Denigrating the physical, mental or moral integrity of people on the basis of their race or ethnicity — hate speech — can lead to the utter devastation of a nation. Germany under the Nazis provides the most well-known historical example.
The terrorist attack in Quebec City will, I fear, prove to provide us with a modern example of how it can lead to the slaughter of innocents and at least diminish the soul of our nation as well.
At the very least, unrestrained hate speech by even a few malevolent voices with access to a wide audience can wreak such havoc as terrifying children and leaving them unable to sleep or function properly in school. The United States of America has provided a current example of this for over a year now.
The freedom to assault one’s fellow Canadians would surely jeopardize the very existence of Canadian society, so we do not allow it. We criminalize it. We jail people for it.
The freedom to produce child pornography would surely traumatize Canadian children so we, of course, do not allow that, either. We hunt down its producers and even its consumers with understandable zeal and punish it severely. Police forces across the country have independent, highly trained, well-staffed units devoted to nothing else but detecting this crime and these criminals — across the internet if necessary. The Toronto Police Service Child Exploitation Unit, for example, boasts 16 full-time officers as well as civilian researchers. They proactively search for offences and offenders. They do not wait for offences to be reported.
There is no separate hate speech unit in the Toronto Police Service. In 2015, the most current year with reported records, the TPS made no arrests as a result of proactive police investigation and only a tiny few as a result of complaints involving hate crime graffiti or vandalism.
Incredibly, the RCMP has no separate unit to go after hate purveyors, either. The OPP claims it does as part of an anti-terrorism unit, but does not appear to have made an arrest of a hate propagandist since 2010.
This lack of police devotion of resources and effort seems at odds with the scope of racial- and ethnic-based hate purveyance in Canada, certainly in proportion to the threat it represents. The RCMP, for example — while not actively pursuing the culprits — documents nine different hate-spewing Canadian right-wing extremist groups operating on the internet.
Many believe the views promoted by such groups could never lead to racist or bigoted governments here, but they forget our persistent history of anti-native racism, our past anti-Asian and anti-Semitic immigration policies, and our current politicians, such as Kellie Leitch, who are already experimenting with mimicking the worst of Donald Trump’s hate-mongering.
Moreover, we ignore what any people will stomach if an economy sufficiently sours. In Betxlarge his treatise, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer quotes a German industrial worker in 1935, deprived of his right to unionize by the Nazis, but working and with a full lunch pail: “At least under Hitler there is no more freedom to starve.”
We are in a different time than most of us had hoped. History is proving not to be the inexorable progression to the constitutionally protected democratization of the world some of us imagined it had become. Signs of uglier moments in history repeating themselves abound.
A clear message is needed right now: keep your racism and bigotry to yourself in the same way you have to keep your hands to yourself or you will be hunted down, apprehended, prosecuted and jailed.
It is not a matter of free speech. The right to publicly deny the basic equality of other human beings as human beings is not something that needs to be protected to make Canada a better place.
Proponents of rights and freedoms become justifiably accustomed to thinking of the criminal law as something that too often operates to unconstitutionally deny essential liberties. Sometimes, however, it is only criminal laws, vigorously policed and prosecuted, that can protect these rights and freedoms for everyone.
Others argue education is the only real way to eradicate hate, but the enforcement of hate speech laws are not intended as a cure. They are to keep the disease from spreading until education can eradicate it.
The Germans understand all of this too well. Germany’s hate laws are far broader in scope and are policed with far greater vigour. German police, for example, recently raided 60 addresses across Germany of individuals suspected of posting racist or bigoted hate content on social media.
Here in Canada no one should be more closely monitored by the police for this offence than politicians who would commit it for their own selfish political goals — however subtly, however cleverly they imagine they are doing it. This is Canada. You simply are not entitled to promote yourself as a public leader here if you espouse hate against a race or ethnicity any more. If you are tempted to try, you must know you risk jail.
Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer and managing partner of Rusonik, O’Connor, Robbins, Ross, Gorham & Angelini, LLP.
Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer and managing partner of Rusonik, O’Connor, Robbins, Ross, Gorham & Angelini, LLP.
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