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5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

We don’t need to abolish Section 13. We just need to defy it daily.

February 22, 2010 By admin

Don’t wait for the gub’ment to “let” you write what you want.

But if we have to go through the tedious motions of “repeal” and “voting” and crap, we’ll need more VERY clever “gotcha” stuff like this in the newspapers.

Color me impressed:

 The 20-year-old legal reasoning behind Canada’s human rights hate speech law is now “utterly outdated” because of the “interactive, dynamic and democratizing” effects of the Internet, according to arguments in Federal Court.

 Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits online messages that expose identifiable groups to hatred or contempt, was designed in the 1970s for telephone hate hotlines. In 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled it a justifiable limit on freedom of expression, in part because a telephone hate message “gives the listener the impression of direct, personal, almost private, contact by the speaker, provides no realistic means of questioning the information or views presented and is subject to no counter-argument within that particular communications context.”

The Internet “radically changed” that context, by allowing for instant rebuttal and discussion, according to lawyer Barbara Kulaszka.

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