What Canadians think about Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act and hate speech law

March 21, 2024

Last week Leger released a poll on public support for Bill C-63, the federal Online Harms Act.

The survey reveals a significant lack of alignment between public opinion supporting the bill and the prevailing criticism of the bill in the news media and various blogs.

The lead poll question is this: Do you support the government’s plan to regulate content on social media to make their platforms safer and to remove harmful or hateful content?

The results were 68% in favour of the bill versus 24% opposed. You can download the report here to flush out the nuances in the responses.

Despite the strong support for the bill, there is anxiety about the impact on freedom of expression. The second question is this: Do you trust the federal government to regulate online content in a manner that protects your right to freedom of expression online?

The result was that 43% trust “the federal government” and 50% don’t. It’s not clear if this is a concern about the effective execution of the bill in practice or which political party is in government.

Even breaking down opinion into the bill’s three constituent parts (criminal hate speech, human rights hate speech and platform regulation), popular support is consistent. 

The fourth question about criminal hate speech tends to conflate two distinct offences (hate speech promoting genocide; willfully promoting hate): Do you support the government’s plan to impose stiffer sentences on those convicted of a hate propaganda or hate crime offence, including up to life in prison for advocating genocide? The current maximum penalty is a two year prison term.

The result was 72% in favour and 15% against. I have to say, that one took me by surprise. Life imprisonment.

On to the human rights question: it helps to recall that the bill reinstates the right of Canadians to file anti-discrimination complaints about hate speech to the federal Human Rights Commission, repealed by a free vote of the House of Commons in 2012.

The question is: Do you agree or disagree with allowing people to file complaints about online hate speech to the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

The result was 71% for, 16% against. 

An earlier Leger poll found widespread public support for a companion federal Bill C-367 that would repeal the current exemption in criminal hate laws for good faith religious argument (e.g. “God hates homosexuality”).

Back in the late 2000s, there was a lot of public debate about hate speech thanks to some high profile, and unsuccessful human rights complaints, against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. In the run-up to the repeal of section 13 of the Human Rights Act in 2012, the human rights law expert Richard Moon submitted an important Report that recommended abolishing section 13 (or alternatively amending it) and relying entirely on Criminal Code hate laws. 

I stumbled across an article he wrote, shorter than his Report, that does a great job contextualizing the free speech versus harm debate.

At the risk of simplifying his well reasoned arguments, Moon says that regulation of hate speech should be restricted to incitement or imminent risk of violence (and thus it belongs in the Criminal Code) and that stamping out non-violent harmful speech (which he takes very seriously) would require an intolerable level of censorship to work. That’s why he supported eliminating section 13 of the Human Rights Act.

If incitement of violence were the acid-test of censorship, there is still a debate over what is incitement. For members of those communities who have been the targets of hate and violence for hundreds of years, most hateful speech is a dog-whistle to violence.  The virtue of the Human Rights approach over the Criminal Code is that individual Canadians don’t have to ask the Attorney General’s permission to fight it.

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As I was hitting the “publish” button on this post, over at Canadaland an excellent podcast went up with host Jesse Brown interviewing Ivor Shapiro of the Centre for Freedom of Expression on Bill C-63. Worth a listen.

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