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• Monday, January 14, 2008 04:41 AM

  Ezra Levant

  Sorry but your post is extremely misleading.

  Ezra Levant is not being charged with violating our hate speech laws; that is an offence under the Criminal Code and requires the consent of the attorney-general to prosecute. If you want to read more about those hate speech laws, read the Zundel and the Keegstra cases in the supreme court of Canada.

  What Mr. Levant is facing is a complaint under the Alberta Human Rights code. This deals only with issues of Discrimination. Hate speech has occasionally been found in violation of various Human Rights codes; curiosly enough the discriminatory hate speech took the form of Holocaust denial. The process that Mr. Levant faced is early in the proceedings where an investigator with the commission determines whether to proceed with the complaint; most complaints (depending on the commission over 90%) are dismissed at this early stage.

  What has never happened is that a major media publication has been successfully brought before a Human Rights Tribunal. I would not mind this happening because I would like to see our courts dealing with the issue. The only way it would get to the courts is if the Human Rights Tribunal makes a decision and then it gets appealed (likely all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada).

  Hate speech is the hard case in Free Speech and requires a balancing of the right to Free Speech with the right to be free of discrimination. This balance is probably better left to the courts to determine than either Free Speech absolutists (like yourself and Ezra Levant) or the anti-discimination absolutist (in all liklihood the various Human Rights Tribunals).

  Cheers

  Andrew

  —andrewcb Read andrewcb's other letters
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