Canadian Nazis blow PM Harper big wet sloppy kiss

[TithonusSyndrome]

RIP progressive, respected Canada

A Conservative private members’ bill that repeals part of Canada’s hate speech laws has passed the House of Commons with scant media attention, and even less commentary. But it's being cheered by many Canadian conservatives as a victory for freedom of speech. And it's being cheered most vocally by another group: White supremacists.

Bill C-304, introduced by Conservative backbencher Brian Storseth, repeals Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which bans hate speech transmitted over the Internet or by telephone. It passed third reading in the House of Commons on Thursday and is now headed to the Senate.

“This is a huge victory for freedom in Canada,” a poster calling him or herself “CanadaFirst” posted on the website of StormFront, a notorious white supremacist group. “However, we still have other unjust Zionist ‘hate’ laws that need to go.”

“Way to go, Harper. I know we can’t get everything we want, but I stand a little taller today as a Canuck,” wrote “OneMan.”

The new law doesn’t make hate speech legal on the web or by phone -- hate speech remains illegal under the Criminal Code. But by removing it from the Canadian Human Rights Act, it takes away the authority of the country’s human rights commissions to investigate online hate speech and request that violating websites be taken down.

That has alarmed the Canadian Bar Association, which said in a recent report it’s concerned that the law may be the start of a campaign by the Conservatives to weaken Canada’s human rights laws.

“The debate surrounding the expediency of section 13 has become the proxy for an open assault on the very existence of an administrative framework to protect human rights in this country,” the CBA stated.

"Over the years, human rights commissions have remained at the vanguard of eliminating discrimination based on race, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other grounds, and advancing equality," the CBA added.

Other supporters of the commissions say taking away their authority over hate speech will embolden racists and lead to more racial violence.

But human rights commissions have become bogeymen to many Canadian conservatives, and some others, who have campaigned for years to eliminate them altogether, painting them as bureaucratic tools of censorship.

In one famous case, conservative media icon Ezra Levant was hauled in front of an Alberta tribunal to explain his decision to run controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed in the magazine he ran at the time, the Western Standard.

Levant became a cause celebre for opponents of the commissions, and his decision to republish the cartoons online on the day of his human rights hearing was hailed as heroic by many conservatives.

But all the opposition parties voted against the private members’ bill in Parliament Thursday, with NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison arguing that it would now be much harder to prevent hate speech online.

“We do have a serious problem,” Garrison told the National Post. “If you take away the power to take (websites) down, it’s not clear they have any mandate to even to talk to people about it and educate them about it.”

Garrison argued that the Tories are being dishonest by having these laws be introduced as private members’ bills, rather than government bills, noting that the Conservative Party of Canada made repealing human rights commissions’ ability to regulate hate speech a part of their platform.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews defended the bill, tweeting on Thursday that the new law will “end arbitrary censorship powers of human rights commissions.”

Public opinion on human rights commissions is split. An unscientific poll on the CBC website shows a bare majority of people supporting the Tories’ move.

Aside from the obvious non-debate that "freedom of speech" is a dog whistle for unleashing hate speech in cases like these, this is hardly the first chapter in Harper's cozy relationship with the Canadian racist right, having served with the non-profit Northern Foundation alongside open white supremacists in the pursuit of preserving South African apartheid in the 1980s. Seriously, swap the names for some leader in the FSU and nobody might be astonished, but this is a country that only a half decade ago was considered a world leader in progressivism. Shows how quickly a committed effort can reverse these things, I guess.

[Aaron MkII]

I've always been amused by right wing extremists hate for the HRC's. They are largely powerless and have heard a bare handfull of cases.

[PeZook]

I've always been amused by right wing extremists hate for the HRC's. They are largely powerless and have heard a bare handfull of cases.

They are offensive on the gut level to a certain type of person who doesn't see anything wrong with calling for an entire ethnic group to be gassed.

Yet they are offended when someone says "The Red Army should have summarily executed all the Nazis they found" and proceed to say it would've been a barbaric war crime.

The irony is always lost on them. Always.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Beyond simply that, these hate communities tend to be small and tightly knit, meaning that sentencing just the right person or group of people will deal an irreparable blow to the focii of their networks, even if such sentences aren't frequent or numerous. I've become more personally acquainted with these people and how they work on account of Richard Warman stomping out all their leaders and sending them packing to western Canada where they clog up metal shows and the like.

And of course, the modern right just about anywhere on earth has turned appropriating the language of grievance from the left into their bread and butter, and there's no shortage of aggrieved rhetoric to import from their American associates.

[Wild Zontargs]

Guys, this article was from last summer. According to this, the thing is sitting in a corner of the Senate collecting dust, waiting to be swept out with the trash. Sky status: not falling.