So, you post a comment online about Canada’s immigration policy. Someone – you’ll never know who – finds it offensive, reports it as “hate,” and a few days later the police are at your door..Now what?You haven’t broken any law. No one is alleging criminal hate speech under section 319 of the Criminal Code. Yet there they stand.According to John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, the first thing you do is simple and necessary: take out your phone and start recording. If possible, have a family member record as well.Then ask a direct question: “Am I being charged with a criminal offence under section 319?”If the answer is no, you are entitled to say, politely but firmly, “I do not wish to continue this conversation. You may leave now.”Police have no business at your door unless they are investigating an actual crime..But sadly, these days that doesn’t always stop them being there. Edmonton police – and, according to Carpay, other forces across the country – have been inviting the public to report “non-crime hate incidents”: racial slurs, offensive jokes, or comments that someone finds hurtful but that fall well short of the Criminal Code.The practice echoes a British experiment that began around 2000 with good intentions (one must hope) and ended twenty-five years later, with police knocking on doors over tweets people posted and, in some cases, people spending time in jail.Great Britain has now begun to retreat from the model.Canada however, appears to be embracing it..The deeper problem is not simply wasted police resources – though they’re already stretched too thin to adequately deal with real crime, such as car thefts, break-ins, and violent assault. The deeper problem, says Carpay, is the principle. Once the state is invited to monitor, record, and respond to lawful speech it dislikes, the boundary between criminal and merely unpopular becomes dangerously elastic.Carpay is careful on this point. He believes most Canadians still cherish freedom of speech. The difficulty, he says, is that many do not fully grasp the consequences of handing government the power to decide what is true or false, and what may or may not be said:“People support bans on “racist” or “hateful” speech because they do not consider themselves racist or hateful. They assume the power will only ever be used against others. But, history and recent Canadian experience suggest otherwise. If the state can silence one unpopular group today, it can silence another tomorrow – including groups that once thought themselves safely on the right side of the consensus.”.The Justice Centre is currently litigating several cases that illustrate the risk.In Alberta, it is defending two women before the Human Rights Commission: one for objecting to a rainbow crosswalk on public property as a controversial political symbol, another for stating that a “family-friendly” drag-queen performance is a contradiction in terms. Neither woman discriminated against anyone; both simply expressed an opinion.In New Brunswick, the Centre is representing citizens who distributed flyers arguing that parents have a right to know what is being taught to their children about gender identity.In British Columbia, a former school-board trustee was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for publicly opposing the promotion of transgender ideology to children..Embattled former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld back in court.None of these cases involves criminal hate speech. All of them show how elastic definitions of harm and offence can be used to punish dissent..Carpay’s prescription for Alberta is straightforward: repeal section 3 of the Alberta Human Rights Act, the provision that has enabled these political complaints about speech, while leaving intact the rest of the code that prohibits actual discrimination in housing, employment, and services. More broadly, he argues that police should stop soliciting reports of non-crimes and concentrate on the criminal law they are sworn to enforce.Free speech, Carpay reminds us, is like a muscle. Unused, it atrophies. The fact that we can still have this conversation is evidence that the muscle has not yet withered. The question is whether we will continue to exercise it – or gradually accept that the state may decide which opinions are permitted to be spoken aloud.The Hannaford Show uploads tonight at 7 o’clock.
