A new power
Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already.
This is Canada we’re talking about. We know it won’t be people announcing on Twitter that they’re going to shoot up a classroom full of women. We know it will be people saying trans women are not women.
Since it was published on Monday, some lawyers and constitutional experts have raised fears that Bill C-63 could chill free speech.
The bill would allow people to file complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission over what they perceive as hate speech online – including, for example, off-colour jokes by comedians. People found guilty of posting hate speech could have to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation.
But not jokes about women of course. Those are 1. sacred and 2. harmless.
This from bill C-63 defines what constitutes a hate crime:
“…it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
(“Ground of discrimination” meaning basically protected classes, based on race, sex, religion, gender identity, etc. I am not a lawyer, however.)
So the claim that an off-color joke can foment “detestation or vilification” seems on the face of it to be pretty unlikely. What’s more likely is that this legislation will create a slippery slope with respect to judging whether a crude joke is a hate crime. Or whether saying a trans woman is by definition male is a hate crime.
Well yes, you must bear in mind that women are the hegemonic power of our times. Everything is fair game if it is ‘punching up’.
Yes, the question is who gets to define “hate”? What about criticism of an ideology? Any questioning of trans dogma is already called hateful bigotry by its proponents and allies. We’ve already seen the legal expansion of the definition of “conversion therapy” to include watchful waiting and exclude sterilization and mutilation.
It’s insane. This bill is so childish. It’s basically the BAD PEOPLE BILL. They’ve decided there are BAD, HATEFUL PEOPLE and they must legislate to punish them. But they’re leaving it ENTIRELY UP TO LATER to define who these bad people are.
The people supporting this bill aren’t even asking WHO will be doing this crucial defining. It’s a nightmare.
It’s literally impossible to ethically support a bill that proposes a bunch of penalties — right up to the nation’s maximum penalty of life imprisonment — before anyone has bothered to set the fucking definitional terms of what they’re criminalizing. It’s purely an irrational appeal to emotion. That always works out well, right?
Ban it first; define it later.
I can predict all the excuses:
“The definition is self-explanatory, ok? It’s just hate.” I can hear people argue that. “Look, hate is just bad. No one has ever politicized the definition of hate before, right?”
(Ridiculous!)
It’s going to become life and death what counts as hate in Canada. But nobody can fucking bother to decide who makes that call. There are stupid situations, and then there are STUPID SITUATIONS.
And yet, even SKEPTICS of this turd of a bill fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: the original draft was LIGHT YEARS WORSE, and now that the government has retreated and then returned to proffer a “moderate” proposal RELATIVE TO THE ORIGINAL SHITSHOW, the loudest critics have fallen for it and they’re cooing about how reasonable the new version of the bill is (Overton Window Suckers), and they’re now placated enough to not be raising nuclear alarms…
I despair at the state of Canada right now. The Online Harms Bill seems very obviously like a disaster to me.
This from the National Post provides some useful context about Bill C-63:
Chris Selley: The Liberals’ ‘online harms’ legislation will disappoint its supporters most
Bill C-63 is less offensive than some earlier proposals, but only because it tries to do less
Never have I been prouder to be an American (for what that’s worth)…
Canada: government by da feelz. Canadians (and everyone really) could do with a crash course in the relationship between sentimentalism and fascism. Unfortunately our standard cultural template for totalitarianism is 1984 and while Orwell had a keen understanding of bureaucracy and the ways it can be perverted I don’t think he had any real understanding of the way propaganda works. (Of course he understood how it was used – he practised it after all – but he didn’t consider it important. In the novel it’s just AI generated mush for keeping the proles in their place. Neither it nor the proles themselves are considered particularly interesting, something I found puzzling when I first read 1984 and I still find puzzling many decades later. Maybe someone with a better understanding of Orwell’s politics can explain it for me.)
Anyway lengthy asides aside, what I came here to say is that had Orwell paid as much attention to Goebbels as he did Stalin and his cronies he might have replaced the “two minutes hate” with a “two minutes love”. Goebbels knew that hate justified by a sentimentalised love is far more powerful than hate alone. The truth may be “a boot stamping on a human face – forever” but the lie that sustains it is the the image of the boot of the monstrous other stamping on the face of our most vulnerable again and again.
[…] a comment by Francis Boyle on A new […]
Afraid that it could chill free speech?!
Please! Has anyone noticed that Virani is a Muslim? Or that Islam is one of the main forces endangering free speech worldwide? Canada’s Human Rights Commissions — which are like courts, except that guilt is assumed as soon as someone is brought before them — are already a danger to free speech, since it is so easy to characterise reasonable critique or analysis as hate speech. The right not to be offended is already entrenched. All you have to do is cultivate a particular point of view as racist, colonialist, LGBTQ-ist or RSTVXYZ-ist, and you have a lever to move someone from a legitimate critic of something to a crazed, lunatic voice raining down hate on the latest favoured religious or or other minority as threatened. And now they are going to house arrest anyone who is going to what? Speak, write, comment? Speak about the danger of jihad and you are already guilty of hate, even if you spell it out from the Koran and the Hadith. Say that a man is not a woman, and what shall we do with the offender?
Eric is “cultivate” what you meant there? Should it instead be “declare” [& then delete the “as”]? Or “characterize/ise”?
[…] a comment by Artymorty on A new […]
Francis Boyle @ #7
Orwell was a public school boy who spent his last four years of schooling at Eton. They have to be taught empathy there, and even so I doubt whether it sticks with most of them.
Orwell was curious about the ‘lower classes’, at any rate the ones who led colourful lives on the edge of society – see Down and Out in Paris and London – but he did not identify with them.
Yes, Ophelia, that’s what I meant! Comes from typing very fast and not checking up on what I wrote! Thanks.
Oh, and by all means, ‘characterise’!