Hate speech no longer part of Canada’s Human Rights Act
A contentious section of Canadian human rights law, long criticized by free-speech advocates as overly restrictive and tantamount to censorship, is gone for good.
A private member’s bill repealing Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the so-called “hate speech provision,” passed in the Senate this week. Its passage means the part of Canadian human rights law that permitted rights complaints to the federal Human Rights Commission for “the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet” will soon be history.
“(Section 13) had actually stopped being used as a shield, as I think it was intended, to protect civil liberties, and started being used as a sword against Canadians, and it’s because it was a poorly-written piece of legislation in the first place,” said conservative MP Brian Storseth .
Various human rights lawyers and groups such as the Canadian Bar Association say Section 13 is an important tool in helping to curb hate speech, and that removing it would lead to the proliferation of such speech on the Internet.