nathalie Desrosiers favoured eliminating it. Both
Agreed that the Human Rights Committee was important for
Purposes of teaching and monitoring human rights

The section deals with communication by telephone and internet.
Both participants were lawyers. They hardly dealt with the social
and political issues except to disagree on the impact of the legislation.
Warman said it stopped hatred and Desrosiers said it stopped free speech.

The legislation was first promulgated in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s.

They mostly discussed the meaning of hate in a legalistic way. It was
interesting but avoided the core of the problem.

1. As I see it, the legislation came out of the 50’s where hate crime was
against Jews and Blacks and other minorities. They had no outside support
They certainly did not use the HRC as a way to limit the free speech of
the majority by charging people under the laws of the HRC.
That all changed in the 2000’s with the strong pro-Muslim activision
of the Islamists. They have used it to silence any criticism of Islam.
In addition as it costs nothing to bring someone before the commission
and thousands of dollars for legal fees to participate in a hearing to defend
an accused, the odds are stacked against a defendant. All that is now
necessary to stop criticism of Islam is to accuse a person of bias
before a HRC. So the use of the HRC has changed, but the law is still in the 50’s.
The intended good result is therefore not being achieved.

The second problem is that the truth of any statement does not seem to matter.
Statements against Jews or Muslims etc are compared to see if one set of words
against one group is compatible with the same set of words against another group.

13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.


As you see, there is no mention here of intent or truth. Now intent would
be extremely hard to prove, but truth is the basis of our society. It cannot
be ignored. The Muslims have a concept of Taqiyya where you can lie to
benefit Islam. But Christians and Jews have no such concept. Telling the
truth in all occasions is obligatory. Now I know that that is not always done,
but that is the basis of how we live. We can’t have a law that just ignores it.

Let’s take some examples of identical statements where the terms Jew and Islamist
are interchanged. It is interesting to note that anti-Muslim statements usually refer
to Islamists or fundamentalist Muslims or Islam whereas statements against Jews
do not distinguish between fundamentalist and moderate ones. They are all bunched
together.

Let us suppose that 2 sets of statements come before the HRC. The wording will
be the same, except for the name of the targeted group.

1. Jews oppress their women. Muslims oppress their women.
When ignoring the truth of either of these statements it appears that
hate crimes have been committed. Yet some will believe
the first statement is true and the latter is false and some will
believe the reverse. Under section 13 both statements would be
hate crimes even though most of us would believe that the first
is false and the second is true or at least more true. Jews are not
permitted to hit their wives, and they don’t have honour killings
or female circumcision. Obviously if both statements were being
subject to prosecution there would be gross unfairness in the result.

2.Jews want to take over North America. Islamists want to take
over North America. Again, the same problem exists as in
the first example. Gross unfairness results depending on the
truth of the facts and the belief system of the interrogator.

Conclusion: Section 13 is not effective in what it is trying to do because
1. It is a 60 year old law and social circumstances have changed
2. The law’s use has changed from defensive to offensive
3. The cost to the defendant is prohibitive.
4. Ignoring the truth of statements leads to unfairness.
5. Truth is often incorrectly considered to be relative and
may be subjective.
6. Because there is no adequate judicial process, the act
would be better handled under the Criminal Law.