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.
Caveat: IANAL so there are sure to be things wrong/missed here.
So recognizances or peace bonds are issued frequently - even before this act.
"The purpose of a recognizance or peace bond is to prevent serious harm by imposing conditions upon a person, which may restrict their movement or behaviour to reduce the risk of them committing a future offence"
I know of instances where someone has verbally threatened harm on another person - and been subject to this. Generally, the impact is "stay away from the person or face consequences" but can have many additional conditions. Often a recognizance/peace bond is offered as an alterative to actual court proceedings - like a plea deal, but without the burden of a criminal record.
Appreciate the info. That it's not new doesn't change my opinion about it all that much. I'm sure that in practice it probably resembles a restraining order, and requires a certain level of likelihood that said harm will come to pass.
But in the end it's the state that has the latitude to broadly restrict the movement and behavior of an individual who hasn't committed an offense.
That is too much power to entrust in the state, and poorly justified.
In so far as the state is a provincial/federal judge making the decision based on the presented evidence and setting the conditions as appropriate.
It looks like it will probably be used in the "you made these threats and if you follow through, you'll be tried for that _and_ suffer some penalty for breaking the conditions of this order" kind of way...
That said, you won't get much traction in Canada with an argument that free speech includes things like "we should rid ourselves of all [members of some group]".
"Even though these freedoms are very important, governments can sometimes limit them. For example, freedom of expression may be limited by laws against hate propaganda or child pornography because they prevent harm to individuals and groups."
> 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.
We demand therefore:
11. The abolition of incomes unearned by work.
The breaking of the slavery of interest
12. In view of the enormous sacrifices of life and property demanded of a nation by any war, personal enrichment from war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore the ruthless confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, the immediate communalizing of big department stores, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that the utmost consideration shall be shown to all small traders in the placing of State and municipal orders.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
18. We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d have assumed that was a Soviet platform. Weird! Thanks for sharing those quotes. You can see how those positions might have been appealing to Germans after wwi, and how the maniac could have used them to manipulate his way to power
Why? Given how much US socialist groups condemn each other or infight, it doesn't seem Nazis would be unique to purity check competing parties or treat them like traitors.
Goldberg is a polemicist, not a historian, and frankly not all that competent even in his acknowledged line. Do better - by not ignoring the Night of the Long Knives, for a start.
That's an appeal to authority and with that not relevant. What about the night of the long knives means the NDSAP was not ideologically aligned with socialism. Parties which make socialism part of their platform run the gamut from social democrat parties in western Europe to the Khmer Rouge and anything in-between. There's plenty of blood on 'socialist' hands. That does not mean there is blood on all socialist hands. The same goes for nationalism.
Most blasphemy laws were (ostensibly) against public speech. The way these laws are phrased if you say something hurtful in a private chat online you could be charged.
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."
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.
Your point about EQ's role in speech and its unequal distribution is spot on. It underscores a significant issue: those who can't master the nuances of "acceptable" speech are getting marginalized, especially in fields like academia, journalism, politics, and now social media with this type of legislation.
Plain, straightforward speech has immense value. It promotes clarity and honesty, ensuring ideas are communicated without the need for high-EQ code. Restricting political discourse to high-EQ speech to avoid offense stifles genuine expression and hampers robust debate. This not only limits free speech but also degrades the quality of political dialogue, making it more about adhering to social norms than addressing real issues.
We need to value pluralism and strive for inclusivity in our discourse, ensuring that all voices, regardless of EQ, can be heard and respected.
Being a free speech absolutist ensures that all ideas, even those clumsily expressed, get a fair hearing. It fosters an environment where truth and innovation can thrive, unhampered by artificial constraints on how thoughts must be articulated.
Speech shouldn't require constant PR massaging to be accepted / "legal"
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!
These are not necessarily equivalents though. Without knowing the author or the tweets in question, there are a lot of aspects about the campus protests that go beyond free speech into actual disruption and criminal activity and public safety.
Which is a much different topic than charging people with crimes outside of the justice system.
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?"
I think it's very very likely that Trudeau steps down as PM with little fuss when his party loses the next election (as polls very strongly suggest will be the case) and power is transferred to the opposition without drama. The previous election he lost his majority and there was no 'totalitarian' attempt to keep it.
People will then also claim the next government is 'quasi-totalitarian' and eventually they lose an election as well and step aside.
I'm not sure what you want the 'passive' Canadians to do given they already going to vote out a 'bad faith as gets' government - doesn't that seem like the proper course of action?
> generally make life impossible without due process
What do you mean by that?
> the government will freeze their bank accounts
Just putting this into context:
> Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a committee of MPs that up to 210 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the financial measures contained in the Emergencies Act.
> She also said the fact that more than 200 bank accounts were frozen did not necessarily mean that more than 200 people lost access to their funds. Jacques said that individuals may have held more than one account affected by the measures.
> 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.
There's a big difference between advocating a crime, and perpetrating a crime. Do you really want to live in a world where something you say on your favorite social platform can be used as reasonable grounds for your imprisonment?
I don't know how to feel about that. Social media is like a gigantic public square. If you do that in the real world and advocate for genocide, talk about hanging the PM, talk about killing migrants or gender diverse people etc, what would happen in that case?
I'm actually not sure at all about the law but I would expect to get a visit from law enforcement eventually.
We have a good standard in the US: is a statement a “true threat?” Violent rhetoric that doesn’t rise to the level of a true threat is a part of political expression. For example, the folks bringing guillotines to Jeff’s Bezos’s house are making a political point. So are Islamic imams advocating violence (in the abstract) against infidels.
> Violent rhetoric that doesn’t rise to the level of a true threat is a part of political expression.
In the risk-benefit analysis, let's be sure we consider another factor: Unknown, unpredictable, armed, nut-job third parties who are triggered to act — sometimes in concert — when dog-whistle rhetoric goes viral.
Depending on the circumstances, a prudent analysis might limit 1A protection for certain types of rhetoric because of its unacceptable risk to others. That might be the case even for facially non-violent speech, e.g., so-called dog whistles.
It's been said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact [0] — neither is it a license to kill.
> Before taking the reins of the country, Erdoğan famously said that democracy was a tram you get off when you reach your destination. He did, indeed, get off the democracy tram once he had accumulated enough power.
Canada literally have generational politicians in ballot. Same families for 100+ years. I don't see how voting even remotely important here. There is no tangible differences between parties either.
Our electoral system sucks, that's our main problem in my opinion. But there is a difference between, say, the Cons on one side and the NDP/Greens on the other.
I'm thinking a lot about this in the context of what's going on in the US where we're seeing a human rights regression of sorts in many aspects (reproductive rights, free speech, role of law enforcement, etc) unlike in most (all?) other developed nations where the trend is the other way.
Human rights are only considered human rights because lots of people believe in them. It's not a universal rule of nature, societies are free to depart from them if they choose to do so. Who are we to force our worldview on a group of people that as a majority has chosen to live life in a different way?!
Personally I'm just lucky to be able to choose where I live so that my world views somewhat matches the values of the people around me. Not everyone is that lucky though. Especially marginalized people.
I don't think any one disagrees with this. I do think the poster meant your pithy quote about violence against the government is not any where appropriate in Canada at the moment, or at any point in the past or any foreseeable point in the future.
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.
> Government exists to keep us all safe from external and internal threats.
They’re failing to muster a coast guard, a military, a functioning counter-intelligence service, a court system that isn’t over capacity, jails that aren’t overcapacity, …
How about they begin by dealing with real criminals and real crimes before we ever pretend they can be a morality police keeping people’s feelings from being hurt.
> If you've scared your fellow citizens into believing you're going to commit an imminent hate crime, then you're probably guilty.
If it's just about how much fear you instill in people - no matter how reasonable or unreasonable, than the same argument could be used about throwing immigrants, LGBT, intellectuals, etc in jail.
They don't need to reasonably define a hate crime. Being scared of a hate crime is enough. And if they're scared, they've been given reason to be scared. And the person giving them a reason to be scared should be watched. If you don't want to be locked up for a hate crime, then don't scare people into thinking you're going to hurt them.
In general i see one very easy solution to this problem. People who want everyone else locked up for thoughtcrime can be locked up for threatening the human rights of their peers, and everyone else can move on with their lives. Your own standards getting applied to you is always fair.
> And if they're scared, they've been given reason to be scared.
We've just had elections in the EU and you won't believe how many people are scared of migrants. Now everyone can just say they're afraid of being victims of a hate crime committed by said migrants. What an amazing idea. /s
