Nov 10
3
Whatcott case: A golden opportunity to kill human rights censorship
National Post – November 3, 2010
A golden opportunity to kill human-rights censorship
By Karen Selick
The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to reconsider 20-year-old jurisprudence that limits free speech. The case under appeal is The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission vs. William Whatcott. Back in 2001 and 2002, Whatcott, a social conservative activist, distributed flyers in Regina and Saskatoon bearing headings such as “Keep Homosexuality out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools” and “Sodomites in our Public Schools.” He was hauled before the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission for having “exposed to hatred, ridiculed, belittled or affronted the dignity” of gays and lesbians, and was ordered to pay compensation totaling $17,500 to four complainants. That decision was upheld on its first appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench in 2007. But in February, 2010, three members of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal overturned it.
While the Court of Appeal’s decision was a victory, of sorts, for free speech, the court had to twist itself into contortions to reach it. On any objective reading of Whatcott’s flyers, he did ridicule and belittle gays – and he probably even exposed them to hatred. What rankles free-speechers is the more fundamental question: Why should this be against the law? After all, don’t we have a Charter of Rights that guarantees freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression? But the Court of Appeal declined to strike down the offending portions of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code as inconsistent with the Charter. The problem lay in the fact that in 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada had considered similar human rights legislation and had decided that those censorship provisions were permissible despite the Charter’s free-expression guarantee. That case, known as Taylor, attempted to set some guidelines or standards as to when censorship laws designed to deter “hate speech” would be acceptable. Hatred or contempt, wrote then-chief justice Dickson, “refers only to unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification.”
Then, with inexplicable confidence in the niceness of the universe, justice Dickson opined that so long as human rights tribunals paid heed to the extreme degree of hatred necessary to justify censorship, there would be “little danger that subjective opinion as to offensiveness” would trump free speech.
Read the complete article here.