Canada is known worldwide as a nice place, full of wonderful people who just want everybody to get along. Lately, though, it seems not all members of Canadian society are getting along so well. The cause of this uncharacteristic turmoil: Bill C-250, a law that if passed would criminalize written or spoken material considered "hate speech" against gays and lesbians. Biblical passages condemning homosexual relations, for instance, might come under fire with this proposed law. Bill C-250 however is only an addition to an existing piece of Canadian legislation, Section 319 of the country's Criminal Code. According to this Section, it is a crime to "communicate statements in any public place" which "willfully promote hatred against any identifiable group." The "group" in question could be racial, ethnic or religious and the means of communication a pamphlet, Internet website, church sermon or newspaper article.

Other jurisdictions possess similar legislation. Last year the Council of Europe adopted a measure that would make it illegal to "advocate, promote or incite hatred or discrimination" on the Internet. Individual European nations too have hate crime laws. For example, in 1992 British historian David Irving was fined 10,000 German marks (approximately $6,000 US) for claiming Auschwitz's gas chambers were "fakes" created to bring tourists to Poland. Likewise, Toronto-based publisher Ernst Zundel could face prison if he is deported to Germany (his birthplace), where he has been convicted in absentia of Holocaust denial.

These laws have not gone unchallenged. Critics fear that if material can be banned or penalized on the grounds that it may or does offend a certain group or groups, freedom of speech itself will go down the tubes. I agree; once censorship takes root, there's no telling where it will end. Also, the liberty to express one's ideas is part and parcel of any supposed democracy's character. But there are other reasons to question a law that would make "hate speech" a crime.

First, what is hate speech? As I wrote in an essay called "Not in My Name: Don't Ban the Sopranos," some Italian-Canadians want the television show The Sopranos taken off the air because it allegedly paints Italians as criminals and thereby tarnishes the reputation of the entire ethnic group. Other Italians, like my aunt, respond that the program depicts only a certain segment of the Italian community and in no way typecasts all its members. So how can the state be expected to decide whether The Sopranos constitutes hate speech or not when Italians themselves can't agree on the matter?

The second problem with criminalizing hate speech is that when it comes to defending purportedly oppressed groups, some of us are clearly more unequal than others. After all, no one's calling for Rob Roy and Braveheart to be yanked from the video stores on account of those films' less than glowing portrayal of the English. The poor old Brits just don't qualify as a downtrodden minority (nor should they, because they aren't). Joking aside, however, the possibility of a "double standard" looms large. For instance, in several European countries a number of people have been fined and/or jailed for publicly denying the Holocaust. The courts found these defendants guilty of among other things promoting hatred of Jews.

One wonders what these courts would have had to say about former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who in 1989 stated that the Poles "imbibed anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk." Though many Polish people understandably felt offended by this remark, there was little international outcry over it. And certainly no effort was undertaken -- at least to my knowledge -- to bring Shamir before a court of justice for "promoting hatred of Poles." Yet even if there had been, it's not hard to suspect that any complaints would probably have been tossed out. Why? Because the Poles were not "oppressed" enough to warrant protection against hate speech.

I myself would defend David Irving, Ernst Zundel and Yitzhak Shamir's right to make any odious and absurd comments -- such as the above-mentioned ones -- they wished. But if we want to render hate speech a crime, we should ask ourselves a number of questions beyond mere freedom of expression. What constitutes hate speech, and who gets to define it (the state, a judicial board, etcetera)? Are some groups more deserving or needful of protection than others? If so, what would be the criteria for classifying a group as "oppressed?" Until we can answer these questions satisfactorily (and in my view, we haven't yet and most likely never will), we should be careful about criminalizing speech that some people might find offensive.

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