Tag: freedom of expression

Consequences

Are demands that speech not be punished just a childish attempt to escape consequences?

A recent piece by Max Fawcett in the National Observer invokes a number of common tropes about freedom of expression. One, which I address here, is that when people are punished for what they have said or written, they have “not been denied that right. But neither [have they] been excused from the potential consequences associated with exercising it”. The implication is that it is just as absurd ― perhaps childish ― to try to escape punishment for one’s words as it is to escape the consequences of one’s actions.

The context of Mr. Fawcett’s piece is a dispute between Jordan Peterson and the Ontario College of Psychologists, which ― like pretty much everything else Dr. Peterson-related ― I don’t care about. But this response to all manner of speech-related controversies is widespread. It is, in these terms, particularly favoured on the social justice-minded left: see, for instance, the comments of a man whom the BBC describes as engaged in “publicly shaming” people for real or perceived transgressions against progressive propriety and “ultimately getting the people ‘cancelled'”: “These times of doing whatever you want without consequences are over”, the BBC quotes him as saying. But, as Cathy Young points out just today in The Bulwark, the political right, especially in the United States, is also quite willing to visit retribution on those who say and write things it doesn’t like, even as it poses as a defender of free speech.

Why is the claim that punishment for the expression of ideas is just “consequences” and, as such, must be accepted by any reasonable adult wrong? Because the whole point of freedom ― of any freedom, not only freedom of expression or speech, but also freedom of religion, of assembly, or association for example ― is precisely freedom from certain kinds of consequences. And it is only, I think, with freedom of expression that anyone would dispute this. Imagine saying “you’re free to go to Church on Sunday, but you must accept the consequence of being fined for it”; or, “you’re free to form a union, but you must accept that you’ll be jailed if you do”. This is arrant nonsense, and everyone will instantly recognize that it is just that. The freedom of expression is no different: it is also, of course, an immunity from at least some kind of consequences attaching to its exercise.

Now, the real issue ― and again, this is true of freedoms other than that of expression ― is what consequences, imposed by whom, are off-limits. At one end of the spectrum, almost everyone agrees that it’s wrong for government to jail people for what they say, at least in most circumstances; it’s wrong to fine people for going to this or that house of worship, or to beat them up for holding a peaceful protest in a public square. At the other end, contrary to the caricature prevalent in social-justice circles, very few people, if anyone really, think that pure criticism is a forbidden consequence for speech. Again, other freedoms are mostly similar, though there is, it seems to me, a tendency in some quarters to view any criticism of (some) religious beliefs as categorically wrong; indeed, there is a perplexing overlap between the people who believe this and those who argue that even state-imposed or -backed punishment for speech is just “consequences”.

The difficult questions, when it comes to expression, are of two main sorts. First, what are the exceptions to the general principle that the state should not punish people for what they say? I don’t think anyone who accepts the legitimacy of the state denies that there are some exceptions. Fraud is committed through speech or writing, for example. But there are issues on which reasonable people disagree in good faith; hate speech is a classic example. I’m inclined to say, though, that this category of hard questions is actually a comparatively narrow one.

The bigger and perhaps more socially provocative one has to do with the vast middle part of the spectrum between state-imposed punishment on the one hand and pure criticism on the other. Does an employer have the right to fire an employees for their politics? Can a social media platform censor a story it considers to be disinformation, or indeed ban a user inclined to share such stories? Should people be able, not just to criticise someone who they think has crossed a line that should not be crossed in polite society, but to seek to get them fired from their job? How about doxxing them?

What makes these questions even more fraught is that each of them, in truth, is at least two questions, if not more. Does an employer have a legal right to fire an ideological dissident? Does an employer have a moral right to do it? And, perhaps, even if there is a moral right, should a good employer forbear from exercising it? And so on. Far too many people confuse the legal and moral issues, or think that the law should precisely track (their) morality, but here as elsewhere there may be perfectly good reasons for law and morality to diverge.

This is the stuff the “culture war” about freedom of expression is largely about; the legal debates, less so, but increasingly in the last few years. There are genuinely difficult questions there. Questions about line-drawing, for example, such as when, if ever, what would be perfectly legitimate criticism coming from one person becomes a morally reprehensible pile-on when engaged in by a large group. Questions about clashing rights, such as those that arise in relation to employers or social media, who have expressive interests of their own to set up against those of employees and users. Questions about the nature and relevance, or not, of market competition and monopoly. And no doubt many others.

When such difficult questions are debated, as they should be, nobody is served by amalgam, clichés, and misdirection. The tired claim that punishment for speech at the hands of the state ― or for that matter at the hands of an online mob ― is just “consequences” is all of these things. Yes, of course a punishment is a consequence, but if we believe in freedom of expression at all, we are committed to the principle that not every consequence that can be visited on a person for what he or she says or writes is just. What we want to know is what consequences are just, and when. Let’s talk about that.

I will try to address a particular set of questions related to this, also based on Mr. Fawcett’s piece ― specifically, on his claim that “[t]here is nothing unjust or illiberal about professional organizations enforcing codes of conduct for their members” ― in a separate post. Stay tuned.

The Woke Dissent

The thinking animating the dissenting opinion in Ward’s case would destroy freedom of expression in the name of equality and safety

As promised, in this post, I come back to the dissenting opinion in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse), 2021 SCC 43. I commented (mostly) on the majority opinion in my last post. In that post, I referred to The Line‘s editorial by Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney (possibly paywalled, but you should subscribe!), which addressed the case, and especially the dissent, in some detail. Ms. Gerson and Mr. Gurney write that “[t]here’s an incredible amount of popular modern discourse seeping into judicial reasoning” in the dissent ― that “culled plausible-sounding legalese from Twitter logic”. That’s not a bad way of putting it.

I will put it slightly differently. The dissent is, in a word, woke. And I don’t mean “woke” as a generic insult. Nor do I mean, incidentally, that Mr. Gabriel is a snowflake. As noted in my last post, I think he deserves sympathy on human level, though not the protection of the law for his claim. Rather, what I mean by calling the dissent woke is that it embraces a number of specific tenets of contemporary social-justice ideology, which, if they become law ― and remember that they were one vote away from becoming law ― would be utterly corrosive to the freedom of expression.

For one thing, the dissent erases the line between words and actions, so that disfavoured words are treated as deeds and therefore subjected to vastly expanded regulation. Justices Abella and Kasirer write:

We would never tolerate humiliating or dehumanizing conduct towards children with disabilities; there is no principled basis for tolerating words that have the same abusive effect. Wrapping such discriminatory conduct in the protective cloak of speech does not make it any less intolerable when that speech amounts to wilful emotional abuse of a disabled child. [116]

In what is going to be a theme of my comment, this twists the meaning of words beyond recognition; conduct is conduct and speech is speech. Using words instead the proverbial sticks and stones is not just a disguise. It’s the better part of civilization. The law relies on a distinction between words and actions all the time. This is a principle, and a general one, but it has also been a cornerstone of the law of the freedom of expression in Canada since the early days of the Charter. In my last post, I gave the majority grief for disregarding precedent and doctrine. The dissent does the same, only much worse.

Besides, as I once noted here, the negation of the distinction between speech and conduct often combines with a belief that violence against some politically heretical group or other is permissible into the toxic belief that “[w]hat one says, or does, is expression; what one’s opponents say, or do, is violence”. This, in turn, means that law dissolves into a raw competition for political power, with the ability to decide whose expression will stripped of its “protective cloak” and proscribed as the prize.

Another way in which the dissent is woke is its wilful blindness to the context in which words appear. Like critics dragging a writer for the words of an unsavoury character, Justices Abella and Kariser claim that

Mr. Ward remarked that he defended Mr. Gabriel from criticism only until he found out that he was not dying, at which point he took it upon himself to drown him. This implies that it would be too burdensome for society to accept Jérémy Gabriel in the mainstream permanently and that ultimately society would be better off if he were dead. 

No, it really doesn’t. Mr. Ward’s persona is, as The Line‘s editorial puts it, that of That Asshole. He is making an obviously hyperbolic statement, a joke ― not remarks at a political meeting. The joke was in poor taste, to be sure, but in no non-woke person’s mind is it a statement about what is best for society. Insofar as Mr. Ward’s comedy was meant as a social commentary, it targeted taboos around joking about certain people or subjects ― not the supposed burdens, or otherwise, of disabled persons for society.

A further symptom of coddling wokeness in the dissenting opinion is its bizarre insistence that Mr. Ward bullied Mr. Gabriel. Justices Abella and Kasirer claim that “[i]n a 2012 interview, Mr. Ward himself acknowledged the view that his comments constituted bullying”. [196] But this isn’t quite true. They quote the relevant interview passage early on in their opinion: it is the interviewer who suggests that Mr. Ward’s jokes amounted to bullying. Mr. Ward himself says “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a good point.” [126] Not quite an admission, by my lights. But, in any case, the idea that comments about a person whom one has never met and will likely never meet, over whom one has no actual power, with whom, indeed, one shares nothing at all can amount to bullying are just twisting the meaning of this emotionally charged word. Nobody can defend bullying of course, just as nobody can, say, defend racism, and Justices Abella and Kasirer again take a leaf out of the woke playbook to redefine words in a way that makes their decision seem beyond debate.

Now, Mr. Gabriel’s classmates seem to have bullied him, and to have used Mr. Ward’s jokes in doing so. But it is only on a woke view that Mr. Ward can be liable for their behaviour. He did not commission or instigate their actions. He doesn’t even know about their existence. Again this is reminiscent of calls for the “cancellation” of a work of fiction or some scientific article on the basis that, regardless of its author’s intentions, it will contribute to discrimination by others.

Then again, Justices Abella and Kasirer wouldn’t agree that Mr. Ward had no power over Mr. Gabriel. A preoccupation with power hierarchies imagined to run entirely along the lines of “privileged” and “oppressed” demographic categories is perhaps the clearest sign of their opinion’s wokeness. They write that

that there is value in the performance of comedy and in criticizing those in power in society. But in the circumstances of this case, condoning the humiliation and dehumanization of a child, let alone one with  a disability, would fly in the face of the very idea of the public interest. … Mr. Ward’s message about Mr. Gabriel, albeit one said in jest, was that he was disposable and that society would be better off without him. Unlike other “sacred cows” targeted by Mr. Ward, Jérémy Gabriel fell victim to a stark power imbalance here. [215-16; paragraph break removed]

This focus on power imbalance explains, I suspect, the seeming inconsistency between the position of the dissenters in Ward and in  Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34 highlighted by Christopher Bredt. (Recall that the the same four judges dissented in both cases.) The Lawyer’s Daily reports that Mr. Bredt, who was part of the legal team that

represented the intervener Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said he finds it incongruous that the minority in the Ward appeal comprises the same four judges who earlier this month vigorously defended freedom of expression to the extent that they would have struck down the Ontario government’s downsizing of wards during Toronto’s municipal election.

The incongruity resolves itself once you account for the fact that in City of Toronto the “stark power imbalance” ran the other way ― the free speech claimants were the less powerful side, and hence the good side in the moral framework that decides worth according to where a person or group stands in an a priori power hierarchy.

In the real world, power hierarchies are not so neat ― which is one of many reasons why they should not be given nearly as much importance as the woke worldview attaches to them. As The Line editors point out,

this is a kid who became famous in all of Quebec, sang, and was enthusiastically cheered by entire hockey stadiums. He performed in front of some of the most famous people in the world. And we’re to believe that the ugly jokes of one stand-up comedian was enough to undo all of this honour and fame? That Mike Ward is uniquely responsible for a disabled child’s ostracization from his peer group and suicidal thoughts? 

Justices Abella and Kasirer insist that a celebrity must be treated like everyone else, and does not lose his rights. That’s true ― in a liberal legal system where everyone has equal rights to begin with. In a system whose starting point is not equality, but people’s relative positions in power hierarchies, insistence that cultural prestige, sympathy, and (in other cases) even wealth are to be disregarded are absurd. But it too is characteristic of the specifically woke take on power and inequality.

Like some others who have written about Ward, I find it frightening that this opinion got four votes at the Supreme Court. Had the dissenters found another colleague to agree with them, it’s not only “edgelord comedians”, in The Line‘s words, that would have come under the potential fire of human rights tribunals. Make a disparaging remark about a member of any of the protected groups that references that membership? There, you’re a law-breaker. Make fun of Greta Thunberg in a way that touches on her Asperger’s and selective mutism ― remember, it doesn’t matter that you’re not targeting her for that? Don’t be surprised if the equality bureaucracy comes calling. (I am grateful to my friend and sometime co-author Akshaya Kamalnath for this example.)

And remember, too, that under Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms “political convictions” are a prohibited ground of discrimination as well. Of course, for the foreseeable future, mockery of literal Nazis is undoubtedly safe. You wouldn’t expect human rights tribunals condemn right-thinking members of society! But that’s only good until the day “common good” conservatives get their chance to appoint these tribunals’ members. Then, I’m afraid, the boundaries of permissible discourse will shift.

But abuse of anti-discrimination law as an instrument of censorship would be only the beginning. If speech can be conduct; if the intent of a speaker doesn’t matter for attributing liability for words; if public criticism or mockery can be bullying; if speech can be censored based on how people over whom the speaker has no control might respond to it, or if the right to be free from censorship depends on one’s place in a dogmatic hierarchy of oppression; then hardly any restriction on freedom of speech cannot be justified. It will all be done in the name of safety and equality of course. But it will be no less the end of the freedom of speech, and of democracy, for all that.

It Ends Well

Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s narrow but seemingly decisive rejection of a right not to be offended

Last week, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse), 2021 SCC 43. By a 5-4 majority, it quashed an award of damages a human rights tribunal had granted to Jérémy Gabriel, a child celebrity, whom a well-known comedian, Mike Ward, had cruelly mocked. As Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney put it in The Line’s editorial (possibly paywalled, but you should subscribe!)

Ward … decided to become That Asshole, the edgelord comedian who pointed out that the kid wasn’t very good. In a few stand-up bits, Ward called the child ugly, and noted that the performances were tolerable only because he thought the singer’s condition was terminal. Nice guy. (Paragraph break removed)

The tribunal, and the Québec Court of Appeal found that this amounted to discrimination in the exercise of Mr. Gabriel’s right to “the safeguard of his dignity” under section 4 of Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a.k.a. the Québec Charter. The majority of the Supreme Court resoundingly holds otherwise.

Instead of my usual blow-by-blow summary and comment, I will offer some more condensed thoughts on a few striking aspects of this case. While the most important thing about Ward is what, if anything, it means for the freedom of expression, there are a few other things to mention before I get to that. In this post, I mostly focus on the majority opinion. I will shortly post separately about the dissent.

The Human Face

Because I will argue that the majority decision is correct, and indeed that it was very important that Mr. Gabriel not win this case, I want to start by acknowledging that he has had it very hard. Mr. Ward’s jokes at his expense were cruel. Mr. Gabriel did suffer, greatly ― we are told that he even tried to kill himself at one point. I think we can wonder whether the connection between these things is all that strong. I’m not persuaded by the dissent’s imputation to Mr. Ward of the full responsibility for Mr. Gabriel’s bullying by his classmates. We can also argue that anti-discrimination law ― perhaps any law ― isn’t the solution. But we have to recognize that a person has been in a lot of undeserved pain, and a person who, even before this case, had not had it easy in life.

The Court

As already noted, the Court is narrowly divided. The Chief Justice and Justice Côté write for the majority, with Justices Moldaver, Brown, and Rowe concurring. Justices Abella and Kasirer write for the dissent, joined by Justices Karakatsanis and Martin. For those keeping score at home, this is the exact same alignment as in the recent decision in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34. Indeed, even the authorship of the opinions overlaps: in City of Toronto, the Chief Justice wrote with Justice Brown, while Justice Abella wrote for the dissenters.

I’m old enough to remember, as they say, how smugly self-satisfied Canadian commentators were, just a few years ago, at the consensus reigning at our Supreme Court, in contrast to the US one always splitting 5-4. To be sure, two cases do not make a trend, but I think it’s pretty clear that on the Supreme Court as it has recently been constituted there is ― though there are always exceptions ― a somewhat cohesive group consisting of Justices Côté, Brown, and Rowe, and perhaps an even more cohesive group led by Justice Abella, with Justices Karakatsanis, Martin, and Kasirer. The Chief Justice and Justice Moldaver are the swing votes. It remains to be seen how, if at all, Justice Abella’s retirement is changing this, but in the meantime, our Supreme Court has been fractured along lines that can be predicted. This is not necessarily bad. But let’s not be smug.

One odd thing to add is that, whereas in City of Toronto majority and dissent were ― by the standards of the Supreme Court of Canada ― at each other’s throats, here they studiously ignore one another. I’m not sure which is better, but the contrast between cases argued and decided just a month apart, by identical alignments, and with overlapping opinion authorships, is striking.

The Case

One uncomfortable question I have is: should the Supreme Court have taken this case at all? Let me take you straight away almost to the end of the majority judgment, where we learn, for the first time, the following

[I]n light of the Tribunal’s finding that Mr. Ward [translation] “did not choose Jérémy because of his handicap” but rather “because he was a public personality” (Tribunal reasons, at para. 86), it must be concluded that the distinction was not based on a prohibited ground. This conclusion on its own is sufficient to dispose of the appeal. [91]

Everything else that the Court has said and that I’m about to discuss ― that’s just obiter dicta. The tribunal made a basic logical mistake, which, as the majority explains, the Court of Appeal then glossed over. That was, of course, unfortunate. But it’s not the Supreme Court’s role to correct basic logical mistakes by tribunals or even courts of appeal. They’re there to develop the law. And develop the law they do ― in a way that, if the majority is right (and I think it is), was pressing and necessary. But also in a way that, by the majority’s own admission, is beside the point in this case.

I think this raises the issue of the Supreme Court’s role in our constitutional system. Where is the line between developing the law in deciding cases, as we expect them to, and developing the law by making big pronouncements that are unnecessary to decide cases? Should a court refrain from doing the latter, or may it properly seize on the opportunities that present itself to it to provide important guidance to lower courts? I have no firm views on any of this, but I think the questions are worth thinking about. (For some related musings, see here.)

Jurisdiction

Back to the very beginning of the majority’s reasons:

This appeal … invites us … to clarify the scope of the jurisdiction of the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse … and the Human Rights Tribunal … with respect to discrimination claims based on the … Quebec Charter. [1]

Clarify the… what? Yes. That word. The majority uses it several times in the course of its reasons. In particular, it speaks of “the distinction that must be drawn with respect to jurisdiction over, on the one hand, an action in defamation and, on the other, a discrimination claim in the context of the Quebec Charter“. [22]

This is odd. A mere two years ago, in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, all of the Ward majority judges signed an opinion that not only eliminated jurisdictional questions as a distinct category of correctness review, but seemed to endorse scepticism at the very “concept of ‘jurisdiction’ in the administrative law context”. [66] Vavilov said that what might previously have been thought of as jurisdictional questions are legal questions like all others, subject to reasonableness review, except when the respective jurisdictions of two administrative bodies must be demarcated.

One recent example of this reasoning is the decision of the Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice in Morningstar v WSIAT, 2021 ONSC 5576, about which I have written here. The Court roundly rejected the argument that, as I summarized it

the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should be policed in much the same way as, Vavilov said, “the jurisdictional boundaries between two or more administrative bodies”, [63] ― that is, by hav[ing] the court ensure the boundary is drawn correctly.

I thought ― and still think ― that that was a correct application of Vavilov. Ward, though, says that there is indeed a jurisdictional boundary between administrative tribunals and courts. I don’t think this is consistent with Vavilov. Nothing turns on this here because the case gets to the courts by way of statutory appeal rather than judicial review, and ― under Vavilov ― the correctness standard applies to all legal questions in such circumstances. But the tensions inherent in Vavilov, including in its attempt to rid Canadian administrative law of the fundamental concept of the law of judicial review are becoming apparent. (Co-blogger Mark Mancini has made a similar observation in the latest issue of his newsletter.)

Interpretation

One of the things the majority is right about is that Ward is, among other things, a case about interpretation. It requires the courts to make sense of a somewhat peculiar statutory scheme, which protects, among other things, rights to the freedom of expression and to the “safeguard of [one’s] dignity”, says that “the scope of the freedoms and rights, and limits to their exercise, may be fixed by law”, and protects equality in “the exercise and recognition” of these rights, rather than as a general self-standing right. This is not an easy exercise and I won’t go into all the details, but I will make a few comments.

The majority deserves credit for trying to work out an independent meaning for the right to the safeguard of one’s dignity. As it notes, dignity is a very tricky concept ― and the Supreme Court itself has tried to avoid putting too much weight on it in other contexts. But here it is, in the text of the Québec Charter, a statute that binds the courts. It will not to do to simply find violations of dignity when other rights are violated in particularly egregious ways, as Québec courts had done. The Québec Charter makes it a distinct right, and the courts must treat it as such. At the same time, they have to give it defined contours. The majority seeks to do so by stressing the importance of the safeguard of dignity, to which the right is directed:

Unlike, for example, s. 5 [of the Québec Charter], which confers a right to respect for one’s private life, s. 4 does not permit a person to claim respect for their dignity, but only the safeguarding of their dignity, that is, protection from the denial of their worth as a human being. Where a person is stripped of their humanity by being subjected to treatment that debases, subjugates, objectifies, humiliates or degrades them, there is no question that their dignity is violated. In this sense, the right to the safeguard of dignity is a shield against this type of interference that does no less than outrage the conscience of society. [58]

What the majority does is a careful and, I think, pretty convincing reading of the statutory text. Good.

Some things the majority says are not so good. For instance: “the interpretation of this provision must be refocused on its purpose by considering its wording and context”. [55] No, no, no. Interpretation should be focused on text understood in context. Purpose can sometimes help a court understand the words and enrich its understanding of the context, but it should not be the focus of interpretation. And then, there is this:

This Court’s jurisprudence also establishes “that mere differences in terminology do not support a conclusion that there are fundamental differences in the objectives of human rights statutes” … It follows that, as long as this is not contrary to the usual rules of interpretation, symmetry in the interpretation of the various instruments that protect human rights and freedoms is desirable. [68; quoting Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse) v Montréal (City), 2000 SCC 27, [2000] 1 SCR 665, [47]]

What are we to make of this? If usual rules interpretation are to prevail, differences in terminology must make a difference, if not to the objectives then to the effects of human rights as of any other statutes. And the idea that differences in wording don’t matter because objectives are key to interpretation is specifically rejected in the majority opinion in Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147-0732 Québec inc, 2020 SCC 32 ― signed onto by the same five judges who are in the majority in Ward (even as it is endorsed by the concurrence).

Between the jurisdiction issue and this, I cannot help but wonder whether their Lordships remember what they said last year. Or are they trying to say that we are supposed not to? This stream of inconsistent pronouncements ― by the same people! ― reveals, at best, a lack of attention to legal doctrine and craft. It is very disappointing.

Freedom of Expression

I finally come to the meat of the case. Here too, I want to praise the majority for getting things fundamentally right, but also to criticize them for saying things along the way that are doubtful or even wrong in themselves, or inconsistent ― without explanation ― with important precedent.

Let me start with a quick note from the “judges are not philosophers” file. The majority’s discussion of the freedom of expression begins with the assertion that it, “[l]ike the right to the safeguard of dignity … flows from the concept of human dignity”. [59] Perhaps. But in the next paragraph the majority quotes Joseph Raz’s claim that “a person’s right to free expression is protected not in order to protect him, but in order to protect a public good, a benefit which respect for the right of free expression brings to all those who live in the society in which it is respected”. [60] These are two quite different views of the foundations and purposes of the freedom of expression ― one deontological, the other utilitarian. Perhaps nothing turns on which of these is correct in this case, but if so, the majority shouldn’t be making these philosophical declarations at all. And I suspect that in some cases the choice might actually make a difference. The majority’s approach is muddled and unhelpful.

Now for some good things. This, especially: “freedom of expression does not truly begin until it gives rise to a duty to tolerate what other people say”. [60] This is the key to so many disputes about freedom of expression. Speech is not harmless. It can hurt. It can propagate falsehoods. It can inflame base passions. But freedom of expression means sometimes having to tolerate such things ― just like freedom of assembly means having to tolerate noisy protests, and freedom of religion means having to tolerate heresy and blasphemy ― even when their cost falls on particular groups or even individuals.

The majority adds that “[l]imits on freedom of expression are justified where, in a given context, there are serious reasons to fear harm that is sufficiently specific and cannot be prevented by the discernment and critical judgment of the audience”. [61] This sets a fairly high bar to limits that will be considered justified. It also acknowledges that the audience has its share of responsibility in appreciating troublesome words. Courts assessing a limit on the freedom of expression should not assume that citizens are, by default, unthinking and gullible playthings for the tellers of tall tales. This is also good and important. Assuming away all critical sense among the citizens would help justify all kinds of restrictions on speech, including, and perhaps especially, in the political arena. It is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a self-governing, responsible citizenry.

But this insistence sits uneasily, to say the least, with the Court’s position in Harper v Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827. There, the majority said that

The legislature is not required to provide scientific proof based on concrete evidence of the problem it seeks to address in every case. Where the court is faced with inconclusive or competing social science evidence relating the harm to the legislature’s measures, the court may rely on a reasoned apprehension of that harm. [77]

This is contrast to the Harper dissent’s concern that “[t]here [was] no demonstration that” the limits on “third party” spending at issue were “required to meet the perceived dangers of inequality, an uninformed electorate and the public perception that the system is unfair”. [38] By my lights, Ward‘s insistence on serious reasons to fear specific harm, as well as on audience discernment is much more in tune with the Harper dissent. Because I regard Harper as an abominable decision, I am happy to see Ward go in a different direction. But there is no comment in Ward on how these cases interact. Again, it’s as if the judges don’t remember what the law says, though at least Harper is a much older case that Vavilov and Québec Inc.  

All that said, the substance of the majority’s decision is right and reassuring (or it would be reassuring if more than five judges had signed on). The majority insists that the right to the safeguard of one’s dignity most not be “vague” or given “a scope so broad that it would neutralize freedom of expression”. [80] It stresses the objective nature of the test for whether this right is breached and rejects the modified objective standard of “a reasonable person targeted by the same words”, because “[t]hat approach results in a shift toward protecting a right not to be offended, which has no place in a democratic society”. [82] What matters is neither “the repugnant or offensive nature of the expression [nor] the emotional harm caused”, [82] but the effect of the words on listeners: would “a reasonable person, aware of the relevant context and circumstances, … view the expression … as inciting others to vilify [its targets] or to detest their humanity on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination” [83] and would “a reasonable person would view the expression, considered in its context, as likely to lead to discriminatory treatment of the person targeted”? [84]

All this is the more important since the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Québec Charter is very broad and includes “political convictions”. As I have written here, “even if we accept the need to protect vulnerable minorities from hate speech targeting them, I struggle to see what makes it necessary to extend this protection to members of political parties or movements”. Protecting people from mockery, let alone hurt feelings, based on their political views is incompatible with lively democratic debate. However much we can wish for such debate to usually be civil, I think it’s a mistake to insist that it always must be, and certainly a grave mistake to put government officials in charge of deciding whether it is sufficiently civil on any give occasion.

The insistence on the need for objective assessment and the clear rejection of a right not to be offended will, I hope, be the key takeaway from Ward. For them, we can forgive the majority opinion its many flaws. That there can be no right not to be offended in a society that proclaims its commitment to the freedom of expression and to democracy might have been self-evident ten years ago, but it evidently isn’t anymore. The dissent offers us a glimpse of what a world in which this truth isn’t recognized looks like. I will focus on it in a forthcoming post.

Don’t Make Idiots into Martyrs

The Double Aspect view on why an Alberta judge was wrong to order that pandemic deniers promote the expert consensus

This post is co-written with Mark Mancini

In Alberta Health Services v Pawlowski, 2021 ABQB 813, a judge of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench sentenced a preacher opposed to anti-pandemic public health measures and his brother to steep fines for contempt of court. The defendants had ostentatiously breached court orders requiring them to comply with various public health requirements, and there is no question that they deserved punishment. But the remarkable thing about Justice Germain’s ruling, and the reason, we suspect, why it made the news, was an additional component of his order. “[W]hen … exercising [their] right of free speech and speaking against AHS Health Orders and AHS health recommendations, in a public gathering or public forum (including electronic social media)” the defendants

must indicate in [their] communications the following:

I am also aware that the views I am expressing to you on this occasion may not be views held by the majority of medical experts in Alberta. While I may disagree with them, I am obliged to inform you that the majority of medical experts favour social distancing, mask wearing, and avoiding large crowds to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Most medical experts also support participation in a vaccination program unless for a valid religious or medical reason you cannot be vaccinated. Vaccinations have been shown statistically to save lives and to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms.

This order manifests a deeply disturbing, not to mention likely unconstitutional, disregard for freedom of expression. And Justice Germain’s judgment suffers from other deep flaws on its way to this untenable conclusion, which make his decision all the more troublesome.

We should start by saying that, on a personal level, we have very little sympathy for the defendants’ cause. While reasonable people can always debate the specific measures being taken by the authorities―even to combat a pandemic―there is nothing reasonable in denying the seriousness of the situation, or in opposing vaccinations, which are our only hope to get out of this mess. And while both of us have written with some sympathy about civil disobedience, as practiced by people such as David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, civil disobedience involves acceptance of punishment―not flagrant disregard of the court system.

But the court system, for its part, should not beclown itself, even when dealing with jackasses. Justice Germain, alas, sets the tone quickly. “Alberta”, he writes,

has been and is in its worst shape ever concurrently with these sanction hearings. It is not an overstatement that Pastor Artur Pawlowski and his brother Dawid Pawlowski have contributed to this ominous health situation by their defiance of the health rules and their public posturing, which encourages others to doubt the legitimacy of the pandemic and to disobey the AHS Health Orders designed to protect them. [5]

The idea that the defendants deserve punishment not only for breaking the rules and the court orders enforcing them (which, to repeat, they do), but also for what they say and for what others make of what they say runs through Justice Germain’s reasons and taints his decision. Much of the opinion concerns what the judge personally thinks of the conduct of the defendants. But whatever one’s personal views, a judge cannot justify a decision that forces someone to agree with a particular law. The decision, in this sense, is incompatible with a free society where people can be required to comply with the law, but not to support it, as a majority of the Supreme Court held in National Bank of Canada v Retail Clerks’ International Union, [1984] 1 SCR 269.

One example of Justice Germain letting his personal views get the better of his judicial duty is his indignation at the fact that the defendants present themselves as martyrs. He is especially upset because one of them has done so “on a speaking tour in the United States where he parlayed his title as a pastor and the fact that he had been arrested for holding a church service into a rally cry that attracted like-minded individuals”. [33] For Justice Germain,

It is disappointing that Pastor Pawlowski had to air his grievances about Alberta in another country. Leaders and statesmen don’t do that. During his sanction hearing, AHS played some trip reports in which Pastor Pawlowski oozes hubris, while relishing in his notoriety. He got to take a picture with a governor of a U.S. state. He is proud of what he asserts is the love of the U.S. people for him. Love he implies he is not feeling in Canada. [34]

In a free and democratic society, no citizen is legally required to be a patriot. Punishment for not loving one’s country in accordance with its authorities’ idea of what such love ought to look like is a hallmark of dictatorial regimes. It is distressing to see a Canadian judge failing to comprehend this.

In a slightly different vein, Justice Germain is also angry that Mr. Pawlowski’s “accuses the Court of being a ‘tool of the government’” and so “show[ing] no civic understanding of the independence of the Courts and their distance from the government”. [35] To the extent that this anger contributes to Justice Germain’s choice of punishment for the defendants, it comes perilously close to being a sanction to the old contempt by “scandalizing” the court―that is, by making statements tending to bring the court into disrepute or to undermine its authority. The Ontario Court of Appeal held that this offence was unconstitutional in R v Kopyto, 62 OR (2d) 449, all the way back in 1987.  

Next, Justice Germain observes that, even as “Pastor Pawlowski makes much virtue of his status in Canada as an immigrant from Poland”, he also “describes health authorities as Nazis”. [36] To the judge, “[i]t defies belief, that any immigrant from Poland (having studied the atrocities of the Nazis in that country) could identify a doctor of medicine trying to keep people alive as a Nazi”. [36] At human level, one might sympathize with Justice Germain, but coming from a judge as part of reasons for sentencing, the suggestion that an immigrant might be held to some kind of special standard due to his origins strikes us as troubling.

These personal views take centre stage in Justice German’s opinion. The law is forgotten; only briefly does Justice Germain seem to acknowledge the relevance of freedom of expression to the case before him―and in a way that shows that, in truth, he just doesn’t get it. He says that “Pastor Pawlowski is entitled to express views about the government, the Courts, and AHS, but he must do it in a respectful, hate-free way that does not breach AHS Health Orders”. [37] To be sure, freedom of expression doesn’t extend to breaching court orders. But nor does it have to be exercised in a “respectful, hate-free way” as a matter of law (though as a matter of morality, we usually hope the freedom of expression is exercised in this way). One might, of course, refer to the US Supreme Court’s well-known decision in Cohen v California, 403 US 15 (1971), the “fuck the draft” case, where Justice Harlan famously wrote that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric”. (25) But, closer to 2021 Alberta in time as well as in jurisdiction, let us note Justice Miller’s opinion for the Court of Appeal for Ontario in Bracken v Town of Fort Erie, 2017 ONCA 668, where it was argued that a loud protest was tantamount to violence and hence unprotected by the Charter’s guarantee of the freedom of expression:

A person’s subjective feelings of disquiet, unease, and even fear, are not in themselves capable of ousting expression categorically from the protection of s. 2(b) [of the Charter].

…

A protest does not cease to be peaceful simply because protestors are loud and angry. Political protesters can be subject to restrictions to prevent them from disrupting others, but they are not required to limit their upset in order to engage their constitutional right to engage in protest. [49-51]

Justice Germain insists that

Pastor Arthur Pawlowski, his brother Dawid Pawlowski, and others that I dealt with in the sanction hearings are on the wrong side of science, history, and common sense on this issue. The growing number of dead and dying in North America from COVID-19 infection cannot be ignored, nor defined as a false reality. [38]

This is true. But the consensus view of science, history, and common sense, even to the extent that it exists, as here, is not and must not be an official ideology that all citizens are required to endorse. For this reason, while Justice Germain’s sentencing the defendants to a fine and community work is justified, his further order quoted at the beginning of this post is not. In a free and democratic society, which is what the Charter says Canada is, citizens are not required to make themselves into instruments of government propaganda when they engage in political or religious speech. Nor are they required to confess to their own heterodoxy, as Justice Germain would have the defendants do. It is for others to make that showing against them.

We might understand what Justice Germain did if he had framed his opinion in traditional legal terms. But his findings on s. 2(b) of the Charter, such as they are, are couched in personal opinion and conjecture. He does not conduct any analysis about freedom of expression of the sort that we have come to expect from Canadian courts. Indeed, he does not refer to precents on freedom of expression either. When it comes to determining whether his order is justified under s. 1, the only way Justice Germain addresses proportionality is through a comparison of his remedy to an order of jail time. He says that “many reasonable individuals will view the sanctions that I impose to be more beneficial in repairing the harm Pastor Pawlowski and his brother did to society than a short period of jail that will perhaps martyr them in the eyes of their followers”. [43] Yet this is not the test. Our constitutional law, in order to afford speech protection, does not count how many “reasonable people” support a particular exercise of speech or a particular way of repressing it. Not to mention, this statement does not consider, at all, the severity of the impact on the defendants’ freedom of expression—no matter how distasteful we might find their message.

We should note that Canadian case law on the subject of compelled speech is relatively sparse and nowhere near as robust as one would wish it to be. While National Bank, to which we refer above, rightly described attempts to coerce support for existing laws as totalitarian, Slaight Communications v Davidson, [1989] 1 SCR 1038 upheld an arbitral order that an employer state certain facts, found by the arbitrator, in a letter of recommendation provided to a former employee. The majority distinguished National Bank on the basis that Slaight concerned compelled statements of fact, rather than of opinion.

Ostensibly the order given by Justice Germain is framed as a factual statement. There is thus at least an argument that it is valid under Slaight. But this matter is also different from that case―even assuming that it was correctly decided. Justice Germain’s order applies whenever the defendants are speaking on a broad swathe of issues of pressing public concern and, contrary to what was the case in Slaight, the defendants vigorously―if not at all reasonably―dispute the facts they are required to convey. Justice Germain’s order requires them to undermine their own messaging and so to expose themselves to public ridicule if they wish to speak at all.

Thus, even as he gets on his high horse about science, common sense, and the importance of respecting court orders, Justice Germain simply ignores the constitution which constrains his own powers. In denouncing the defendants’ quest for martyrdom and, seemingly, punishing them for their opinions, he is in fact making them into martyrs. Indeed, thanks to him, they are now martyrs for free speech rather than only for covidiocy. We hope that there is an appeal, and the Justice Germain’s decision is reversed. So long as it stands, it is a much more serious affront to the dignity of the Canadian judiciary than anything the defendants―whom we do not mean to excuse―have done.

And that, perhaps, is the important point. COVID-19 has challenged all Canadian institutions in different ways. The challenges have been significant. Courts specifically have been asked to rule  that, at times, public necessity outweighs personal freedoms. We believe COVID-19 presents a number of these situations quite starkly. But when courts must make this judgment, they should do so by predictably applying established doctrines, and in a way that gives due respect to the rights and freedoms at issue. When the judicial analysis is perfunctory, or advanced as part of a personal opinion, public belief in the courts as guarantors of a government of laws, not men, is understandably diminished. This should worry us.

Correct, but Wrong

Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the challenge to Ontario’s interference in the Toronto municipal elections

Last week, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in Toronto (City) v Ontario (Attorney General), 2021 SCC 34, upholding a provincial statute cutting the number of wards and councillors in Toronto in the middle of a municipal election campaign. The Court divided 5-4, with Chief Justice Wagner and Justice Brown writing for the majority (also Justices Moldaver, Côté, and Rowe) and Justice Abella for the dissent (also Justices Karakatsanis, Martin, and Kasirer).

The majority gets the outcome right. As both co-blogger Mark Mancini and I have written here in response to the Superior Court’s decision in this case, the province was well within its rights to enact what was, by all accounts, a disruptive law of questionable usefulness. But the majority’s reasoning is underwhelming. It’s not bad on the first issue: that of an alleged violation of the freedom of expression. But it is just rubbish on the second: that of the constitutional principle of democracy. The majority’s attempt to synthesize and cabin the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on unwritten principles is a complete failure.

The first issue is whether the reorganization of the Toronto city council after the beginning ― though well over two months before the end ― of the municipal election campaign was a limitation of the freedom of expression of the candidates who had started campaigning under the old system. The majority holds that it was not. As a result, it does not get to the question of whether a limitation would have been justified.

For the majority, the matter falls to be considered as a claim for the provision by the state of a particular platform for expression, rather than as a (more usual) claim that a person is being prevented from conveying their ideas to others. As the majority explains,

the City does not seek protection of electoral participants’ expression from restrictions tied to content or meaning … ; rather, it seeks a particular platform (being whatever council structure existed at the outset of the campaign) by which to channel, and around which to structure, that expression. [32]

In other words, this is a “positive” rather than a “negative” right claim. The majority reformulates the test for such a claim as whether it is

grounded in the fundamental Charter freedom of expression, such that, by denying access to a statutory platform or by otherwise failing to act, the government has either substantially interfered with freedom of expression, or had the purpose of interfering with freedom of expression? [25]

The majority adds that “substantial interference with freedom of expression requires “effective preclusion” of “meaningful expression”, which is “an exceedingly high bar that would be met only in extreme and rare cases”. [27] 

The City has not cleared this bar. The majority states that “the candidates and their supporters had 69 days — longer than most federal and provincial election campaigns — to re‑orient their messages and freely express themselves according to the new ward structure”, with “no restrictions on the content or meaning of the messages that participants could convey”. [37] There was a meaningful election campaign, albeit a different one than had originally been planned.

The majority also rejects the City’s alternative argument on freedom of expression, to the effect that it implies a guarantee of “effective representation” which the Supreme Court originally articulated in the context of section 3 of the Charter. This provision protects the right to vote in federal and provincial ― not municipal ― elections. For the majority, “[e]ffective representation is not a principle of s. 2(b), nor can the concept be imported wholesale from a different Charter right”.

The dissent, for its part, begins by stressing the disruptiveness of the reform imposed by the province, and the lack of justification for it ― indeed, the new electoral structure had been considered by the City itself, and rejected. It goes on to argue that

When a democratic election takes place in Canada, including a municipal election, freedom of expression protects the rights of candidates and voters to meaningfully express their views and engage in reciprocal political discourse on the path to voting day. … When the state enacts legislation that has the effect of destabilizing the opportunity for meaningful reciprocal discourse, it is enacting legislation that interferes with the Constitution. [115]

This is what the province has done here, as the dissent emphasizes by quoting at great length the statements of candidates impacted by the disruption.

The dissent also argues strenuously that the majority is wrong to see the dispute as being about the positive provision of a platform for expression, and so to apply a higher threshold of seriousness to the question of whether the freedom of expression has been infringed. Indeed, in its view

There is no reason to superimpose onto our constitutional structure the additional hurdle of dividing rights into positive and negative ones for analytic purposes. Dividing the rights “baby” in half is not Solomonic wisdom, it is a jurisprudential sleight-of-hand that promotes confusion rather than rights protection. [155]

The province has also failed to advance a justification. This means that the impugned law contravenes the Charter.

As noted above, I think that the majority is basically right, notably in treating the claim advanced by the city as being for the provision or maintenance of a specific set of arrangements within which expression is to be channelled. The freedom of expression is the ability to say things one thinks, and not to say things one doesn’t. It’s not a guarantee that what one says will be interesting or relevant to anyone. If a province goes dry tomorrow, a great deal of alcohol advertising will have been rendered pointless, as will a great deal of campaigning for moderate drinking, research into the health benefits of red wine, and what not. But prohibition will not infringe the Charter. (It will be abominable, but constitutional.) It is the same when a province renders pointless a great deal of campaigning for a municipal election. Stupid, but constitutional, as Justice Scalia used to say.

The dissent’s response to this would be, I think, that the context of an election is different, but that really just proves the majority’s point. The claim at issue is about a specific platform for expression. The dissent’s analogy with Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority v Canadian Federation of Students — British Columbia Component, 2009 SCC 31, [2009] 2 SCR 295 also doesn’t work. That case was concerned with a ban on political advertisements on city buses, and the issue, as the majority explained, was not access to the platform in question ― that is, advertising on buses ― but a restriction on the content of what could be said on that platform. Here, the situation is exactly the opposite. The province hasn’t changed how it regulates the content of municipal election campaigns, but instead has shut down the old platform for expression and substituted for it a different one.

My objection to the Chief Justice’s and Justice Brown’s reasons has to do not with what they do, but with some of the things they say. They describe the threshold at which the “positive” freedom of expression is engaged as “an exceedingly high bar that would be met only in extreme and rare cases”. This may be tantamount to reading this aspect of the freedom out of the doctrine entirely ― but they also say that it has, in fact, some value. This language of “extreme and rare cases” isn’t necessary here, and I don’t think it provides useful guidance for the future; the words are too imprecise and subjective. The other troubling aspect of the majority’s reasons is its mention ― seemingly in passing, but I suspect that it is with at least a measure of approval ― of the fact that the Charter‘s guarantee of freedom of expression “has been interpreted so broadly that the framework has been criticized for setting too low a bar for establishing a … limitation”. [16] This has nothing to with this case, since that broad framework traditionally traced to Irwin Toy Ltd v Quebec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 SCR 927, doesn’t apply. The Supreme Court is already far too accepting of limitations on the freedom of expression, and its possible willingness to restrict the freedom’s scope bodes ill.

I turn now to the second issue, that of whether interference with an ongoing municipal election is an unconstitutional violation of the democratic principle. This principle, which the City suggested required the provision of “effective representation” in the municipal context, as well as in the cases governed by section 3 of the Charter, would serve as a limit on the legislature’s ability to enact laws in relation to “Municipal Institutions in the Province” pursuant to section 92(8) of the Constitution Act, 1867.

The majority is unimpressed. It says that unwritten principles such as democracy “are … part of the law of our Constitution, in the sense that they form part of the context and backdrop to the Constitution’s written terms”. [50] However,

because they are unwritten, their “full legal force” is realized not in supplementing the written text of our Constitution as “provisions of the Constitution” with which no law may be inconsistent and remain of “force or effect” under s. 52(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. Unwritten constitutional principles are not “provisions of the Constitution”. [54]

They can serve two functions: on the one hand, they can be used as aids in interpreting constitutional text; on the other, they can fill textual gaps. What they cannot do, the majority says, is directly invalidate legislation. To hold otherwise would be to “trespass into legislative authority to amend the Constitution”, [58] and to make an end-run around section 1 and 33 of the Charter, which allow, respectively, reasonable limitation of rights and legislative override of some of them, including, relevantly for this case, the freedom of expression.

To support its claim that principles have only interpretive and suppletive effects, the majority reviews various cases that might suggest otherwise. Notably, it dismisses the dissent on the legal question in the Patriation Reference, Re: Resolution to amend the Constitution, [1981] 1 SCR 753, which the Supreme Court later unanimously endorsed in Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 SCR 217, on the basis that “while the specific aspects of federalism at issue there may not have been found in the express terms of the Constitution, federalism is“. [52] As for the Provincial Judges Reference, Reference re Remuneration of Judges of the Provincial Court (PEI), [1997] 3 SCR 3, it stands, the majority says, for the proposition that “where the constitutional text is not itself sufficiently definitive or comprehensive to furnish the answer to a constitutional question, a court may use unwritten constitutional principles as interpretive aids” [65] and “to fill a gap where provincial courts dealing with non‑criminal matters were concerned”. [66]

In this case, “the unwritten constitutional principle of democracy cannot be used to narrow legislative competence” over municipalities, which is “plenary” and “unrestricted by any constitutional principle”. [80] Moreover,

The constitutional status of municipalities, and whether they ought to enjoy greater independence from the provinces, was a topic of debate during patriation … In the end, municipalities were not constitutionalized, either in amendments to the Constitution Act, 1867 or by reference in the democratic rights enshrined in the Charter. … Were the unwritten democratic principle applied to require all elections to conform to the requirements of s. 3 (including municipal elections, and not just elections to the House of Commons or provincial legislatures), the text of s. 3 would be rendered substantially irrelevant and redundant. [81]

The dissent, again, sees matters differently. It points out that unwritten principles have been recognized as binding both in Canada and in other “Parliamentary” [166] constitutional systems. (The dissent thus does not mention the United States.) It insists that

unwritten principles are our Constitution’s most basic normative commitments from which specific textual provisions derive. … Constitutional text emanates from underlying principles, but it will not always be exhaustive of those principles. In other words, the text is not exhaustive of our Constitution. [168]

The dissent rejects the majority’s insistence on the primacy of the text. Unwritten principles are just as important. It is they that “assist in developing an evolutionary understanding of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution” ― that is, they “make[]” the constitutional living “tree grow”. [179] As for the majority’s argument based on section 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982, it “is a highly technical exegetical exercise designed to overturn our binding authority establishing that unwritten constitutional principles are a full constitutional partner with the text”. [183]

For the dissent, in “rare” cases “unwritten principles may be used to invalidate legislation” that “elides the reach of any express constitutional provision but is fundamentally at odds with our Constitution’s ‘internal architecture’ or ‘basic constitutional structure'”. [170] As the dissent sees things, this is what happened in the Provincial Judges Reference, as well as in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v British Columbia (Attorney General), 2014 SCC 59, [2014] 3 SCR 31. That said, the dissent does not say anything about the application of the democratic principle in this case, which it has already resolved on the Charter argument.

By my lights, this is the judicial equivalent of a Leafs-Bruins game, which both ought to lose, but one has to win, just because. Now, I think that the majority’s conclusion is correct as a matter of both precedent and principle. As the Supreme Court held in British Columbia v Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd, 2005 SCC 49, [2005] 2 SCR 473, it would be wrong to apply an unwritten principle so as to expand the scope of a Charter right so as to directly contradict clear text. Imperial Tobacco concerned the protection against retroactive legislation, which the Charter reserved to criminal law. Here we are dealing with the right to vote, and its love child “effective representation”, which the Charter reserves to federal and provincial, not municipal, elections. So far, so good. But only so far.

The rest of the majority’s analysis ― which, of course, is quite unnecessary, because the passage from paragraph 81 quoted above is enough to dispose of this issue ― rests on wholly untenable distinctions. The majority says that federalism is unlike the other constitutional principles ― indeed, that it is not a constitutional principle but part of the constitution’s “structure” ― because “federalism is” “found in the express terms of the Constitution”, notably the division of powers between the Dominion and the provinces. But the same is true of democracy and of the rule of law. We can point to some provisions, such as sections 1 and 3-5 of the Charter for democracy (as well, of course, as all the provisions having to do with the House of Commons in the Constitution Act, 1867), and sections 9-11 of the Charter and 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867 (again, this is not an exhaustive list) to say that these principles too are found in the express terms of the Constitution, and hence their other “specific aspects .. not found” in those express terms can nonetheless be judicially enforced.

Similarly, the majority’s distinction between alleged “gap-filling” in the Provincial Judges Reference “where provincial courts dealing with non‑criminal matters were concerned” and invalidating laws on the basis of unwritten principles is humbug. So far as these courts were concerned, the only reason the laws reducing their judges’ salaries were invalid was unwritten principle.

Last but not least, as Mark has noted, the majority doesn’t even begin to address  Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, with its clear statement that

Where a court reviews the merits of an administrative decision … the standard of review it applies must reflect the legislature’s intent with respect to the role of the reviewing court, except where giving effect to that intent is precluded by the rule of law. [23; emphasis added]

In other words, Vavilov says that the Rule of Law principle does invalidate legislation to the extent that (though only to the extent that) it would require an incompatible standard of review.

The majority also says that “The unwritten constitutional principle of the honour of the Crown is sui generis” because, it seems, it “arises from the assertion of Crown sovereignty over pre‑existing Aboriginal societies … and from the unique relationship between the Crown and Indigenous peoples”. [62] But the other principles, such as federalism (a sine qua non for Canada’s existence) and democracy and the Rule of Law (1688 and all that), can also boast “unique” historical pedigrees.

The majority’s other arguments fare just as badly as its attempts at splitting hairs with a blunt axe. Applying principles to invalidate laws does not trespass into constitutional amendment if principles were already part of the constitution as enacted, in 1867 and in 1982. While some applications may inappropriately compromise section 33 of the Charter ― which is arguably one reason why Imperial Tobacco approach to cases to which the Charter already speaks is correct ― others will not. Principles are not reducible to expanded forms of Charter rights. Federalism is of course the obvious case in point. As for section 1 of the Charter, foreign precedents, such as the Australian jurisprudence on the implied freedom of political communication, suggest that something like a proportionality analysis can be combined with unwritten principles. Again, though, principles are not just a beefed-up Charter. Perhaps the best argument the majority advances is the one based on the word “provisions” in section 52(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, but ― without endorsing the dissent’s rant about “technical exegetical exercises” ― I think that it is undermined by section 52(2)’s suggestion that “the Constitution of Canada” is not limited to textual sources, to say nothing of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence to this effect.

A word, finally, on the dissent. It advocates not only for living constitutionalism, which as readers will know I think is a misbegotten interpretive approach, but also, more precisely, for what I have described as “constitutionalism from the cave“. This is the view that the constitution’s text is just a pale shadow of the true constitution, which judges alone can, over time, discover and impose. As much as I think the majority’s attempt to swat constitutional principles away is unsound as a matter of both doctrine and, sorry, principle, this is not a tenable alternative.

Here we are, then, at the last chapter of this unfortunate saga. It began with institutional vandalism by the Ontario legislature, and concludes with a Supreme Court decision that, despite narrowly reaching the right outcome, may yet do considerable damage of its own. The majority’s statements on freedom of expression are worrying, and its discussion of constitutional principles ― admittedly, a difficult subject (I have had more to say on it here) ― is almost entirely wrong-headed. The dissent, meanwhile, is largely unmoored from the law throughout. The judicial end is not better than the legislative beginning.

Disinformation and Dystopia

Whose disinformation efforts should we really fear―and why we should also fear regulation to stop disinformation

Mis- and disinformation about matters of public concern is much in the news, and has been, on and off, for the last five years. First kindled by real and imagined interference in election campaigns, interest in the subject has flared up with the present plague. Yesterday’s developments, however, highlight the dangers of utterly wrongheaded responses to the issue, one that would will lead to a consolidation of government power and its use to silence critics and divergent voices.

First, we get a hair-raising report by David Pugliese in the Ottawa Citizen about the Canadian Armed Forces’ strong interest in, and attempts at, engaging in information operations targeting Canadians over the course of 2020. Without, it must be stressed, political approval, and seemingly to the eventual consternation of Jonathan Vance, the then-Chief of Defence Staff, the Canadian Joint Operations Command sought to embark on a “campaign … for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information” about the pandemic. In their view “the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience … and to bolster government messages”. They also saw the whole business as a “learning opportunity” for what might become a “routine” part of their operations.

Nor is this all. At the same time, but separately, “Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario”, including (but seemingly not limited to) from people associated with Black Lives Matter. This, supposedly, was “to ensure the success of Operation Laser, the Canadian Forces mission to help out in long-term care homes hit by COVID-19 and to aid in the distribution of vaccines in some northern communities”. A similar but also, apparently, unrelated effort involved the public affairs branch of the Canadian Forces, which want its “officers to use propaganda” peddled by “friendly defence analysts and retired generals” and indeed “information warfare and influence tactics”, “to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts” and “to criticize on social media those who raised questions about military spending and accountability.”

And in yet another separate incident,

military information operations staff forged a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose in a particular region of the province. The letter was inadvertently distributed to residents, prompting panicked calls to Nova Scotia officials … [T]he reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers.

To be blunt, there seems to be a large constituency in various branches of the Canadian forces for treating the citizens whom they are supposed to defend as enemies and targets in an information war. Granted, these people’s enthusiasm seems to outstrip their competence ― but we know about the ones who got caught. We can only hope that there aren’t others, who are better at what they do. And it’s not a happy place to be in, to be hoping that your country’s soldiers are incomptent. But here we are.

Also yesterday, as it happens, the CBA National Magazine published the first episode of a new podcast, Modern Law, in which its editor, Yves Faguy, interviewed Ève Gaumond, a researcher on AI and digital technologies, about various techniques of online persuasion, especially during election campaigns. These techniques include not only mis- and disinformation and “deep fakes”, but also advertising on social media, which need not to untruthful, though it may present other difficulties. Mr. Faguy’s questions focused on what (more) should Canada, and perhaps other countries, do about these things.

Ms. Gaumond’s views are somewhat nuanced. She acknowledges that “social media is not the main driver of disinformation and misinformation” ― traditional media still are ― and indeed that “we’re not facing a huge disinformation crisis” at all, at present. She points out that, in debates about mis- and disinformation, “the line between truth and falsehood is not so clearly defined”. And she repeatedly notes that there are constitutional limits to the regulation of speech ― for example, she suggests that a ban on microtargeting ads would be unconstitutional.

Ultimately, though, like many others who study these issues, Ms. Gaumond does call for more and more intrusive regulation. She claims, for instance, that “[i]f we are to go further to fight disinformation”, online advertising platforms should be forced not only to maintain a registry of the political ads they carry and of the amounts the advertisers spent, but also to record “[t]he number of times an ad has viewed” and “the audience targeted by the ad”. This would, Ms. Gaumond hopes, deter “problematic” targeting. She also wants to make advertising platforms responsible for ensuring that no foreign advertising makes its way into Canadian elections, and tentatively endorses Michael Pal’s suggestion that spending limits for online advertising should be much lower than for more conventional, and more expensive, formats.

Ultimatelty, though she doesn’t “think that we should tackle speech per se”, Ms. Gaumond muses that “[w]e should see how to regulate all platforms in a way that we can touch on all possible ways that disinformation is spread”. This means not only spending limits but also that “[y]ou cannot pay millions of dollars to microtarget … what you’re saying to people that believe the same thing as you do without oversight from other people, from Election Canada”. And beyond that

not only regulating social medias [sic], but also all of the environment that has created the disinformation crisis. That means education, funding and great journalism, the media ecosystem is one of the important components of why we’re not facing such a big disinformation crisis.

There are a few things to say about Ms. Gaumond’s proposals ― keeping in mind Mr. Pugliese’s report about the activities of the Canadian forces. The overarching point is the one suggested by the juxtaposition of the two: while researchers and politicians fret about disinformation campaigns carried ou by non-state and foreign actors, the state itself remains the most important source of spin, propaganda, and outright lies with which we have to contend. Unlike bots and Russian trolls, the state can easily dupe the opinion-forming segments of society, who are used to (mostly) believing it ― partly out of ideological sympathy, but partly, and it’s important to stress this, because the state is also an important source of necessary and true information which such people rely on and relay.

This means that we should be extremely wary of granting the state any power to control information we can transmit and receive. Its armed agents think nothing of manipulating us, including for the sake of propping up the government of the day. And it is no answer that we should grant these powers to independent, non-partisan bureaucracies. The Canadian Forces are also an independent, non-partisan bureaucracy of sorts. I’m pretty confident that they weren’t trying to manipulate opinion out of any special affection for the Liberal Party of Canada, say. They are just on the side of order and stability, and any civilian bureaucratic structure would be too. It would also be likely to be tempted to squish questions about its own budget and functioning, and to develop an unhealthy interest in people it regards as trouble-makers. Civilians might be more suspicious of right-wing groups than of BLM, but the ones have the same right to free speech and to privacy as the others.

Another thing to note is the confusion among the different issues clustered under the general heading of concerns about mis- and disinformation. Concerns about the targeting of advertising may be valid or not, but their validity often has little to do with the truthfulness of the ads at issue. Concerns about foreign influence may be magnified when it is being exercised through misleading and/or microtargeted ads, but they are not necessarily linked to the issues either of disinformation or of microtargeting. Spending limits, again, have little to do with disinformation. No doubt a knowledgeable researcher like Ms. Gaumond would be more careful about such distinctions in a paper than she sometimes is in the interview with Mr. Faguy. But can untutored policy-makers, let alone voters, keep track?

In light of all this, Ms. Gaumond’s suggestions, though sprinkled with well-intentioned caveats about “not saying ‘you cannot say that'”, should give us serious pause. Even increasing disclosure requirements is far from a straightforward proposition. As Ms. Gaumond notes, Google simply refused to carry political ads rather than set up the registry the government required. Facebook and Twitter might follow if they are forced to make disclosures that would reveal the functioning of their algorithms, which they may have good reasons for keeping out of their competitors’ sight. More fundamentally, the idea that all (political?) speech should at all times be tracked and monitored by the state does not strike me as healthy. Political debate is a fundamental right of citizens, not something we can only engage in on the government’s sufferance. We are not children, and government ― including Elections Canada ― is not a parent who needs to know what we are getting up to online. Last but not least, because of the government’s track record of spin and deceit, it cannot be trusted with educating citizens and funding media in a way that would solve the problems of the “environment that has created the disinformation crisis”. The solution must come from the civil society, not from the state.

Lastly, let me note in my view Ms. Gaumond may be far too optimistic about the willingness of Canadian courts to uphold constitutional limits on government regulation of electoral speech. Their record on this issue is generally abysmal, and the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the leading case, Harper v Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827, is itself misinformed and speculative. If government actors take the initiative on these matters, the courts will not save us.

The issue of mis- and disinformation is at least much a moral panic as a genuine crisis. As Ms. Gaumond points out, the trouble is to a considerable extent with traditional media and political forces outside anyone’s easy control; as Mr. Pugliese’s reporting makes clear, we must fear our own government at least as much as any outside force. Yet fears of new technology ― not to mention fear-mongering by media and political actors whose self-interest suggests cutting social media down to size ― mean that all manner of new regulations are being proposed specifically for online political discussions. And the government, instead of being reined in, is likely to acquire significant new powers that will further erode the ability of citizens to be masters in their own public and private lives.

Unstuck

Ontario’s Superior Court strikes down the anti-carbon tax-sticker law, but still doesn’t get freedom of expression

Last year, I wrote about Ontario’s Federal Carbon Tax Transparency Act, 2019 (the “Act”) ― both about the disgraceful way in which it became law and about its unconstitutional speech compulsion, which I argued should not even be considered as a potentially justified limitation of the freedom of expression under section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because it was tantamount to the imposition of an official ideology. The constitutionality of the Act was in fact challenged by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and, last week, in CCLA v Ontario (Attorney General), 2020 ONSC 4838, the Superior Court of Ontario struck it down.

At first glance, this is a welcome development for the freedom from compelled speech. Not only is the compulsion invalidated, but Justice Morgan’s approach might seem to bear some resemblance to the one I had proposed: in effect, he denies the government the chance to justify the Act under section 1. But look at Justice Morgan’s reasons more closely, and they turn out to be very narrow. Indeed, they could be used to support significant speech compulsions in the future.

This is not altogether surprising. Justice Morgan was constrained by the Court of Appeal’s reasoning in McAteer v. Canada (Attorney General), 2014 ONCA 578, 121 OR (3d) 1, upholding the constitutionality of the requirement that applicants for the Canadian citizenship swear an oath to bear “true allegiance” to the “Queen of Canada”, which I have described as a “parade of horribles“. And indeed it was none other than Justice Morgan who had written the first instance decision in that case. While it wasn’t quite as bad as that of the Court of Appeal, it did not evince much understanding of the harms of compelled speech either.

The Act required all gas stations to display a prescribed sticker alerting customers to the amount of the “federal carbon tax” levied on the gas they were purchasing. The evidence adduced by the CCLA showed that it was meant as a not-so-subtle intervention in the 2019 federal election campaign, in which the Ontario government supported the anti-carbon-tax position of the federal Conservatives and opposed the pro-carbon-tax Liberals. This partisan dynamic is a key factor in Justice Morgan’s reasoning.

Before getting to the substantive issues, Justice Morgan must address the Attorney General’s objection to the CCLA’s standing to challenge the Act. As it turns out, the CCLA has tried to enlist actual gas stations as plaintiffs or co-plaintiffs, but none would come forward. Justice Morgan explains that “retailers, with a view to market forces rather than to politics and constitutional law, have been loath to participate in this case” due to its political valence. [40] But the record to which Justice Morgan alludes suggests that this is not quite accurate: politics, in the shape of a fear of regulatory retaliation, seems to have been a motivating factor too. Be that as it may, Justice Morgan grants the CCLA public interest standing to pursue the case.

He must next decide whether the sticker requirement limits the freedom of expression protected by section 2(b) of the Charter. To this end, he applies the test set out in the Court of Appeal’s McAteer decision:

The first question is whether the activity in which the plaintiff is being forced to engage is expression. The second question is whether the purpose of the law is aimed at controlling expression. If it is, a finding of a violation of s. 2(b) is automatic. If the purpose of the law is not to control expression, then in order to establish an infringement of a person’s Charter right, the claimant must show that the law has an adverse effect on expression. In addition, the claimant must demonstrate that the meaning he or she wishes to convey relates to the purposes underlying the guarantee of free expression, such that the law warrants constitutional disapprobation. (McAteer, [69])

Justice Morgan finds that the sticker is indeed a form of expression. Yet in his view its purpose is not to control expression. In particular, he takes the view that “it would be difficult for the government to control expression by compelling certain messages … but not restricting others”. [50] Objectors remain free “to disavow” [52] the message they are compelled to voice, for example by posting disclaimers; hence their expression is not “controlled”. However, it is adversely impacted by the Act.

The key point for Justice Morgan is that, unlike the citizenship oath in McAteer, the sticker does not promote democracy and the Rule of Law. Indeed, it does not even serve to truthfully inform. Justice Morgan attaches some importance to the sticker’s use of the “carbon tax” nomenclature, which in his view is at odds with the Court of Appeal for Ontario’s opinion, in Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2019 ONCA 544, 146 OR (3d) 65, that the policy at issue is not a “tax” within the meaning of the Constitution Act, 1867. Moreover, the sticker says nothing of the ways the money levied as carbon tax is distributed, in part to taxpayers, in part to provinces. As a result, it is a form of “spin”. [60] By requiring it, “the government is not so much explaining a policy [as] making a partisan argument”. [63] And “[b]y using law for partisan ends, the Ontario legislature has enacted a measure that runs counter to, rather in furtherance of, the purposes underlying freedom of expression”. [65]

This limitation of the freedom of expression is not justified under section 1 of the Charter. Indeed, unusually, Justice Morgan finds that the Act lacks a pressing and substantial purpose ― the first, and normally very low, hurdle a statute must meet to be upheld under section 1: “While truly informing the public about the components that make up the cost of gasoline would be a pressing and substantial purpose, promoting the Ontario governing party over the federal governing party is not.” [69] The Act is purely partisan rather than a real “policy choice”. [69] Justice Morgan goes through the other steps of the justified limitation analysis by way of an obiter, but it all comes down to his concern with partisanship. The Act is invalid.

Right outcome, but the reasoning is another matter entirely. Justice Morgan’s approach is illogical and conflicts with the Supreme Court’s precedents, notably inthat it collapses the two stages of the Charter analysis that the Supreme Court has always sought to keep distinct: first, the question of whether a right is being limited; second, that of whether the limitation is justified.

First, to say, as Justice Morgan does, that one’s expression is not controlled because one can disavow something one has been coerced to say is perverse. The fact that one is forced into disavowals shows sufficiently that what one is saying is not what one chooses to say.

The political context that Justice Morgan’s reasons depict highlights this problem. As he explains, it appears that gas station owners would rather keep quiet and sit out the political conflict about the carbon tax. This is their right ― the obverse of the freedom of speech is the freedom to stay silent. If they are forced into disavowals and denials, the gas stations will inevitably be taking sides in the political conflict they are trying to avoid ― if anything, this will be much more obvious than if they merely comply with the Act and display the required stickers. Of course, such a response is not what the Ontario legislature envisioned, but it would be caused entirely by the Act, and so it is absurd to deny that the Act amounts to a form of control of the gas stations’ expression.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s precedents mandate no such twisted inquiry. Ostensibly the most important freedom of expression case (I have argued here that it is only “leading from behind”), and the source of the “control” language used in McAteer and by Justice Morgan is Irwin Toy Ltd v Quebec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 SCR 927. The distinction between legislation that has control of expression as purpose and that which doesn’t is described as follows in the joint opinion of Chief Justice Dickson and Justices Lamer and Wilson:

If the government’s purpose is to restrict the content of expression by singling out particular meanings that are not to be conveyed, it necessarily limits the guarantee of free expression. If the government’s purpose is to restrict a form of expression in order to control access by others to the meaning being conveyed or to control the ability of the one conveying the meaning to do so, it also limits the guarantee. On the other hand, where the government aims to control only the physical consequences of certain human activity, regardless of the meaning being conveyed, its purpose is not to control expression. (974)

Applied to speech compulsions rather than censorship, this means that any legislation that “singles out particular meanings” that must be communicated, or forces an audience to listen to a communication, necessarily has control of expression as its purpose. Such legislation limits (or, as the Supreme Court often says, prima facie infringes) the freedom of expression. There is no need to consider effects, let alone to ask the purely subjective question of whether they are worthy of “constitutional disapprobation”.

This inquiry into effects and “disapprobation” in effect forces claimants to show that the law which compels their speech is not justified, and more specifically that it pursues an end worthy of judicial condemnation. The success of such an argument in this case should not blind us to the fact that this is a high hurdle. As noted above, this approach collapses the usual section 1 test of whether a limitation on a right is justified into the threshold inquiry of whether a right is limited in the first place, and it means that the claimant rather than the government bears the burden of proof. It follows that Justice Morgan’s streamlined approach to the section 1 analysis is rather less supportive of freedom of expression than one might think. The important work is already done by the time he gets there, as he has, in effect, found that the Act is unjustifiable. Had he not so found, he would have upheld it without ever getting to section 1, just as the Court of Appeal upheld the citizenship oath in McAteer.

Last but not least, Justice Morgan’s emphasis on partisanship as the fundamental problem with the Act is also misguided. For one thing, as tempting as it might be to say that partisanship can never be a sufficient justification for restricting Charter rights, the Supreme Court has in the past upheld laws that protect political incumbents from criticism, notably in Harper v Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 33, [2004] 1 SCR 827. I think the Supreme Court was wrong to disregard the partisan valence of that legislation, but this shows that it will often be difficult to disentangle partisanship from other, specious considerations. Indeed, Justice Morgan himself suggests that a statute that is “a hybrid of policy and partisanship” would deserve to be treated as fully legitimate.

More importantly, Justice Morgan’s understanding of partisanship is very narrow. It does not encompass the promotion of a state ideology that rises, if perhaps only slightly, above the “horse race” version of partisan politics. He has nothing but sympathy for governmental “protection and promotion of Canada’s national and legal culture” [58] by means of forcing those who did not agree with this culture to voice loyalty to it. Needless to say, there is a political dimension to a “national and legal culture”, especially when this culture is coercively imposed by the state, even though Justice Morgan is oblivious to this. To him the distinctions between partisanship and high principle appear obvious. To the rest of us living in 2020, they are anything but.

Consider an obvious example: the late and unlamented “statement of principles” requirement that the Law Society of Ontario tried to impose on its members. Certainly its supporters argued in terms promoting a certain high-minded vision of social and legal culture (indeed they spoke of a “culture shift”). But then again, as we now know, there is a bitter partisan division over the issue within the ranks of the Law Society’s membership. So how would Justice Morgan approach the question of the constitutionality of the requirement? And would his approach be different now than it would have been before the partisan cleavage was revealed by the success of the StopSOP campaign in the 2019 Bencher election? Whatever we might think of the “statement of principles” or its opponents (of whom I was one), or of compelled speech more broadly, I hope we can agree that this is not a reasonable way of addressing such an important issue.

Of course it is a good thing that the Act is no more, and that the Ontario government, if it wants to continue its anti-carbon-tax propaganda campaign, will have to do it by itself, rather than by means of conscripting third parties. I have argued here that such ideological conscription is wrong when it serves to supposedly advance some rights-protecting agenda. It is no less wrong, obviously, when its aim has to do with fiscal and environmental policy. Governments have plenty of resources at their command. If they want to propagandize, they have no need to get unwilling individuals to do it for them.

Yet, the state of the law on compelled speech, and indeed on freedom of expression more generally, in Ontario at least, is cause for concern. It’s not just that few restrictions on freedom of expression are ever struck down. More importantly, the courts fail to understand what free speech means, and why it matters. Justice Morgan’s reasons for striking down the Act illustrate these failures just as much as his and the Court of Appeal’s earlier reasons for upholding the citizenship oath did.

Ministers of Truth

A proposal to criminalize epidemic-related “misinformation” is dangerous

The CBC’s Elizabeth Thompson reports on a rather startling development: the federal government is, apparently, giving serious thought to introducing censorship to discussions of the present plague. More specifically, there is talk of “legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people”, based on a member of the UK House of Commons proposal “for laws to punish those responsible for spreading dangerous misinformation online about the COVID-19 pandemic”. At least some of the opposition seem keen, Ms. Thompson quoting an NDP Member of Parliament as claiming that “Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and it is about protecting the public”, and reassuring us, I suppose, that “[t]his is not a question of freedom of speech”.

Actually, it is very much a question of freedom of speech. The Supreme Court invalidated an earlier prohibition on the speading of “false” news in R v Zundel, [1992] 2 SCR 731, and for good reason. Such prohibitions mean that government telling us what we are and what we are not allowed to say. Say something the government deems, in the words of the same honourable gentleman, to “interfere with the efforts of our frontline medical workers”, and suffer punishment. This is a limitation of the freedom of speech on any plausible definition of that concept, and for a Member of Parliament to pretend otherwise is not only an illustration of the politicians’ habitual mendacity but, more specifically, a rather ironic way of getting the public used to the idea of meting out punishment for statements that fail to live up to a standard of truth.

It is far from clear just what these restrictions are meant to accomplish. The CBC report quotes a spokesperson from the Communications Security Establishment, an intelligence agency, as warning about “cybercriminals and fraudsters” who “encourage victims to visit fake web sites, open email attachments and click on text message links” that purport to provide health information. But fraud, for example, is already a crime; there is no need for “extraordinary measures” to prohibit it, or for broadly defined bans on “misinformation”. The report also says that “Health Canada … is sending compliance letters to companies it finds making false or questionable claims about COVID-19”. It is not quite clear what sort of compliance is in question here, but presumably ― or at least hopefully ― it’s compliance with existing laws, perhaps ones having to do with advertising, or specifically advertising of health products. If so, then why is more legislation necessary?

For his part, the NDP MP tells, darkly, of “troll bot farms, state operators or … conspiracy theorist cranks who seem to get their kicks out of creating havoc”. State actors with troll bot farms at their disposal are unlikely to be deterred by Canadian legislation. At most, then, it will be targeting conspiracy theorists… and giving them more ammunition for believing the government is hiding things. Is there any evidence at all, actually, that “conspiracy theorist cranks” ― especially ones within the reach of Canadian laws, and not the one domiciled at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC ― are having a real effect on Canada’s response to the plague?

And on the other side of the scales, there will be real costs to this proposed legislation. Even if it includes the mens rea requirements of knowledge, wilfulness, and malice ― which, if applied, would result in good faith conspiracist cranks being off the hook ― the law is likely to produce chilling effects. Worse, attempts to enforce it, even if they do not ultimately lead to convictions, will target the politically unpopular, or simply those who happen for one reason or another, to incur the displeasure of police services and prosecutors. As concerning as recent stories of overzealous enforcement of “social distancing” regulations are, the problem is much more longstanding one. Readers may remember me blogging about a makeup artist prosecuted for gory videos involving no actual gore or violence whatsoever and Québec blogger who ― stupidly, to be sure ― mused about a mass shooting in the legislature, about the man who had to go all the way to the Ontario Court of Appeal to quash a municipality’s attempt to prosecute him for a solitary, non-violent protest in the town square, and about the author and publisher of a novel prosecuted for a brief and not remotely titillating description of the rape of a child. And the provisions invoked in these cases are all well-known, and not directed at dealing with a crisis. There is every chance that an emergency anti-disinformation law will result in harsh and arbitrary prosecutions. Even if the accused are ultimately acquitted, they will have undergone considerable stress and expense in the meantime. And, again ― for what?

Even in the short term, the harm of a law against plague-related “disinformation” is likely to outweigh what little good it might do. But the real damage it will do will occur in the medium and long term, as it becomes a template for widespread criminalization of statements deemed to be contrary to this or that state policy. The British MP whose ideas are inspiring the Canadian proposals is apparently drawing his own inspiration from “Germany’s laws governing online hate speech or France’s legislation countering disinformation during election campaigns”. And the report itself notes that the federal

government set up an elaborate system to watch out for attempts to disrupt last year’s federal election through disinformation, including a committee that brought together several departments and a special group chaired by the clerk of the Privy Council to sound the alarm.

Once the plague is over, it will be all too tempting to declare something else the next great public emergency, and to repurpose, instead of abolishing, the censorship mechanisms that allow government to silence those who question or undermine its response ― even if stupidly.

If there is there one thing we’ve learned from events of barely a year ago, it’s that clerks of the Privy Council are not always imbued with a great respect for constitutional propriety, or immune to the temptation to shill for their political masters. I would not trust one of them with the job of a Minister of Truth. Nor would I trust the public health authorities, which themselves at times seem quite confused about what the truth is. Indeed, this confusion only serves to underlie the fact that a government that is entitled to impose the truth on its subjects ― who can no longer be counted as citizens ― is also a government that is empowered to lie to them. No one, after, is allowed, and at length able, to tell the difference. The Canadian government needs to reverse course before it becomes a government of this sort.

Day Nine: Leonid Sirota

The Roads Not Taken

Sometimes, as other contributors to the symposium have discussed, dissenting opinions chart the law’s future course. But at other times, they are only signposts for alternative paths which the law passes by, perhaps for the better. And sometimes, they point to the lost straight road, from which the law tragically deviates, never to return. The three dissents below belong to this last category.

1. Justice Beetz in Slaight Communications v Davidson, [1989] 1 SCR 1038

Slaight was an unjust dismissal case, in which a labour arbitrator sided with the former employee. The issue at the Supreme Court was the arbitrator could, consistently with the Charter, require the former employer to provide the employee with a recommendation letter bearing the employer’s signature but actually entirely dictated by the arbitrator, and further to refrain from saying anything else about the former employee. The majority held that he could. After all, there was a power imbalance between employer and employee that needed to be rectified, and anyway the employer was only required to state true facts, as established by the arbitrator.

Justice Beetz saw things differently. To force a person to state “facts in which, rightly or wrongly, he may not believe” is tantamount making him “tell a lie”. The outcome of an official fact-finding process cannot be equated with an objective, all-purpose truth, let alone be elevated into a dogma everyone must believe in. The state has no more authority to make a person proclaim what it, but not he, believes to be true facts than to make him proclaim what it, but not he, believes to be true opinions. Such an order “is totalitarian in nature and can never be justified under s. 1 of the Charter. It does not differ, essentially, from the command given to Galileo by the Inquisition to abjure the cosmology of Copernicus.”

Justice Beetz also rejected the arbitrator’s order that the former employer not say anything other than what the arbitrator required about the former employee. He pointed out that “one should view with extreme suspicion an administrative order or even a judicial order which has the effect of preventing the litigants from commenting upon and even criticizing the rulings of the deciding board or court”. Finally, while condemning the former employer, Justice Beetz pointed out that “under the Charter, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are guaranteed to ‘everyone’, employers and employees alike, irrespective of their labour practices and of their bargaining power.”

All these points are important, and Canadian law is the worse for not having taken them more seriously. Most disturbingly, of course, we have seen in recent years recurring attempts to impose official dogma on dissenting individuals, whether by the Law Society of Ontario or by the governments of Canada and Ontario. But we also now have an asymmetrical Charter jurisprudence, notably in the realm of freedom of association, against which Justice Beetz correctly warned. And, while fortunately we have not seen attempts to stifle criticism of the judiciary or the administrative state by law, too many Canadian lawyers are intolerant of critiques of their judicial heroes.

2. Justice McLachlin (as she then was) in R v Keegstra, [1990] 3 SCR 697

Before she became, allegedly, the “Conscience-in-Chief” of Canada, or at least of the Central Canadian establishment, and a Chief Justice somewhat notorious for strong-arming colleagues into consensus, Justice McLachlin, as she once was, authored a number of important dissents. Famously, the one in Rodriguez v British Columbia (Attorney-General), [1993] 3 SCR 519 eventually, in effect, became Supreme Court’s unanimous position. The one in Keegstra did not. Even Chief Justice McLachlin, as she became, eventually resiled from it. That’s too bad.

In Keegstra, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the Criminal Code‘s proscription of hate speech. The four-judge majority upheld it as a reasonable limit on the freedom of expression. Justice McLachlin wrote for three (on the freedom of expression issue) dissenters. Her opinion is, perhaps, a little fastidious, and contains little in the way of memorable language, but it is thoughtful and deserves to be considered even by those who do not ultimately agree with her. Indeed, having argued the substantive case against the criminalization of hate speech elsewhere on this blog (and Emmett Macfarlane having discussed them in his contribution to this symposium), it is the more general or procedural points that I would like to highlight here.

For one thing, Justice McLachlin was fundamentally skeptical of content-based regulation of speech, and much sympathetic to the American approach, the views all such regulation with great suspicion. For another, Justice McLachlin firmly rejected the attempt to equate hate speech with violence. Violence, she stressed, involved the use of physical force, not words, even hurtful words. Furthermore, Justice McLachlin refused to read down the Charter‘s protection of freedom of expression in the name of equality: “it seems a misapplication of Charter values to … limit the scope of that individual guarantee [of freedom of expression] with an argument based on s. 15, which is also aimed at circumscribing the power of the state”. Compare this to the use of “Charter values” to impose egalitarianism on private actors and eviscerate religious freedom in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 SCR 293!

Last but not least, consider Justice McLachlin’s insistence on the need for evidence to justify limitations on the freedom of expression. While acknowledging the appropriateness of some deference to the government on this issue, Justice McLachlin nevertheless wrote that, in order to avoid trivializing the justification of limitations on rights, “in cases … where it appears that the legislation not only may fail to achieve its goal but may have a contrary effect, the Court is justified in finding that the rational connection between the measure and the objective is absent”. Good intentions are not enough ― nor is the sort of ill-informed speculation, camouflaged as “common sense”, that has all too often sufficed in subsequent Supreme Court decisions.

Had just one vote gone the other way, and this opinion become the law, our constitution may well have been in much better shape than it is, far beyond the narrow issue of hate speech. As things stand, Keegstra has to count as one of the more significant missed opportunities in the Charter‘s history.

3. Justice Moldaver in Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21, [2014] 1 SCR 433, a.k.a. l’Affaire Nadon

In l’Affaire Nadon the Supreme Court was asked to opine on the eligibility of the judges of federal courts for appointment to the Supreme Court itself, and especially that of judges of the federal courts from Québec for appointment to one the Supreme Court’s Québec seats. It was, as readers will recall, a very high-profile and controversial case (more on which in a forthcoming book by Michael Plaxton and Carissima Mathen). The sort of case, in other words, in which the Supreme Court not infrequently issues unanimous opinions “by the court”. But Justice Moldaver’s dissent prevented the majority from giving itself this ultimate institutional imprimatur.

The majority held that, while judges of the federal courts were, as former lawyers, eligible for non-Québec seats on the Supreme Court, only current lawyers or current judges of the Québec’s superior courts could take one of the Québec seats. In doing so, the majority relied heavily on the idea that judges from Québec had to be not only experts in the civil law, but also representatives of Québec’s “social values”. This, they could not do without being current, not merely former, judges of Québec’s courts or members of the Québec bar.

For his part, Justice Moldaver dissected each of the majority’s arguments, and found them empty. In particular, as a matter of text, the two provisions governing eligibility for appointment ― the general one requiring judges to be or to “ha[ve] been” judges or lawyers of at least 10 years’ experience, and the specific one providing that Québec judges are to be chosen “from among the judges of the Court of Appeal or of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec or from among the advocates of that Province” ― are “inextricably linked”. If the 10-year rule applies to Québec seats, as the majority accepted, so must the eligibility of former lawyers.

As for purpose, Justice Moldaver rejected the majority’s claim that the eligibility criteria had anything to do with the representation of Québec’s alleged “social values”. Indeed, “[i]mporting social values — 140 years later — is unsupported by the text and history of the [Supreme Court] Act”. The majority’s interpretation leads to the absurd result that judges not only of the federal courts, but also of Québec’s provincial court, are ineligible for appointment, while a lawyer who has done no more than pay his fees to the Québec bar while not engaging with the law at all could be appointed; so could a former judge who rejoined the Québec bar for a single day. While Parliament might have chosen such absurd criteria for eligibility and said so, “when interpreting a statute to determine what the relevant criteria are — i.e. what Parliament intended them to be — absurd results are to be avoided”.

As I have said here before, the majority opinion was not only wrong but pernicious; in particular, its linchpin, the concept of “social values”, was just self-important twaddle. Justice Moldaver deserves credit for exposing its vacuity. Rumour has it that he did it at some cost to himself. His fortitude, then, is to be commended as much as his legal acumen.

Honourable mentions: Justices Brown and Côté in Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 S.C.R. 293, which I described here as “probably the best opinion to come out of the Supreme Court in a long while”, and Justices Martland and Ritchie in Re: Resolution to amend the Constitution, [1981] 1 SCR 753, a.k.a the Patriation Reference, which I plan on discussing further in a post on unwritten constitutional principles in a not-too-distant future.

Day Three: Emmett Macfarlane

Among the panoply of difficult constitutional decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada, there are many occasions when the majority of justices provide reasoning that can only be described as less than compelling (some might simply say ‘wrong’). The virtues of dissenting reasons – which, even on a highly consensual court like the Supreme Court, appear in roughly one-quarter of all cases – are multiple, and include presenting a counterpoint that might sharpen the overall decision, identifying weaknesses in the majority’s reasons, and, perhaps most importantly, providing a potential foundation for a future iteration of the Court to overturn itself (indeed, this has happened in cases involving assisted dying and labour rights.) 

An invitation to identify three favourite dissents poses a considerable challenge given the long list of candidates, but I’ve managed to settle on the following:

  • Dissenting opinion in R. v. Keegstra (1990), by Justice McLachlin (as she then was). 

The Keegstra case involved a Charter of Rights challenge to the criminal law against unlawfully promoting hatred. The majority upheld the law as a reasonable limit of freedom of expression. They did so in part on the basis that hate speech “is of limited importance when measured against free expression values … the state should not be the sole arbiter of truth, but neither should we overplay the view that rationality will overcome all falsehoods in the unregulated marketplace of ideas.” Moreover, hate speech subverts the democratic process by denying dignity to at least some segments of the community. The majority is dismissive of efforts to “prove a causative link between a specific statement and hatred of an identifiable group” and even states that requiring such proof of direct harm “would severely debilitate” Parliament’s objectives. Instead, it is enough that there is a risk of harm.

McLachlin’s dissent acknowledges the intuitive kinds of harm that hate speech can generate, particularly the pain and indignity it can inflict upon its targets. Yet she rightly questions the effectiveness of criminalizing hate speech. Indeed, the law is rarely enforced in Canada precisely because it does not capture that vast majority of hateful utterances. McLachlin also notes that hatred is notoriously broad, and that identifying it requires reliance on vague or subjective understandings. Importantly, this had already resulted in dramatic state overreach. She points to instances where copies of Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were stopped by border authorities in a misguided effort to enforce the criminal provision. In another incident, arrests were made when pamphlets were distributed that happened to include the words “Yankee Go Home.”

The Keegstra dissent is a principled defence of free expression and the dangers of permitting state line-drawing on a vague basis like the promotion of hatred. McLachlin’s dissent correctly highlights the lack of evidence that hate speech laws mitigate hateful expression, the very real risk of state overreach, and the chilling effect such laws might induce. It is a shame that, when offered a chance to revisit the issue of hate speech in the statutory human rights context years later in Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v, Whatcott, McLachlin essentially disregarded her own important points of caution.

The Chaoulli case involved, at its core, a fundamental principle of the design of the health care system – equity, specifically access to health care regardless of ability to pay – and whether a provision designed to protect it, the prohibition on the purchase of private medical insurance, violated the right to life, liberty and security of the person under section 7 of the Charter. Had there been clear evidence that the provision at stake in the case contributed to waitlists and delays in access to health care, this might have been a straightforward decision. But regardless of whether one supports, as a matter of policy, a greater role for private options in health care, everyone should be concerned about the majority’s capacity to properly assess the evidence at stake in the case.

In a remarkably frank and punchy dissent, Justices Binnie and LeBel excoriate their colleagues for their overconfidence and questionable assumptions in deciding that the law ought to be invalidated. Noting that their colleagues contend the failure to provide “public health care of a reasonable standard within a reasonable time” violated rights, the dissenters ask:

What, then, are constitutionally required “reasonable health services”?  What is treatment “within a reasonable time”?  What are the benchmarks?  How short a waiting list is short enough?  How many MRIs does the Constitution require?  The majority does not tell us.  The majority lays down no manageable constitutional standard.  The public cannot know, nor can judges or governments know, how much health care is “reasonable” enough … It is to be hoped that we will know it when we see it.

The dissent rightly criticizes the majority for a lack of deference to finding of facts at the trial level, for disregarding the majority of experts, and for failing to pay heed to comparative evidence that waitlists exist in countries with private options. In a particularly noteworthy passage for a Supreme Court of Canada opinion of any kind, the dissent notes bluntly that the “resolution of such a complex fact-laden policy debate does not fit easily within the institutional competence or procedures of courts of law.” Moreover, they note that a “legislative policy is not ‘arbitrary’ just because we may disagree with it.” If only this message was one Canadian justices heeded more often.

The Remuneration reference is one of the most dramatic cases of judicial overreach in Canadian history. In it, the majority of the Court mandated “independent compensation commissions” for judges based on the “unwritten principle” of judicial independence (grounded in the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 of “a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom” and an analysis of section 11(d) of the Charter, a plain reading of which comes nowhere close to imagining the requirements invented by the majority).

Justice La Forest’s partial dissent stands as the lone voice of reason on a Court wildly stretching and misapplying the concept of judicial independence. He describes the majority’s approach as “a partial usurpation of the provinces’ power to set the salaries of inferior court judges” under the Constitution Act, 1867. That the reference involved “an issue on which judges can hardly be seen to be indifferent, especially as it concerns their own remuneration” was not lost on him either. La Forest criticizes the majority for its view that the constitutional preamble is a source for limiting the power of legislatures to interfere with judicial independence. Indeed, the idea that the British Constitution imposes such limits on Parliament is ahistorical nonsense.

La Forest also correctly notes that judicial review is “politically legitimate only insofar as it involves the interpretation of an authoritative constitutional instrument. … That legitimacy is imperiled, however, when courts attempt to limit the power of legislatures without recourse to express textual authority.” It is unreasonable, in La Forest’s view, to assume changes in judicial salaries or discussions between the two branches of government about salaries impair judicial independence.

Honourable mentions:

The dissent in Daviault (1994), against a defence of extreme intoxication for offense of general intent like sexual assault.

The dissent in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (2015), against constitutionalizing the right to strike.

The dissent in Reference re Supreme Court Act (2014), against a cherry-picked connection between the general eligibility requirements for Supreme Court justices and those for judges from Quebec.

The dissent in R. v. N.S. (2012), against the notion that requiring a sexual assault complainant to remove her niqab when testifying at trial protects the right to a fair trial.

The dissent in Sauvé (2002), in favour of deference to Parliament’s legitimate moral and philosophical objectives in denying the right to vote to those currently in prison for having committed serious crimes.