The Regulation of Hate Speech Under the Canadian Human Rights Act

This paper summarizes the recommendations made in the report I prepared for the Canadian Human Rights Commission concerning s.13 of the CHRA. In the report I recommended the repeal of the section so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would no longer deal with hate speech, and in particular hate speech on the Internet. I took the position that state censorship of hate speech should be confined to narrow category of extreme expression – that which explicitly or implicitly threatens, advocates or justifies violence against the members of an identifiable group, even if the violence advocated in not imminent – and that the restriction of this narrow category of expression should be dealt with under the Criminal Code rather than the CHRA.