In Canada, media companies like The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, or CBC are liable for the content they publish and face severe penalties for publishing harmful, defamatory, or illegal content like hate speech. As a result, these media companies take great care to ensure the content they publish is legal and accurate, and in doing so, they preserve the integrity of democratic debate.
Platforms like Facebook and YouTube that host user-generated content consider themselves not responsible for users’ posts, and so far, Canadian police and prosecutors have done little to oppose that argument. This leaves platforms free to publish, amplify, recommend, and make unprecedented sums of money from content that would land most other media companies in court. Examples include child abuse, revenge pornography, incitement to suicide, or worse.
However there is reason to believe that existing Canadian law says that companies like Facebook are responsible for promoting hateful and illegal content.
The early internet held out the promise of Eden but delivered anarchy instead. Nowhere is this anarchy and its consequences more evident than on social media, particularly Facebook and YouTube.
This timely and essential paper documents how these platforms have been overrun by hate speech, threats, and other illegal or otherwise objectionable content. It makes a compelling argument that Canadian law, while certainly imperfect, is decently equipped to beat back the online harms—individual, social, and political—with which platforms like Facebook are increasingly synonymous.
This paper reveals that the platforms’ standard excuses for failing to address the scourge of illegal content—for example, claiming not to know about it until it is flagged by users—are likely insincere. Among the paper’s many striking insights is that social media platforms—by their own admission—have technology that correctly interprets even highly nuanced user-generated content before they publish it. What is most shocking is not the ghastly prevalence of illegal content online, but rather how little governments have done to crack down on the businesses that profit from it
A letter from Nova Scotia Premier, Stephen McNeil.
Like so many Nova Scotians, members of my government and I are concerned about the ongoing dispute between Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers in Southwest Nova Scotia.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the Peace and Friendship Treaties provide the Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq the right to harvest and sell fish, wildlife, and wild fruit and berries to provide a moderate livelihood.
The province recognizes and supports the legal, constitutional Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Mi’kmaq, and while many of the details surrounding the nature and extent of those rights are not clear, clarification is best addressed through open and respectful dialogue.
Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq are working as a Nation to determine what is required to implement those treaty rights, what it means, what it looks like and what rules should be put in place.
It’s good that the federal fisheries minister continues to speak with interested parties regarding this latest fishing dispute in southwest Nova Scotia. It is essential to find a path forward and that can only happen if all sides come together in a respectful and constructive way.
Discussions continue within communities and with the province on topics such as wildlife and forestry through the Made in Nova Scotia negotiation process.
Meanwhile, the province of Nova Scotia and the Mi’kmaq have entered into a number of interim collaborative management agreements, including moose population management and a forestry initiative.
Our objective is to have a safe and enjoyable moose hunt for Mi’kmaq and licensed hunters.
Any potential disruption of the legal moose hunt will be jointly addressed. While we respect the right for peaceful protests, it is illegal to interfere with a lawful hunt.
Always The Same Fight
Treaty rights in Nova Scotia included the rights for First Nations to hunt and fish whenever they wanted to. They were never limited by season. Since that time, the government continues to pick away at the rights they bargained for. Now they come with increased stipulations.
Donald Marshall Jr. was charged with three offences pursuant to the Fisheries Act and Fishery Regulations in August, 1993:
The selling of eels without a licence;
The fishing without a licence; and
The fishing during the close season with illegal nets.
What followed is considered a landmark case that establishes First Nations right to fish and hunt. Added to it, they were to be allowed to support themselves and family this way by what was called a “moderate living.” “Moderate living” wasn’t defined. Therefore, it’s up to interpretation to define it. This opens the door for further disputes as we see now.
The court will no doubt impose further restrictions on this right, and limit it some more. See:
Police in riot gear stand in a line against protesters next to a message spay painted on the Kenosha County Courthouse in August 2020 after the police shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake. — (AP Photo/David Goldman)
How should a society allow for the legitimate use of force by police? Egon Bittner, the esteemed sociologist who specialized in policing, wrote in his book Aspects of Police Work:
“As long as there will be fools who can insist that their comfort and pleasure take precedence over the needs of firemen for space in fighting a fire, and who will not move to make room, so long will there be a need for policemen.”
Bittner argued that police “were created as a mechanism for coping with the so-called dangerous classes.” But the “dangerous classes” are simply people deprived of the privileges and societal benefits enjoyed mostly by rich white men.
Let’s consider five scenarios in which force is not required and where, therefore, police are not required.
Situations in which force is unnecessary
First and foremost, it must be acknowledged that most of everyday life needs no police intervention at all — including protests and demonstrations. That’s because people overwhelmingly police themselves, as individuals, families, road users, workplaces, associations, communities and protesters.
The use of uniformed, armed officers whose modus operandi is to demand obedience to barked orders or to resort to violence is clearly a criminally abusive method of dealing with such situations.
The mother and siblings of D’Andre Campbell, who was fatally shot by police in his home in Brampton, Ont., while in a mental health crisis, are seen in this July 2020 photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Carlos Osorio
When it comes to traffic enforcement and accident resolution, police should not be involved. Speeding and other driving violations can now be monitored by technology or via public complaints. Leave accident resolution to insurance agents or other specialized officials. Where criminal driving is involved, unarmed driving violation investigators can be used.
The immediate decriminalization of the possession of narcotics and other drugs (beyond marijuana), as Canadian chiefs of police are recommending, is necessary. Addiction must be regarded as a public health issue to be dealt with by the appropriate specialists. Decriminalizing the entire illicit drug industry and regulating it like any other business would, obviously, remove the need for force by police in what is otherwise a huge area of criminal law enforcement.
Instead, we should create new organizations to handle much of what police do today.
Force doesn’t prevent or solve crimes
The use of force by police neither prevents nor solves crime for the vast majority of criminal offences. In fact, as Bittner wrote in his book:
“When one looks at what policemen actually do, one finds that criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with the frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely.”
Detective work certainly doesn’t require the use of force. It can continue to be conducted by unarmed, plainclothes specialists trained in talking to witnesses, conducting interrogations, assessing crime scenes and collecting evidence.
We’re therefore left with a problem. In Canada, spending on police in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta is rising at a faster rate than other municipal spending as the national crime rate decreases. And in the largest 150 U.S. cities, police budgets have risen steadily for decades, even as crime decreased and during economic downturns, according to data compiled by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy from U.S. census records.
This suggests, correctly, that policing has little or nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. As crime has gone down, police budgets have gone up. So what’s policing for?
As Bittner argued, it’s about protecting the wealthy from the “dangerous classes.”
Threats to order, property
The “dangerous classes” are those who are seen as a threat to public order and property rights. The job of police has long been to effect control — colonial, racial, class, gender and/or sexual — over citizens. Clearly, it’s time for this to stop.
The solution lies not with enforcing economic and social inequality, but in removing it. Putting our tax money towards this — for example, by building affordable housing — makes far more sense than shoring up a police institution that is too often brutal, colonial, racist, sexist and homophobic.
Police use chemical irritants and crowd control munitions to disperse protesters during a demonstration in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 5, 2020. Hundreds gather regularly for rallies and marches against police violence and racial injustice following the death of a Black man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis in May. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
While there will always be occasions when legitimate force by police is necessary, they’re relatively few — and police shouldn’t be militarized in weaponry, rank or uniform. Get rid of all three, except for some small arms held in reserve for use only in exceptionally dangerous situations. Other agencies or officials can do much of what police do now.
So let’s defund the police and put the savings into social services. But let’s go further, and disband police forces as they’re currently configured and replace them with local community organizations, some highly trained members of which are empowered to use force as required by fellow citizens and according to circumstance.
Every day, Black business owners and entrepreneurs make invaluable contributions to communities across the country, and their success is essential to Canada’s economic recovery and future prosperity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing systemic barriers faced by Black entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized business owners in Canada. While we have made progress in advancing equitable access to support and opportunities, much more needs to be done to better help Black business owners and entrepreneurs, and address anti-Black racism.
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced investments of up to nearly $221 million in partnership with Canadian financial institutions – including up to nearly $93 million from the Government of Canada over the next four years – to launch Canada’s first-ever Black Entrepreneurship Program. This program will help thousands of Black business owners and entrepreneurs across the country recover from this crisis and grow their businesses.
Tales abound in the United States about policing efforts that bring the film to mind, the report said. They included a now-abandoned Chicago Police initiative to mine personal data to determine someone’s risk of carrying out a shooting, or a scuttled Los Angeles Police strategy that saw officers targeting possible crime hotspots based on information gleaned from utility bills, foreclosure records and social service files.
Cynthia Khoo, report co-author and lawyer specializing in technology and human rights, said Canadian police forces have access to some of the same technology, but have been more circumspect about using them in predictive policing scenarios.
Khoo said numerous Canadian police forces have been less cautious in their deployment of facial recognition technology.
She said such tools, while lacking predictive capabilities, are often launched without public notice and used to track and log residents as they attend protests or otherwise take part in constitutionally protected activities. Social media monitoring is another common practice, she added.
Khoo said any tech-driven law enforcement solution risks not only violating privacy and liberty rights, but further entrenching systems that have disproportionately targeted marginalized groups for years.
The early internet held out the promise of Eden but delivered anarchy instead. Nowhere is this anarchy and its consequences more evident than on social media, particularly Facebook and YouTube.
