[krrrh]

This comment confuses me. There’s plenty of reasons to wring hands over a new law, and the existence of an old law doesn’t change this. It’s well known that the old hate speech laws have existed for 20 years, and also that they have been unevenly applied (not investigating extreme hate from Imams for instance), and harassing journalists for engaging in basic acts of exposition (publishing the Mohammed cartoons).

The concern is obviously that the new provisions don’t do anything to address these issues, and seem likely to exacerbate these concerns by expanding the scope and the range of punishments in a way that could chill speech, especially since the law doesn’t adequately define its terms leaving that up to unelected bureaucrats.

This law also follows on the heels of bill C-10 which similarly leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how popular youtube channels will be regulated. So Canadians hackles are already up.