The Broken CCRF

"Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;"

I thought I'd just confirm that with the Justice Department since I believe a lot of people are not wholly clear on this little tidbit. The line comes from Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutional document that guarantees the rights of all Canadians. Your rights are enshrined here to protect you from abuse by the government. Despite this, there are certain people within the Canadian government who break the charter on a regular basis. These are the judges and tribunal commissioners who misuse the bench as their own personal soap box. This week, the Moon report was released. It painted a critical picture of the way human rights trubunals are held in Canada. It was drafted partly in response to the Styne/Macleans fiasco that happened over the summer of 2008. The problem arose from section 13(1) of the human rights code that deals with how human rights abuses are to be handled. It found that people were abusing the tribunals to silence any criticism of their particular group. The Moon report called it blantant government censorship. It stopped short of closing the door completely on censorship by noting that documents that deliberately incite violence against minorities should still be prosecuted.

The problem though is not simply with the human rights tribunals but the way the vary legal core of the country has evolved since Trudeau "brought home" the constitution in 1983. Are Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is chock full of vague language and legal loopholes. In fact, the first section of the Charter opens the door wide open for its abuse.
"1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
The reasonable limits clause is defined by Supreme Court Justices and lower courts but that wording in itself is fairly meaningless since who gets to determine what a reasonable limit is? This was how the tribunals came to be misused. Censoring any language that could possible be deemed to incite hatred or is bigoted in any way is considered a reasonable limit to your Section 2(b) rights. This segues into my previous article back in June that dealt with Macleans and Styne. Who exactly gets to determine what is unacceptable language? The tribunals certainly aren't made up of legal experts. Is it them determining what should be censored? These tribunals often poke their noses into issues, looking for problems that are not actually there. Now, I'm not defending people who are genuinely trying to incite hatred. That's a common misconception of what free speech crusaders are trying to do. We believe you should be able to say whatever you want, no matter how stupid or wrong. Someone with an opposing view should have the right to openly disagree with such statements as well. This is how democracy works. If we cannot say things that may offend, then we are not a democratic country at all, not even close.

Currently, you as a Canadian citizen have been given a list of supposed rights. However, the government has no obligation to maintain them. That's clearly listed right in the document. In fact, it's one of the only things that is clear. They can have some rights trump others, or choose to omit entire sections if they so choose. Often, it's non-democratically elected judges making these decisions with an impotent Parliament just keeping mum on the subject. There is nowhere in the constitution that says you have a right not to be offended. In my opinion, the Charter itself needs a serious overhaul to prevent these abuses from ever happening again. First of all, Section 1 and Section 33 need to be removed entirely. Section 33 being the infamous Notwithstanding Clause that allows Parliament to take a whole host of basic legal rights and fundamental freedoms away. There are other parts of the CCRF that I object to but these two sections are indeed the most troubling. If Canada wants to call itself a proper democracy, its constitution needs to reflect that by providing no path for a government to abuse our free speech rights.