TARGETS OF CANADA’S HATE PROPAGANDA LAWS ARE OFTEN CRANKY AND OFFENSIVE. BUT GOING AFTER INDIVIDUALS FOR REFUSING TO TOE THE POLITICAL PARTY LINE IS BECOMING A BADGE OF STATE.
Anti-Muslim commentator facing charges
How comforting it is to return from holidays (and a self-imposed news blackout) and see that Canadian police are still vigorously pursuing those worst of criminals.
By this, of course, I mean those rare citizens who say outrageous things (all right, some of them shriek them) and try in a sometimes clumsy way to shake up the complacent tenor of Canadian public life, what my Post colleague Conrad Black recently described as being all about studious “conflict avoidance, homogenization, washing out differences, avoiding judgments …” and generally just getting along.
The latest target is one Kevin J. Johnston, who was criminally charged last week by Peel Regional Police with the wilful promotion of hatred.
It’s a so-called “hybrid offence,” which means prosecutors can deal with it summarily or by indictment; if the latter, conviction carries a two-year prison sentence.
(The same day as the force issued a press release about Johnston’s arrest, it also issued a public safety advisory about a Kitchener woman who had been convicted a few years back of four counts of poisoning young children at the daycare she ran, and was now being released from prison and moving to Mississauga, Ont. You can guess which heinous offender got the most media attention.)
In any case, Johnston is apparently a bit of an online personality (God help us that we live at a time when that is considered a thing) who has made his name by ranting about Muslims. He opposed the construction of a mosque in Mississauga and once offered cash for videos of Muslim students at prayer in area schools. He runs a website called freedomreport.ca and works and sometimes writes for the online Mississauga Gazette.
But more interesting, given that police can’t lay such a charge without the consent of the provincial attorney general, in this instance Yasir Naqvi, is that Johnston is a former mayoral candidate, losing, as did 14 others, to Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie in the last election.
Johnston finished 11th, and though he says he’s planning to run again, he can hardly be construed as a credible political threat.
And yet, last October, Crombie filed a hate-crime complaint with Peel police after the Gazette website published a bizarre, genuinely unpleasant and rambling article claiming, among other things, that the mayor was trying to convert the city to Islam so “they can kill her son just for being gay.”
It doesn’t appear from the news stories back then that Johnston wrote the article but rather that, as the site’s webmaster (and, Johnston said, the co-owner), he simply posted it.
The headline was, “Bonnie’s Muslims Are Molesting Teenage Girls in Mississauga Highschools” (the school board spokesman said the board had “never heard of” the allegations before), and Johnston told a reporter that he’d remove the piece if ordered to do so by a court, but said, “Would I do it because … Bonnie thinks it should (come down)? No, I wouldn’t do that.”
Crombie said she wasn’t lodging the complaint because she was criticized in the piece, but rather because it attacked her family, as well as Peel’s Muslim community.
(Despite Johnston’s comments, the piece was eventually taken down, in its place a pious statement bemoaning that “freedom of speech is dead.”)
In any case, all that happened last October, and in its press release the Peel force referred to the charge against Johnston being laid after a “lengthy investigation,” later described by a force spokesman as a five-month-long probe.
The timing could mean Crombie’s complaint was the catalyst for the investigation and the charge. Certainly, it lends an overt sheen of politicization to a prosecution which is inherently politicized by the unusual requirement that the AG must first consent.
Naqvi is of course a Liberal, and a member of Kathleen Wynne’s Cabinet; Crombie is also a longtime Liberal, a former federal MP for Mississauga.
As the Ontario Civil Liberties Association says, in its preamble to an online petition defending Johnston’s rights, “the threats to civil liberties caused by the hate propaganda sections … affect all Canadians.” These sections, as the OCLA points out, define offences for speech “that need not be proven to have caused physical or psychological harm to any person … the said sections are applied at the discretion of the government, since no proceeding can be instituted without the consent of the Attorney General.
“Thus, the use of such a proceeding as a political instrument is an inescapable feature of the law.”
The OCLA petition asks Naqvi to strike the hate sections and not use them against a citizen for expressing “unpopular … views — clearly political views about multiculturalism and security.”
But going after individual citizens, who either won’t or can’t for reasons of conscience toe the party line, is becoming the very badge of the Canadian state.
Like Eric Brazau (another cranky fellow who has been prosecuted in Ontario multiple times for ranting in the public square about Muslims, most recently for causing a disturbance, though he was originally also charged with advocating genocide, another of those charges that need an AG sign-off) and peaceful anti-abortion protesters Linda Gibbons and Mary Wagner, who have been jailed for years in total for merely expressing themselves, Johnston is just the latest poor sap to come to government attention.
He now has a proper criminal lawyer, James Heller of Victoria, in his corner, and is due next in court in September.