A tool to help combat hate
In March 2022, I was appointed, along with other Canadian academics and advocates, to the Federal Expert Advisory Group on Online Harms.
We held a wide range of beliefs on hate propagation and online safety and we argued, cajoled, agreed, disagreed and in the end came up with a proposal for legislation that we believed Canadians not only needed but demanded. It was tabled this week as Bill C-63, The Online Harms Act.
Hate was killing us! It did so on Jan. 29, 2017, at a Mosque in Quebec City where a lone gunman murdered six Canadian Muslims at prayer; it did so again on April 24, 2018, on a busy north Toronto intersection when a woman hater used a rented van to murder 11 innocent people in a terroristic murder spree; and only recently four generations of a Canadian Muslim family were deliberately run over in a vicious hate killing that was also labelled as a terrorist crime in London, Ont.
This is not simply a Canadian phenomenon. Only a few months after the incel killings in Canada, on Oct. 27, 2018, a spiteful antisemite walked into Pittsburgh Pa., synagogue where he murdered 11 American Jews. And then, only five months later, on March 19, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand, a right-wing extremist attacked two mosques leaving a bloody trail of 51 deaths and 49 injuries in his mass Islamophobic murder spree.
All these crimes had one thing in common — each of the hateful perpetrators were radicalized to their hatred online. The London, Ont. truck murderer of the Afzaal family admitted to the court that he spent hours a day online since 2020. He consumed far-right content that stoked his murderous rage against Muslims.
The Quebec City murderer was much the same. According to court documents, he spent hours online reading about Muslims immigrating to Canada. Quebec police noted that his “consumption of right-wing and far-right material influenced his opinion on immigration and the presence of Muslims in Quebec.”
Similarly, the antisemitic Pittsburgh killer was obsessed by Jews. This was seen on his online “Gab” account, an alternative to Facebook and Twitter
(now X) where hate speech had free rein. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center that monitors hate and extremism in the United States, the killer “engaged with numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories that have long been in circulation among neo-Nazis and white supremacists.”
And what of Toronto’s mass incel killer? Online incel communities drove his hatred. According the Guardian newspaper on an interview played in court during his trial, the killer acknowledged that “he belonged to an online subculture of sexually frustrated men, and described his path toward radicalization saying he drew inspiration (online) from other men who used violence as a form of retribution for ‘being unable to get laid.’ ”
According to George Washington University researcher Neil Johnson, the Christchurch killer was nurtured by “networks of networks that spread hate around the world with a click of a mouse.”
And of course there is more. Hate online has become the communications of choice for extremist murderers to choose their minority victims from twisted ideologies consumed online. Up till now we have lacked enough decent resources to monitor and prevent hate-motivated murders.
So now with Bill C-63, we have more tools in our legal tool chest to hopefully prevent such radicalization and grief in the future. Members of all parties in Parliament must now come together as one. This ought not to be a partisan political issue. This new legislation will soon go to committee. Let’s discuss any necessary refinements, let the committee do its work but for God’s sake let’s work together to build a fence of protection for vulnerable minorities. We should have done so years ago.
BERNIE M. FARBER IS THE FOUNDING CHAIR EMERITUS OF THE CANADIAN ANTI-HATE NETWORK.