Canada's extremist attack on free speech

Does Canada not already have a law against violent threats?

> If someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”

> A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.

Jury-free, crime-free sentencing! Very cool!

The main content seems to be this:

> if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”

> A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.

Ira Glasser (led the ACLU during some very interesting times in the US):

"Democracy means a system of government where people vote for representatives and majority prevails. But liberty means that the majority doesn’t prevail about everything. And the Bill of Rights defines – it’s basically a list of limits on majoritarian rule. If you look at the way the Bill of Rights is written, it’s all phrased negatively."

[1] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/so-speak-podcast-tran...

An angle of this that I don't think gets brought up - conscientiousness is a measurable personality trait (EQ) - and it isn't equally distributed across the population!

You can have two people with almost identical positions on controversial issues on something like Israel-Palestine. But your ability to phrase and articulate your position can drastically change which side of the hate speech line you are on.

These sorts of policies are not actually in pursuit of reducing actual received harm - what's actually going on is a redrawing of our class system. People with high EQ are excluding low EQ people who can't "behave" in twenty-first century society. Even if you have never personally harmed someone - you won't get access to the same kinds of institutions - academia, journalism, politics, etc.

Reading these laws makes me think less of 1984 and more of, like, the 21st century equivalent of jaywalking or zoning rules or even redlining. We have new rules about how to fit in and behave - but the rules are not going to be equally or fairly distributed.

Keep in mind, you haven't heard the word "pluralism" as a democratic ideal in the last 20 years.

The comparison to George Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is apt, but zooming out, I think Canada is paving the way to "Brazil", the Gilliam movie which was originally called 1984½. The dystopian future is totalitarian, but ruled through inept bureaucracy. The Ministry of Information controls everything and is responsible for nothing. This shift in control structures can be seen in the Hate Speech Bill, Bill S-210, the CRTC Streaming bill, and the massive increase in government jobs and roles.

> It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories.

We have had pretty well thought out prohibitions on discrimination in employment, etc., for a long time. So why do we need to go further and stamp out thought and speech crimes? Why do we need to throw way speech protections and due process because someone might say mean things about someone else? It seems like religious zealots trying to stamp out what they perceive as a kind of immorality.

>> Just countries do not punish mere speech with imprisonment, let alone life imprisonment.

They do. They all do. People are constantly put in prison for illegal speech. Spies have been executed for speaking classified information. People are regularly arrested and imprisoned for communicating illegal material online. Others are jailed for speaking to certain other people, especially where planning future illegal activity is itself a separate crime. And a significant number of people, even in the US, are subject to no-contact or anti-harassment orders forbidding them from certain speech. At least one former US president has been (is?) subject to a court orders how/what they can say. Freedom of speech is a right, but nobody should believe it not subject to innumerable limitations.

The person who wrote this article has been on a Twitter tear for months about how the police (and not the campus police) need to shut down campus Palestinian protests. The chutzpah to turn around and bash Canada's government for outlawing hate speech. He's been advocating the police shut down campus Palestinian demonstrations for months!

Canadians are so incredibly passive. They let the government do whatever it wants. I think it's because they trust their government so much that when you get the Trudeau administration, which is about as bad faith as a government gets, they can put a quasi-totalitarian government in place with little resistance. Every single thing they do can be defended with, "You trust the government to do the right thing, and act in your best interest, don't you? You're not one of those paranoid conspiracy theorists?"

> The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories. And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”

I don't want to defend the bill as it currently stands, it's probably horribly drafted, but I do want to question why we're saying that imprisoning people who advocate for genocide is a bad thing. In my mind, the purpose of all the liberal human rights stuff is specifically to keep governments from doing genocide. So protecting the people who are advocating for genocide is an own goal.

To be clear, there's a lot of potential for a cure worse than the disease. But I don't think "censor the censors" is categorically invalid in a liberal society. The question is one of proportionality, not scope. Human rights as an institution and a concept are under attack worldwide. Illiberal right-wingers are very loudly calling for censorship because the Overton window has stopped working in liberalism's favor. It is important that we defend our rights in a way that does not damage them.

> But amendments would not go far enough. No one who favors allowing the state to imprison people for mere speech, or severely constraining a person’s liberty in anticipation of alleged hate speech they have yet to utter, is fit for leadership in a liberal democracy. Every elected official who has supported the unamended bill should be ousted at the next opportunity by voters who grasp the fraught, authoritarian folly of this extremist proposal.

Ironically, the person who penned this article seems to understand what I'm getting at.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

If you've scared your fellow citizens into believing you're going to commit an imminent hate crime, then you're probably guilty. Government exists to keep us all safe from external and internal threats. Government protecting us from people who are imminently going to commit hate crimes is government working as intended.