Hate Crime Laws Only a Tyrant could Love
A Philippic Against Canada's Online Harms Act, Bill C-63
On February 26th, 2024, the Trudeau government in Canada introduced what it calls the Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, which it claims is remedial legislation to ensure online platforms assume responsibility for harmful content and, wait for it, to create a “safer” online space.
Almost the entire focus of the government messaging is on protecting children and the mainstream media in Canada has dutifully parroted the government backgrounder, which is in nice easy to read text. One could ask, why wait so long; you’ve been in power since 2016? But to ask the question would be to assume there is any truth to the claim. There isn’t.
For my video critique of Bill C-63, click here
Almost nothing of significance in the Bill has anything to do with children. There are existing laws a plenty to deal with online predation of minors and the pet case trotted out to justify the legislation, that of the unfortunate Rehtaeh Parsons, is grotesquely opportunistic: she died of suicide due to bullying in 2011 — 13 years ago. Not only that, but the then existing laws resulted in child pornography charges against two boys. The charges resulted in convictions.
One needs to scroll about 3/4 of the way down the actual legislation to see the real purpose of the Bill, which is to amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Code to introduce truly Orwelian state powers with the actual purpose of targeting political opponents, silencing political debate, and thus preventing the spread of unacceptable views and, thus, maintain the overall progressive agenda, the government hopes indefinitely.
The context of Bill C-63 is far above the capacity of our the current generation of feminized, childlike journalists or even of our so-called political commentators, mere grifters, cowards and hacks, to comprehend. These charlatans and incompetents or mere agents of the state know literally nothing of value about their own country’s political origin story, and even less about how to take a proposed law and assess its suitability as against the traditions and customs of a nation or people. Basic truths must therefore be restated and repeated. Western style Democracy as in Athens, or a Republic as in Rome or, for at least part of its history, the United States, requires the freedom to accuse and condemn, even to insult, blame and censure, to be rude even abusive, as the fuel of political debate. Even in the Wurttemburg of North America, Canada, responsible government meant government that could be attacked with rigor and yes, even with strong language. All that is forgotten under our post-structuralist regime, where the subjective trumps the objective, the reader trumps the author, man trumps God, and where to hurt or offend is a crime worse than murder.
One would have to look very hard indeed to find a case where a hate crime conviction, if it had any merit, and the prosecution was not entirely politically motivated, could not have been addressed by traditional offences under the criminal law, such as threats to life, health or property, assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder or worse, and in the civil law through causes of action such as libel, defamation, interference with contractual relations and the like.
The Hate Crime is really the offence only a tyrant could love and the Online Harms Act, and its equivalents throughout the West, are the Hate Crime regimes tyrants love best. The Online Harms Act is at its core the antithesis of law. It is anti-law, a pure expression of power.
If passed by Parliament, namely, by the House of Commons, the Senate and given Royal Ascent by Charles III’s representative in Canada, the Governor General, this piece of tyranny would allow one person, and not necessarily a citizen, to report others to a provincial court judge out of fear that they may commit a hate crime or hate propaganda in the future. Who might this complainant be? Perhaps a colleague at work, who heard you say something they didn’t like. Perhaps a neighbour who didn’t like the party you supported last election. Or perhaps, and most likely, someone monitoring your social media. The complaints can of course be anonymous — which anonymity the legislation is at pains to protect. Investigators could then enter your workplace without a warrant and demand access to records.
The amendments to the Criminal Code include:
Fear of hate propaganda offence or hate crime
810.012 (1) A person may, with the Attorney General’s consent, lay an information before a provincial court judge if the person fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit
(a) an offence under section 318 or any of subsections 319(1) to (2.1); or
(b) an offence under section 320.1001.
Section 319(1) referenced above is the offence of “public incitement of hatred” and 319(2) is the offence of “willful promotion of hatred”. Section 320 is the offence of spreading “hate propaganda” and contains provisions that allows a judge to order its seizure.
The first thing you may have noticed here is these complaints have to be state approved. The AG must “consent”. So, right off the top, “hate” that the state likes, approves and endorses, such as anti-white, anti-Christian and anti-straight hate, will not be affected.
But there is more, much more. The Bill states:
(2) The provincial court judge who receives the information may cause the parties to appear before a provincial court judge.
(3) If the provincial court judge before whom the parties appear is satisfied by the evidence adduced that the informant has reasonable grounds for the fear, the judge may order that the defendant enter into a recognizance to keep the peace and be of good behaviour for a period of not more than 12 months.
The preliminary question raised from these provisions is how exactly does one provide or prove or show “reasonable grounds” that a person will — in the future —commit a hate crime or hate propaganda? The drafter has created Canada’s first “pre-crime” offence, perhaps slightly ahead of its time, given that the technology to prove a pre-crime still lags behind, such as an improved truth serum, brain scanning thought readers or a time travel device to show that the alleged pre-crime is in your head or will indeed come to pass.
Under the current laws of evidence, what could one put before the court to show what this other person might do in the future? How do you prove what is in this other person’s mind? How much more than the accusation itself will be required? I suspect very little else. In other words, the alleged fear of the complainant and the reasonable grounds are basically the same thing.
This is a good point for an aside. It is regrettable that positive legal theory does not allow us to put the brakes on Bill C-63 here and now. How? By setting it before our non-existent learned jurists, who should, if they existed, conclude that its provisions run so far afoul of the nation’s legal principles, traditions and customs, as well as raising evidentiary issues so perplexing and irresolvable, the purported bill fails the preliminary test of what a “law” must be to be a “law” at all. This one our learned jurists would say is “dead on arrival”. We don’t live in such a system, and I wish we did. Our judges are trained by the “science schools of word quibbling” (called law schools) to accept the law as legitimate based on its source alone, and will then apply all their word quibbling skills to put it into effect, and where it lacks rationality, they will provide what guidance they can in the form of a judicial instruction manual to make it work, which will then allow all its evil to be let loose on the population, with only a faint hope it will be found somehow to violate a “fundamental right” in our so called “Charter” in some manner that can’t be justified by the overarching “Common Good” exception, which we call section 1.
The bill goes on":
(5) The provincial court judge may commit the defendant to prison for a term of not more than 12 months if the defendant fails or refuses to enter into the recognizance.
So now you are serving jail time for something you haven’t done.
It gets worse.
What are some of the conditions that can be imposed on this person who hasn’t done anything yet?
(6) The provincial court judge may add any reasonable conditions to the recognizance that the judge considers desirable to secure the good conduct of the defendant, including conditions that require the defendant to
(a) wear an electronic monitoring device, if the Attorney General makes that request;
(b) return to and remain at their place of residence at specified times;
(c) abstain from the consumption of drugs, except in accordance with a medical prescription, of alcohol or of any other intoxicating substance;
(d) provide, for the purpose of analysis, a sample of a bodily substance … for alcohol and drug testing….
…
(f) abstain from communicating, directly or indirectly, with any person… the judge considers necessary.
A person may also be prohibited from possessing firearms and have their firearms confiscated.
The Bill would increase the penalty for hate crimes from five years to life in prison. Words alone could lead to life in prison.
Hate Crime — Offence motivated by hatred
320.1001 (1) Everyone who commits an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament, if the commission of the offence is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.
As I mentioned, the bill would also amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to specify that posting “hate speech” online is discriminatory
Communication of hate speech
13 (1) 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
What exactly does phrase like “foment detestation” mean? The definition of hate speech has been described as “amorphous and confusing” and thus potentially quite pliable.
And, of course, specialized tribunals are created removing your ancient right to defend yourself of charges and accusation in a public courtroom. Instead, the new Digital Safety Commission would police content. The commissioners on the commission would all be appointed by the government and can be counted on to share its views.
A whole new class of hate speech can now be heard and penalized by the Human Rights Tribunal using a lower standard than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The tribunal can impose fines up to $50,000 and your politically motivated and anonymous complainant can receive a further $20,000.
The previous hate speech provision in the Human Rights Tribunal, section 13, were repealed in 2014, due to public outrage in a case involving Macleans magazine. Those events of a mere 10 years ago have gone down the memory hole of a society with a rapidly decreasing attention span.
This is another example of the fact the progressive left never gives up. It may back down for awhile, but like a bad penny, it always turns up. And the laws the left excretes, no matter how novel, how repugnant to the traditions of a country or its people, no matter how damaging to civic life, no matter how dysfunctional society becomes, are soon entrenched both legally, but also morally, through education and state and MSM propaganda. We always soon hear that the latest and even more radical reform to achieve utopia reflects fundamental rights and especially Constitutional Values, reflecting the only correct way to see the world. These noxious laws become sacrosanct in some progressive religious sense and can never be changed. The population is told it must adapt or face consequences.
Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce describes what has occurred as a merger of the failed Marxist experiment with materialist western liberalism. The result are regimes in the West that believe in the absolute sovereignty of man, which has driven objective human goods out of public discussion. Regimes like the Canadian one are characterized by relativism, destruction of human connections, a startling emphasis on sexual matters and a society that delivers exactly the opposite of what it promises. Awkward questions have to be suppressed, people have to “shut up”, religion “neutered”, a “comprehensive system of lying” established, and scapegoats picked out and persecuted. The Online Harms Act is a finely crafted tool for this purpose in the Canadian context.1
Bill C-63 will add new layers of legal sludge clogging the arteries of civic life in a country like Canada. It will further discourage serious political debate, which on the eve of an election in Canada is without question the real purpose of the Bill.
The Unnecessary Crime
But let me step back for a moment to the very concept of a hate crime, which is now already well intrenched in western societies. There is a fundamental problem with such laws, which make them inherently deleterious to a state founded on Western traditions, to the extent such states still survive. The major flaw with hate crime laws is that they assume, or are designed for you to assume, that the class of tyrants and victims is capable of being defined, fixed and predetermined by a set historical narrative. Was then, is now and forever will be.
Ok, that ‘s nice, but what if yesterday’s tyrants aren’t the same as today’s tyrants? What if yesterday and today’s tyrants aren’t the same as tomorrow’s tyrants? A victim group can produce a tyrant in its midst just as easily as an oppressor group.
Philippic Against Bill C-63
To appreciate how significant any limitations are on who you can call out as a tyrant, consider the classic oration against tyranny. We call this a philippic or a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, delivered to condemn a particular political actor. The term is most famously associated with two noted orators of the ancient world: Demosthenes of ancient Athens and Cicero of ancient Rome. Demosthenes delivered his attacks against the tyranny of Philip II of Macedon. Cicero’s attacks were directed at rising threat of tyranny of Mark Anthony. It is hard to have an angry tirade without a little hate. A “tirade” is defined as abusive, or insulting language used to express blame or censure; or, a form of rude expression or discourse intended to offend or hurt; vituperation, or deeply seated ill will, vitriol. The Latin adjective invectivus means 'scolding.
Not only would the Online Harms Act further suppress public debate with its terrifying web of amorphous ill denied offenses, sanctions, penalties, and secret tribunals, not to mention secondary effects to one being drawn into this rats nest, such as loss of job, career and status, but it is also the perfect tool for tyrants to suppress their critics.
In the West today, it may be that delicate issues need public debate to figure out why exactly the West is in decline, our cities dying, addiction and suicide and crime on the rise, standard of living in free fall, marriage and childbirth rates in collapse, if anyone really wanted to know. And who knows, with open inquiry, perhaps a solution to benefit our children could be found. Hate Crime legislation makes that very unlikely if not impossible. In Canada for example, the Overton window of political debate is paper thin, fear and conformity being omnipresent.
But what about the freedom to attack a tyrant in public? The opposition leader in Canada actually raised this concern, if not with much passion. Now, I would never say Trudeau could be compared to Mark Anthony as a man. That would be ridiculous. Why would you want to? And one cannot compare a speech by Mark Anthony, the real one or as imagined by Shakespeare, with Trudeau’s oratorical style, and his unique gift for spoken imbecility.
But politically, in listening to some of Cicero’s attacks on Anthony, from over 2000 years ago, you will hear that tyrants like the sponsors of Bill C-63 have common qualities of arrogance and cronyism, a surprising transparency in their real political motives, are quick to disregard political institutions and traditions, and even the law, and share a certain stupidity that is often exposed. They are also persistent and vengeful. Cicero considered Anthony a threat to Roman traditions, to its laws, to the survival of the republic itself, and regretted that Anthony had not been eliminated by the conspirators when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, the anniversary of which momentous event just passed. Anthony’s response to Cicero’s speeches against him, called the Philippics, was to have Cicero killed and his hands nailed to the doors of the senate as a warning against opponents to his regime.
We should consider C-63 a warning as well.
From the Second Philippic
[1.] To what fate of mine, conscript fathers [the traditional way Senators were addressed], shall I attribute it that no man has these twenty years been the enemy of the State without at the same time declaring war on me also? There is in truth no need that any man should be named by me: you yourselves have memories. They have paid me greater penalties than I wished: I wonder that you, Antonius, while you copy their deeds, do not shudder at their end. …
[5.] But since, conscript fathers, I must both say something on my own behalf and much against Marcus Antonius, while to the one I ask your consideration, as I speak for myself; as to the other, I will myself take care that while I am speaking against him you shall hear me with attention. …
[6.] …But to whom does he refer such things? Heavens! why, to those whose very birthdays must be announced to us. "To-day Antonius does not come down." Why? He is giving a birthday-feast in his gardens, To whom? I will give no name; …What outrageous indecency the fellow shows! what impudence, wickedness, lust intolerable! When you have a principal senator, an eminent citizen so closely allied to you, would you refer no matter of State to him, but refer it to those that possess no property of their own, and drain yours dry? …
[7.] … For when nefarious conspirators to destroy their country were confessing, compelled as they were by the evidence of their accomplices, by their own handwriting, by letters which almost spoke aloud, that they had agreed to burn the city, to massacre the citizens, to lay waste Italy, and to wipe out the State, who would there be who would not be stirred to defend the common safety, especially when the Senate and Roman people possessed a leader such that, were his like now here, the same fate would have overtaken you as befell them? …
[8.] And so void of sense were you that throughout your speech you were at war with yourself, were making not only inconsistent statements, but statements so entirely disjointed and contrary to one another that the contest was not so much with me as with yourself. … It is not audacity that causes you to make such impudent statements, but being blind to such self-contradiction, you show yourself a perfect fool. For what is [more insane], when you yourself have taken up arms to destroy the State, than to reproach another for taking them up to save it? … But you were even pleased on one occasion to be facetious. Heavens! how clumsy you were! And here some blame attaches to you, for you might have derived some wit from your actress wife. "Let arms yield to the gown." Well! did they not yield then? But afterwards the gown yielded to your arms. Let us therefore ask whether it was better for the arms of criminals to yield to the liberty of the Roman people, or for our liberty to yield to your arms. …
[12.] … But regard the stupidity of the fellow, or - I should say - of the blockhead. … Be it so: let the stupidity of your words be as I say: how much greater is it in your deeds and sentiments! … [S]leep off, I say, and exhale the fume of debauch. Must torches be brought to rouse you as over such an issue you lie asleep? Will you never understand that you must determine whether the doers of that deed are murderers or avengers of liberty? …
[13.] For attend for a while, and assume for a moment the thoughts of a sober man. … What is the matter? do I disconcert you? for perhaps you do not sufficiently grasp what is put as a dilemma? …
[17.] Was it to rake together these charges, that you, you utter madman, spent so many days declaiming in another man's villa? And yet in your case, as your most familiar friends are always saying, you practice declamation to evaporate your wine, not to sharpen your wits. Yet by way of a jest you call in an instructor, a man whom you and your boon-companions voted to be a rhetorician, whom you allowed to say what he wished against you - a witty fellow no doubt, but material lies ready to hand for witticisms against you and your friends. …
[18.] Would you have us then examine you from your boyhood? Yes, I think: let us set out from the beginning. Do you remember that, while yet in your boyish gown, you were bankrupt. "That is my father's fault," you will say. I grant it, for it is a defence full of filial piety. But this touches your own native audacity…
[19.] But let us now dismiss his whoredoms and outrages; there are some things I cannot speak of with decency; you, however, have greater freedom because the acts of which you have been guilty are such as you would never hear from the lips of a modest enemy. …
[46.] … But out of very many evils which he has inflicted on the Commonwealth, there has emerged this much good : the Roman people has now learned how much to trust each man, on whom to rely, of whom to beware. Think you not of these things? and do you not understand that it is enough for brave men to have learned how beautiful in act, how grateful in benefit, how glorious in report, it is to slay a tyrant? …
… I defended the State in youth, I will not desert it in old age; …. even my body will I gladly offer if the liberty of the State can be realized by my death, so that the anguish of the Roman people may some time bring to birth that with which it has so long travailed. For if nearly twenty years ago in this very temple I said that death could not come untimely to a consular, with how much greater truth shall I say it in old age! By me indeed, conscript fathers, death is even to be wished for, now that the honours I have won and the deeds I have performed are past. These two things only I pray for; one, that in my death I may leave the Roman people free - than this no greater gift can be given me by the immortal Gods - the other, that each man's fortune may be according to his deserts toward the State.2
Kalb, J., “Remembering Augusto Del Noce” (Chronicles, February 2024, p. 21)
Cicero, “The Philippics” (East India Publishing Co. 2023); https://www.attalus.org/cicero/philippic2_2.html