Comics helped turn the tide against ‘hate speech’ measures
Withdrawn Bill 59 provisions were unnecessary and dangerous
It was Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée who this week, in the Couillard government’s latest retreat, withdrew the provisions on hate speech from her bill on, well, hate speech.
She did it, she said, so the rest of Bill 59, on forced marriages, could pass. The bill had been held up in committee by a filibuster by the official Opposition Parti Québécois against the part on hate speech, which, the PQ said, threatened freedom of expression.
In the parliamentary system, even when there’s a majority government, while the government proposes, it’s the opposition that disposes. The filibuster, or use of delaying tactics, is the most effective parliamentary weapon available to the opposition, and the Liberals used it effectively against the PQ when they were in the opposition.
But while it was the PQ that prevented adoption of the bill’s provisions on hate speech, it was really Quebec comics who killed them, with their highly publicized recent protest against “censorship.”
It was apparent right from its introduction last June that Bill 59 was a bad bill. It was a political response to a political problem, the pressure on a government to Do Something.
In Quebec, that usually means legislation. In this case, it was to Do Something about the radicalization of young Muslims.
To begin with, the hate-speech provisions were unnecessary. “Hate propaganda” is already an offence under the federal Criminal Code.
Nevertheless, legislating for the sake of legislating, Bill 59 would have created a new offence of hate speech. And it would have turned the Quebec human-rights commission, which is supposed to protect fundamental freedoms, into a “speech police.”
Anyone it charged with hate speech would have been liable, if found guilty by the province’s human-rights tribunal, to a fine of up to $10,000 for a first offence.
But while a conviction under the Criminal Code requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Bill 59 contained no such standard.
And while much has been said about how Bill 59 could have had a chilling effect on criticism of religions in Quebec, what has received less attention is that it could have had a similar effect on political debate.
For unlike the Criminal Code, Bill 59 would have specifically defended political groups against so-called hate speech.
This would have been a boon to the Quebec nationalists who have complained that any but the mildest criticism of them and their movement, especially by English-language commentators, amounts to “francophobia.”
Bill 59 would have armed them with a weapon with which to harass their critics by constantly filing new complaints, the way Bill 101 hobbyists do for petty violations of obscure rules on the language of restaurant menus.
Little public attention was paid to Bill 59, however, until the comics’ protest on a televised comedy awards show two weeks ago.
The protesters didn’t mention Bill 59. And while they pretended to be court jesters using humour to speak truth to power, their actual, somewhat less noble cause was their own freedom to continue to cruelly mock a physically deformed adolescent.
But the protest did make freedom of expression suddenly fashionable in Quebec.
Amid the uproar over the protest, a timely oped article in Quebec newspapers on the more serious issue of Bill 59 led to a rediscovery of it by editorialists and columnists. An editorial in Le Devoir expressed fear that “religious and minority groups” could use the legislation to “muzzle” journalists as well as comics.
A consensus against the bill quickly emerged, isolating the Liberal government. The PQ, citing the “censorship” of the comics, called for the bill’s withdrawal.
Unwilling to use closure to cut off debate and force the adoption of what had suddenly become an unpopular bill, the justice minister withdrew the provisions on hate speech, in a tacit admission that they were unnecessary in the first place.
The PQ claimed a victory. But it really belonged to the comics.