Hate Crime Prevention

"The motivation is to stop this person, and people like this person, from doing these overtly racist, bigoted remarks against any group of people, and to hold them responsible for their actions when sometimes others won't.
"We've never backed down from a bully, or let a bully succeed in bullying people that we know. We'll stand up for ourselves, we'll stand up for others, and we'll be counted."
Sandy Shindleman, president, CEO of Shindico

Sandy and Robert Shindleman are brothers, prominent Winnipeg-based Jewish real-estate developers  with Shindico, their company.  They have decided to launch a libel action as victims of hate speech. The lawsuit they launched has a purpose: to use the civil courts to put a halt to the distribution of anti-Semitic posters. Government officials declined to pursue hate-speech charges against Gordon Warren of Winnipeg.

Posters, titled "$hitlers List", began appearing on the streets of Winnipeg, and on them appeared a number of offensive anti-Semitic tropes. A list of 'influential' Jews was provided ostensibly representing a "cabal of cockroaches", with references to swindlers, dishonesty, conspiracies and "dirty money". The Shindleman brothers were named personally on the posters.

They became aware that defamatory emails were being sent along to their clients. As well, libelous claims were appearing on websites, compelling Sandy and Robert Shindleman to do something on their own to stop Gordon Warren who has admitted to having produced the posters. Their lawyer feels that if the libel action succeeds in supporting the hate-speech claim, the court could issue an injunction to prevent Mr. Warren from "making statements or comments concerning the [Shindlemans] in any manner whatsoever."

Mr. Warren's posters, along with his websites, also target the Mayor of Winnipeg, Sam Katz, alleging financial malfeasance to him, the Shindlemans and others, including the well-known-and-connected Asper national media-involved family.  Manitoba's attorney general's office had previously determined that in their opinion the posters did not meet the standard criteria for criminal hate-propaganda.

Promotion of genocide was absent from the posters, which would, evidently, have made all he difference. David Matas, senior honourary counsel to B'nai Brith Canada, a Winnipeg human-rights lawyer himself, speaks of the burden the hate-speech laws places on complainants in allowing a member of a defamed group to sue for an injunction. It is, he says, "a far from satisfactory solution."

"It is not just that an individual must complain. The individual must carry the total burden of the legal action. The person who is a member of the vilified group must bear the responsibility for the action from start to finish for the remedy to work. We isolate the victims and leave them to their own recourses", he emphasized. So that, without financial independence, not just anyone can take on such a personally onerous obligation.

Which, one supposes, is where the Human Rights councils come into the picture. Their inauguration as a means by which individuals without financial wherewithal could lodge a human rights complaint stemmed originally as a way in which society could address the issues of discrimination. And now that their original purpose has been co-opted by what are for the most part nuisance suits of hurt feelings, they have outdated themselves.

In bringing a human rights complaint of a type that refuse to recognize the country's new pluralist reality and equal rights obligations under the law, along with the need to exercise some measure of personal judgement, when a human rights council accepts a complaint, whoever lodges it is free of cost, while the person against whom the complaint has been lodged is left with expenses, along with damage to reputation.

Which simply serves to emphasize that we should use greater discretion in identifying what qualifies as a legitimate instance of hate-promotion harmful to a minority group or individual, and refuse to indulge in vanity or perverse instances of perceived insults with no depth, brought to human rights councils by those who feel entitled to exercise such a prerogative.