"Save Our Inquisitions!" Thunders Canada's Chief Inquisitioner

The National Post has two pieces about free speech--one for and one against it--on its Issues & Ideas page. Agin' it, of course, is a chap who's trying to preserve his cushy sinecure--David Langtry, the acting chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. In making his (lame, anemic) argument, Lagtry returns to the seminal "hate speech" case that set us on our wacky course:

If you were in downtown Toronto back in the 1970s, you might have bumped into an elderly, articulate fellow in a tweed hat, handing out cards that invited you to phone a number.

Dial it, and a voice on an answering machine accused Jews of an international conspiracy "against the white race." The voice was that of the man in the tweed hat, an avowed fascist, a Canadian who supported Hitler during the Second World War. His name was John Ross Taylor.

Taylor was never a household name. Yet he came to define the legal boundaries of the expression of hatred in this country for decades.

Taylor's messages passed through a loophole in Canada's Criminal Code, which prohibits speech that incites racial hatred. An exemption for "private communications" allowed neo-Nazis to spread propaganda using the telephone.

Across Europe and North America, white supremacist organizations were growing. They were increasingly bold in defying our laws and social order. Memories of our collective sacrifices to fight the Nazis were still warm, and yet, the cold shadow of the Holocaust was stirring.

In Canada, where Parliament was debating the first ever federal human rights legislation, MPs voted for a provision designed to force Nazis like Taylor to stop. Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was meant to target only the most extreme expressions of hate, a defining principle narrowly upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada when Taylor challenged the law. Today, the Canadian Human Rights Commission rigorously applies the court's "Taylor test" to assess whether something is "hate speech," or just offensive.
Just after 9/11, at a time of challenge to the social order, Parliament broadened Section 13 to include hate on the Internet. Yet complaints about hate speech continued to be rare, amounting to a tiny fraction of the Commission's caseload. Complaints almost exclusively concern individuals at the extreme margins of society who seek to dehumanize and vilify people on the sole basis of their belonging to a racial or ethnic group, or their sexual orientation.

A notable exception was a complaint against Maclean's magazine in 2007. The Commission examined the complaint, and dismissed it. Nevertheless, an image of the Commission as a censor of a free press persists in some quarters...

That image is far too narrow. The Commission, in fact, would like to put a lid on all unacceptable thought and expression so that Canada can become a hate-free Utopia. Anyone who thinks "hate speech" is scarier and more dangerous than that simply doesn't understand what's at stake (i.e. a free Canada and the freedom of Canadians).