Pearl Eliadis Writes on Canadian Supreme Court Decision on Hate Speech

Pearl Eliadis Writes on Canadian Supreme Court Decision on Hate Speech

On February 27 2013, Canadian lawyer Pearl Eliadis contributed an op-ed piece to the Montreal Gazette about the landmark ruling in the Supreme Court of Canada in Whatcott. Mr. Whatcott published and distributed hateful material depicting people who are homosexual as child predators and carriers of disease who are intent on the destruction of society. The material openly incited readers to discriminate against gays and lesbians. A complaint about the material was brought before the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, eventually working its way through the Canadian courts.

Pearl Eliadis Writes on Canadian Supreme Court Decision on Hate Speech

Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Whatcott material targeted people through public vilification. Canadian hate speech laws focus on the effects of speech and not the speech itself, and that was and is the dividing line in Canadian law.

Pearl Eliadis Writes on Canadian Supreme Court Decision on Hate Speech

Ms Eliadis had been one of the early supporters of anti-discrimination provisions in 2008 when hate speech cases began to attract media attention. Members of the media and politicians, as well as hate speech proponents, attempted to eliminate protections for minority rights, on the other hand. Attempts were made in Canada to repeal of human rights protections and to call on the the Supreme Court to overturn its previous narrow majority in a 1990 decision called Taylor, which had upheld hate speech laws as constitutional.

Pearl Eliadis Writes on Canadian Supreme Court Decision on Hate Speech

In Whatcott, the Supreme Court not only upheld the prohibitions on speech advocating hatred and inciting violence and discrimination, but did so unanimously. Ms. Eliadis called the decision “reasonable and balanced”, setting out the important impacts of the decision on human-rights law, including its affirmation of both free speech rights and reasonable limits on those rights, the repudiation of the widely-cited view that people can be held liable merely for offending others and its maintenance of civil prohibitions against speech that incites discrimination enforced by human rights commissions.