Good Riddance, Section 13!

Lorne Gunter writes that even though Section 13 has been struck down, criminal hate speech laws remain on the books. So all those hyperventilating about how "hate speech" will thrive now that the state censorship provision in our federal "human rights" code is gone should take a chill pill, because the regular law, breech of which is adjudicated in a regular court room, one bound by regular rules, remains in effect. Besides, Section 13 was a huge embarrassment. It stacked the deck against the accused. It made up the rules as it went along. And then there's the matter of its conviction rate...:

The proof of just how stacked the ["human rights"] tribunal process has been comes from the CHRC's conviction rate: From the time Section 13 was added to the human rights act in 1977 until it began to attract the ire of Storseth (and others, such as Sun News' Ezra Levant) in 2009, no person charged under Section 13 had ever been acquitted. In other words, the CHRC had a 100% conviction rate on hate-speech complaints.

No doubt that rate was the envy of many Third World dictators.

No doubt. It was certainly embraced by the puny tin-pot Napoleons-in-their-own-minds among us.

Update: Of course, for reasons of political correctness, some types of hate speech will never be prosecuted.