I’m a day or two behind in writing about Rob Nicholson — the Minister of Justice in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government — and the legal brief his office released in favour of keeping Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act intact. Ezra Levant has a pretty handy fisking of the document itself, which is rife with all manner of historical errors and poor logic.
My favourite example:
…history teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech…Read that again. The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we’ve seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?
Setting that aside for a moment, though, what has emerged as the big controversy concerning the brief is that it draws heavily upon the scholarship of one man:
So who is this nut the government keeps quoting?
His name is Alexander Tsesis, a professor at a middling U.S. law school. Tsesis has two political clients: the Canadian Justice Department, and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachussets, tied with [Barack Hussein Obama] as the most left-wing senator in America. Tsesis is a left wing kook — but the Canadian government hangs on his every word.
On that basis alone, it’s not much of a surprise that the government, acting on Tsesis’ scholarship, has come out in favour of Censorship. Most left-wing types seem to be in favour of censoring those with whom they disagree, as I am sure that Tsiesis certainly is, without ever realizing it that once those powers have been granted to government agencies, they cannot reliably be expected to remain…shall we say…pointed in the same direction. The laws that today are being used against the likes of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant may tomorrow be used against the likes of David Suzuki.
Moreover, Tsiesis’ various theories and scholarly efforts have been soundly debunked:
Alexander Tsesis, whose work is central to the justifications presented in the Justice brief receives a sound debunking in this review by Anuj C. Desai*:
From a review of Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, Alexander Tsesis, by Anuj C. Desai.
In short, the practical problems of drafting a statute that avoids serious vagueness and overbreadth problems cannot be underestimated.
It may be that Eleanor Holmes Norton was overstating it when she said, “It is technically impossible to write an anti-speech code that cannot be twisted against speech nobody means to bar.”161 But Tsesis’s proposal does little to convince me that she was wrong.
V. CONCLUSION
In sum, although Tsesis’s “goal of preventing atrocities against racial and ethnic minorities is laudable, he has not sufficiently supported his view that a criminal law banning what he refers to as “hate speech” would further that goal. Indeed, because he has not adequately considered the potential for government abuse that his proposal invites, his proposed law could very well do more harm than good.
In effect, what Tsesis’s book depends on is hope, the hope that if a society declares “hate speech” to be illegal, it can eliminate “hate speech” and it can thereby eliminate hatred itself. One is led to presume this will end inequality based on differences of race, ethnicity, culture, and the like, and that genocide, institutionalized subjugation, and oppression will all
vanish into thin air. One can only imagine what the world would be like if it were so simple.…
What he is pretty clearly saying, however, is that society should criminalize words because of the possibility that they could have an impact, even if that impact occurs as much as 400 years later.
I have it on good authority that Tsesis is regarded as something of a bit player, a minor and mostly unknown figure, in the American legal scene, and that few people have really bothered to take him to rhetorical task. If this is the case, then it only underscores how remarkably strange it is that the Canadian government is relying so heavily on his scholarship in defence of their indefensible stance on censorship in Canada.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
