At what point do we go from protecting free speech to providing a platform for hate speech?
According to James Turk, a Canadian academic and labour leader who unapologetically and commendably champions the protection of academic freedom, the vast majority of what people on either side of the political spectrum consider to be hate speech is not, in fact as per definition of Canadian law, hate speech.
I would tend to agree with him.
Sure, there is sadly no shortage of rhetoric being regurgitated that could easily be considered toxic. Ill-informed. Hateful even.
But short of incitement to violence that for example calls for some kind of eugenics program to purge from the gene pool a group of people deemed by another demographic to be undesirable or somehow less than human, Canadian law is unlikely to declare deplorable speech as hate.
Turk, who was among three guest panellists participating in a debate during the recent Alberta Library Conference in Jasper, pointed out that three levels of our own governments could not even unanimously agree on what constitutes hate speech.
He cited as an example the case of controversial former Saskatchewan preacher Bill Whatcott, who rose to infamy for campaigning against homosexuality and abortion by distributing pamphlets filled with hateful rhetoric.
Originally fined $17,500 by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal for distributing material deemed by that court as hate speech, Whatcott pursued the appeal process and eventually successfully had the ruling against him overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.
The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission in turn appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, which later determined a portion — but not all — of the materials he had distributed fit the legal description of hate speech. The justice presiding over that case reinstated the compensation for complainants who received flyers deemed in contravention of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.
Turk also talked about the time Ryerson University cancelled a planned student event to host professor Jordan Peterson. The event was cancelled not because the institution sought to stifle free speech, but rather because the administration could not afford to cover the cost of enhanced policing to ensure everyone’s safety in the face of threats made to forcibly shut down the affair.
Many people, unaware of the reasons behind the decision to pull the plug, blamed the campus for yielding to the protesters’ threats even though the real issue came down to an inability to guarantee safety during the forum.
Ensuring the safety of public discourse, including bearing the brunt of the cost, should fall on the shoulders of the government. Not an educational institution tasked with keeping open the doors of debate, no matter how controversial.
The unintended consequence of students seeking to silence figures such as Whatcott and Peterson is to, perhaps ironically, substantially increase their following.
The line between free and hate speech can be arguably rather blurry depending on one's perspective. But at the heart of the matter, censorship only elevates speech that has been restricted to a sort of martyr status.
Detestable ideas — whether hateful, ignorant, toxic, intentionally misleading, or a blend of all the above — should be deconstructed and defeated through debate. Not by stifling the free exchange of ideas or restricting academic freedom.
