In the small town of Kennesaw, Georgia, law permits that each head of household must own at least one operational firearm with ammunition. Quebec photographer and filmmaker Nicolas Lévesque headed south in 2013 to meet the people of Kennesaw—many of whom were women. The result was In Guns We Trust, a photo essay and accompanying documentary about the politics of gun rights. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Lévesque.

A range officer waves me forward into the shooting bay. The semi-automatic rifle he places in front of me is surprisingly light in my shaking hands. “I’m probably going to get this all wrong,” I nervously shout, the only way to communicate thanks to the heavy-duty ear muffs strapped over our heads to protect our hearing. “Don’t worry,” he shouts back. “You’ll be fine.”

Once the gun is nestled against my shoulder and my hands are properly placed, my nerves suddenly fall away. I remind myself to lean toward the paper target dangling down range. Apparently, tilting back is a common rookie mistake, which some call the “the chick lean”—as though us fragile ladies retreat in fear of firearms.

I’m so focused on hitting the bull’s-eye, I no longer notice the burnt smell or hear the women on either side of me discharge their weapons. I pull the trigger, barely feeling the recoil or the brass casing fly out of the gun, joining hundreds of others scattered on the floor. Then I aim and fire again, feeling slightly more confident—and badass—with every shot.

Shooting off rounds of ammunition is not how this 42-year-old bleeding-heart liberal mom normally spends a Saturday morning. But this past April, I attended a “Guns and Gals” event hosted by far-right media outlet the Rebel in Gormley, Ont., about an hour north of Toronto. Part mixer, part fundraiser for the Rebel, the sold-out affair was the first of a cross-country tour. The web page, promoted to “freedom-loving females,” featured an image that played on the classic James Bond gun-barrel logo with the curvy silhouette of a woman in a pencil skirt and heels brandishing a rather large, hot-pink rifle where Bond normally appears.

I didn’t sign up to handle firepower, though. This was an opportunity to wrench myself out of my left-wing silo. Admittedly, I like the security of my warm and fuzzy social media feeds where my like-minded friends reinforce my opinions. Last fall, this echo chamber largely insulated me from the reality of the American election. I ignorantly took comfort in the Donald Trump bashing I saw on Facebook and held on to the hope that Hillary Clinton would prevail. When Trump became president, my love bubble burst and left me with a troubling thought: What if the far right is on the rise in Canada, too?

After an anti-Muslim demonstration took place outside a Toronto mosque in February, I decided to face my fears: I signed up for the Rebel’s email newsletter. I thought exposing myself to the far-right’s echo chamber might help me better understand them. If nothing else, I’d become more aware of Canada’s political spectrum.

Beyond content promotion, the Rebel’s emails were like personal letters, offering me concrete ways to get involved. After the Rebel’s U.K. host was arrested for contempt of court, for instance, I got an emergency request to sign a petition and help cover his legal fees. When this far-right group gets upset, it knows how to mobilize.

I had zero intention of responding to any appeals until the Rebel sent me an invitation for “Guns and Gals.” I immediately decided to go. Having once been an editor at Outdoor Canada magazine who covered hunting, I was familiar with the gun world. Shooting seemed like a suitable opportunity to actually spend time with the Rebel’s audience. But I was scared. The day before the event, the Rebel posted a video entitled “What is the Alt-Right?” In it, host Gavin McInnes angrily equated “left-wing spies” who infiltrate rightwing gatherings with followers of Hitler. I was terrified the “Guns and Gals” participants would smell my leftist views like a strong perfume and chuck me out.

“Just stay quiet and keep your head down,” I told myself.

“They’re going to hurt you,” my anxiety whispered back.

***

A smiling woman welcomes me at the door. She’s a more animated version of a Walmart greeter, showing me where to sign in and gather my complimentary pink camo T-shirt. While some enthusiastic attendees already have theirs on, I discreetly tuck mine in my bag. An Ezra Levant bobblehead grins at me from the merch table.

As we settle into a classroom, I count more than 30 women, ranging from their 20s to 60s. Some are solo and a few are with their male partners, but most are here with a friend, presumably for a girls’ day out. They definitely don’t meet my expectations: It’s an ethnically diverse group of friendly, chatty women, not the anger-fuelled vigilantes I had anticipated. Any of them could be my neighbour, relative, or even a friend.

Our group is the first of about six sessions, meaning about 150 women have paid $75 for a ticket. “Why are you ladies here?” Faith Goldy, one of the Rebel’s hosts, asks from the front of the room. (Goldy has since departed from the publication.) “Bucket list!” someone shouts. “My husband gave me a shotgun,” a woman at the front says. “So I could make a donation to the Rebel,” another quips.

“And how many of you have shot guns before?” Only a few of us raise our hands. Excited about how many female gun virgins are here, Goldy describes the wonders of shooting and the rise of North American women taking up the sport. In fact, just two years ago, the top shooter in Canada’s military was female.

Then she opens the floor to questions. One woman is curious about gun laws in Canada, to which Goldy explains the difference between owning handguns (restricted) and rifles or shotguns (non-restricted). Then she discloses her dislike of our country’s firearm regulations and concern that the laws will get even stricter. In her opinion, allowing concealed carry in Europe would solve the “terrorist problem.” Several women nod in agreement. Goldy encourages us to ask more questions—about anything at all, not just guns. From the back of the room, an elderly woman asks about M-103, which condemns hate crimes against Muslims. A lot of brows furrow. The Rebel has been vocally opposed to the motion, even starting a “Freedom to Offend” petition to try to stop it.

I do my best to follow Goldy’s explanation that M-103 is “Sharia creep,” a gateway for Pakistani laws to infiltrate Canada and an attack on free speech. “But what do we do now?” the same woman implores. (The House of Commons passed M-103 at the end of March.) Another woman informs the crowd that a protest will take place on Parliament Hill in early June. Goldy asks her to send the details so she can cover it.

My head hurts as I try to follow the comments bouncing around the room. I’m overwhelmed and completely out of my element. I’m thankful when the political discussion ends and an instructor comes in to give us some safety tips on gun handling before taking us to the range.

Afterward, as I walk back to my car, I feel a bit like those spent casings, not sure I’ve met my target. One day of shooting definitely doesn’t mean I fully understand people on the far right, but I realize this movement can’t be arrogantly dismissed by those of us on the left. If anything, we could probably learn a thing or two about translating ideas into action.

One thing I have noticed since “Guns and Gals” is a shift in my thinking: When someone in my social media feed makes fun of Trump supporters, calling them ignorant or stupid, I don’t snicker and keep scrolling. Instead, I cringe as I picture the ridicule directed at the women I met at the range. I feel like I can’t wag a finger at people on the right for stereotyping different groups and labelling them as “other” if I’m doing the exact same thing to them. These are diverse people with diverse backgrounds. They may not be my Facebook friends, but they are technically my neighbours and they seem afraid of losing whatever it is we have here in Canada. And to be honest, as I watch the far right gain momentum, I am, too.

UPDATE (October 10, 2017): The article has been updated from its original print version to reflect staffing changes at the Rebel.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter photo.

Two years ago, some friends and I started our own private chat room on a service called Slack to talk about baseball. We did it because our non-baseball-loving friends on Twitter were tired of us yammering about bat flips and Moneyball and Troy Tulowitzki. I can’t overstate how well used this chat room is. We are in there every day and most of us keep a running conversation going during each Toronto Blue Jays game. We also use it to share baseball ephemera—weird facts, stats, articles, and photos. Recently, someone posted an old baseball card with Bill Murray on it. This sent us off on a chase to figure out why such a card even exists. It’s the sort of exercise that the internet is great for, and we gleefully threw ourselves down every rabbit hole we could find to learn about Bill Murray (who, it turns out, has been accused of some pretty horrible things and is probably an asshole), the history of baseball in Utah, and the many tendrils of minor- and indie-league stories from around North America. All told, we killed about two hours and seriously debated pooling $100 to buy a copy of the card on eBay.

Most of the rest of the time I spend online isn’t this much fun, by which I mean it is mostly terrible. It’s easy to be cynical about the web these days, because it can feel so far from what it was supposed to be. The “Information Superhighway” was going to open up the free exchange of ideas. It would set knowledge free and reinvigorate public debate.

Instead we got fake news and racist cartoon Pepe frogs and Donald Trump. Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media generates hundreds of thousands of YouTube views spreading hate and disinformation. A handful of Conservative leadership candidates slyly court the worst kind of people through dog-whistle memes. We built a global network of information and communication, then neglected to give it any substance.

I’ve been writing about technology and culture for two decades. I’ve never been an enthusiastic cheerleader, but I was always optimistic. I liked what the internet was doing for the world. But then came anonymous online forum 4chan and photos snapped of unsuspecting women called “creepshots” and a seemingly endless barrage of awful people who turned Levant, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos into rich internet “stars.” Over the last year, the columns I’ve written in these pages have been about how Facebook is bad for news and Twitter is bad for discourse and Uber is bad for everybody. The year before that I wrote about photos of dead people invading social networks and sexism on Wikipedia and, before that, 800 words under the headline “#Hate.”

I say this with all the irony my white male privilege can muster, but I’m tired. Maybe we made a mistake.

Were people always this awful, and the web has just dragged them out from under their rocks? In the free exchange of ideas, do the loud, bad ones win out just because they are loud and bad? If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan posited, the message is that decent people should go back to reading books and sending letters.

Or maybe this is the cost of knowledge: Some ideas are bad. Some people are shitty. But sometimes someone posts an old baseball card and you and your friends can spend a couple hours digging up scoresheets from Pioneer League baseball games, or whatever floats your particular boat. We built a global network of information and communication, and it’s our greatest invention. Sure, sometimes it means we need to have tedious discussions about the value of punching Nazis in the head, but it also means I get to talk about baseball. It means my mother gets to watch her grandchildren grow up in real time from the other side of the country. We have a modern Library of Alexandria and an endless archive of video and audio. We are connected to everyone we’ve ever met.

The web is still relatively young and finding its legs. I’m going to try to be optimistic that the best is yet to come and that perfect utopia still awaits. After all, it took television more than half a century to produce The Wire.

ASSIGNMENT Watch the fledgling Sun News Network, infamously nicknamed “Fox News North,” for eight hours. Note distinguishing characteristics, rate credibility and journalistic bona fides, and measure decibel levels of hosts’ shouting. Hypothesize audience size and composition. Compare and contrast with American forerunner Fox News. Administer wine as needed.

4:00 PM The Caldwell Account with host Theo Caldwell. Ten seconds in and there’s a veiled reference to ladies being gentler creatures, free from the oppressive bonds of thinkin’ and carin’ ’bout heavy stuff that matters. I begin jotting a tally of such events, and loosen my bustle so I don’t get the vapours.

4:08 PM Tiny, WASPy fellow sits behind a too-large desk burping sorta-ideas into the ether while people wandering into the background agree with him. Folksy phrases abound: “You know what really fries my ham?” Boy howdy! “Go pound sand!” Darn tootin’! Then he calls all Saudis “nefarious.” (Shortly after this experiment, The Caldwell Account was cancelled. Based on this observation, it is not missed.)

5:06 PM Preston Manning is a guest! I forgot that he sounds like a sad duck.

5:09 PM But don’t be a sad duck, Preston Manning! You have your very own think tank now. And according to that think tank, Canada is becoming more conservative. Just ask the 1,000 elderly people who actually pick up their landline telephones whom Preston Manning called and asked.

5:11 PM Host Charles Adler (his show is called Charles Adler) keeps calling Manning by his full name. Maybe he doesn’t know what title to give him, so it’s safest to just say the whole thing. That, or Manning requested it. Both of these ideas please me.

5:17 PM A commercial: a bunch of hot female Sun News Network anchorbabes. One says, “Finally, a news channel that lets me be me.” There we go again, us womens, confusing our news broadcasts with our tampons.

5:23 PM Joy Tiz—author of Obamanutz! A Cult Leader Takes the White House—comes on to discuss the scandalous underwear photography of congressman Anthony Weiner, and how the Democratic Party refuses to do anything about it (except, you know, call for an investigation. Boring!). She joins Adler “via Skype.” Take that, lamestream telephony! A little Googling reveals that Obamanutz! is self-published and includes 100 percent more zeds than necessary. Her website also notes (on the front page!) that she is the owner of “three magnificent and staunchly conservative German shepherds.”

6:04 PM Bryan Lilley hosts Byline. Finally, someone to make me genuinely mad rather than drowsily irritated. This hour, I will think and write the word “obfuscate” approximately once per minute, e.g., when Lilley uses the postal lockout to try to illustrate how unions are forcing their employees to support “radical organizations.”

6:10 PM A swoopy graphic of money going down a drain with the CBC logo on it!

6:34 PM Former Stephen Harper chief of staff Guy Giorno asserts that politics is not about left or right, or parties, but who stands up for “ordinary Canadians who don’t pick up placards and protest, they’re too busy working and taking care of their families.”

6:35 PM I pour a glass of wine.

6:42 PM According to this guest, whose credentials are unclear, the CBC is “atrophying money.” I think he means hemorrhaging. Also, he notes the CBC cut $30 million from its budget the previous year, so perhaps “atrophying” is exactly what he meant? More wine.

6:47 PM Brian Rushfeldt of Canada Family Action says TV is all left-wing propaganda. “Manipulation of emotions is what television does,” he says—and lo, a dictionary doth populate the word “irony.” The lefty TV shows referred to are Friends and Sesame Street. Never forget: A is for Abortion, B is for Bolshevik, C is for CBC.

7:00 PM Here it comes! The Source with Ezra Levant! Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for—Canada’s answer to Glenn Beck! He of the theatrics! And… he’s off tonight. Instead, please enjoy this dour substitute, who delivers a 15-minute rant about squeegee kids and panhandlers who wait to terrorize your shiny car with dirty water and crudely written signs.

8:14 PM In this neat little advertorial, Charles Adler is actually shilling a product sitting at the same desk from which he broadcasts his show. It’s some sort of nutritional supplement. Let’s all take it! With wine. After all, you have nothing to lose, since the next three hours will all be repeats of the shows you just watched.

9ISH A commercial advertising Sun News Network: “We’re out there. Far out there. Beyond the reach of the television police.”

10ISH More repeats. By the way, where are all the hot chicks “being themselves”? Have not seen even one sexy anchor getting down with her neo-liberal self.

MIDNIGHT OR THEREABOUTS I am done. And glad. So glad. Thank the TV gods that we are so bad at this—this making of polemics, this dividing of loyalties, this unpacking of prejudices masquerading as argument. We, as a nation, appear mercifully ill-suited to the task.

CONCLUSIONS Be unafraid of Sun News Network, lefty elites: there is so little there there. Was watching Sun TV News funny? At times. But mostly it was a little sad, a little pitiful. Sound and fury signifying … not nothing, but worse—just more sound and fury. A sad duck eating its own tail.

RAW DATA COLLECTED:
Incidents of thinly veiled racism: 6
Incidents of not-at-all veiled misogyny: 3.5
Self-congratulatory statements by Sun News personalities: 4
Unions are scary! 5
Artists want all your money! 8
Bottles of wine consumed: 0.75

James Cagney, Greenpeace, Syncrude, and other menaces to society.

Conservative provocateur Ezra Levant suggested in a Calgary Sun column last week that, according to Section 467.1 of the Criminal Code, Greenpeace should be prosecuted as a criminal organization.

That section of the Code defines a “criminal organization” as a group numbering more than three people in or outside Canada that “has as one of its main purposes or main activities the facilitation or commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial benefit, by the group or by any of the persons who constitute the group.”

For the record, a serious offence is defined as that which carries a maximum punishment of imprisonment for five years or more.

Levant argues that Greenpeace, which is clearly composed of more than three people both in and outside Canada, financially benefits from repeated illegal activity—Greenpeace’s protests sometimes employ direct action and civil disobedience—through donations after the fact. And because break and enter—a common charge for protesters—is considered a “serious offence,” Greenpeace ought to be categorized as a criminal organization for encouraging it. Levant’s suggestion? Prosecute the bosses.

Now, let’s play along with him and accept for the sake of argument that Greenpeace leaders ought to be tossed behind bars. But as long as we’re cracking down, let’s take a look around for other nefarious criminal organizations hiding in plain sight. Who else was breaking the law in northern Alberta?

Oh, right. There was that consortium of oil giants, Syncrude, which was guilty of breaking two laws—the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act.

Now, we’re not sure yet what kinds of penalties Syncrude will face, as those won’t be handed down by the court until later this month. But more importantly, we do know what penalties Syncrude could have faced.

According to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, anyone who is convicted of an offence under that Act can be imprisoned “for a term not more than three years”. And if they are convicted a second time, that penalty can double to six years.

Let’s recall the definition of a serious offence: “an indictable offence under [the Criminal Code] or any other Act of Parliament for which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for five years or more.”

If my math is correct, a six-year prison term is longer than five years. So if Syncrude screws up again and a few thousand ducks pay the price, we might have a new criminal organization among our ranks.

Since the federal government is all about getting tough on organized crime these days, we thought they might like to know.

Ann Coulter's Canadian tour T-Shirt.

Last night, I wondered whether it was worth writing about Ann Coulter. When I think of her at all — which isn’t too often, actually — I think of her as being a deeply vile but mostly irrelevant self-promoter. (It would be going too far to call her an ideologue, because that would imply ideas, whereas her shtick is hollow invective.) Either way, she’s deeply unpleasant but I don’t really want to be part of the problem by adding to the attention she craves. Progressives — real, honest-to-god Socialists and Marxists, some of them! — frequently tie themselves in knots trying to come up with the most colourful denunciations of her, and I find it disappointing. People’s hatred of her is central to her business model, and I’d rather not donate my labour to her bottom line by participating.

The thing that most alarmed me in reading some of the news stories about Coulter’s appearance last night in London, Ont. (to be followed by Ottawa tonight and Calgary on Thursday) is not Coulter herself, it’s her audience. We know there’s an appetite out there for her brand of racist nonsense, which is clear from reading any major newspaper’s website comment sections. But writing a semi-anonymous web comment is different from showing up at a public venue and cheering loudly when the speaker tells a Muslim audience member to “take a camel” because she shouldn’t be allowed on airplanes. For a section of the populace that claims to be interested in espousing traditional social values, they seem to place a pretty low value on manners and civil interaction in public. “Respectable people,” as the prime minister called them in his YouTube appearance recently, don’t behave this way.

The creeping Tea-baggification of Canadian politics got a thorough writeup by Paul Wells last week in Maclean’s, and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth your time. I don’t actually believe that social conservatives have as much traction as they appear to think they do, but you can feel their influence in the country as Wells accurately describes it — moving the centre rightward and often successfully defining the terms of engagement for centrist and leftish parties. It’s deliberate, it’s a long-term political play, and people like Coulter are still part of the strategy, despite their court-jester shenanigans. Dropping their explosive rhetoric at the extremes softens the ground for less outlandish — but unsettlingly similar — characters with actual influence.

So our website bit the big one on Friday morning, which kind of cramped our plans for Legalization Week’s big finish. Everything seems to be working again, our apologies for the interruption. Without further ado, here it is, the call for legalization that I think might be the most controversial in the issue: Laura Kusisto writes that we should stop the prosecution of hate speech:

We protect religion and equality because we recognize that these freedoms make individuals’ lives better. But we protect expression because unfettered dissent is the only way to protect democracy. When a government official sits across from conservative blogger Ezra Levant in a 25-square-foot conference room and asks him to explain his decision to publish the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons, she is asking a single citizen to justify his political beliefs before the power of the state. Levant may be a blowhard, but that scenario should give everyone—left, right, whatever—serious pause.

…Which marks one of those exceedingly rare occasions when This Magazine finds itself on the same side of an argument as Ezra Levant — who, incidentally, being a good sport, has donated a copy of his book, Shakedown, which we’ll be raffling off at Thursday’s launch party for the issue.

Be sure to vote in our poll on the issue (see right) and have your say. And check out the whole “Legalize Everything” package of articles, which are now all online for your reading pleasure/rage/irritation/curiosity:

• Tim Falconer: Fix the health care system and end suffering — legalize suicide
• Jordan Heath Rawlings: Pay indie artists and break the music monopoly — legalize music piracy
• Katie Addleman: Crack down on organized crime and save addicts — legalize hard drugs
• Rosemary Counter: Support small farms and get tastier cheese — legalize raw milk
• Laura Kusisto: Strengthen democracy and fight bigotry head-on — legalize hate speech

The fight for free speech is not the work of angels. Academics love Evelyn Hall’s famous saying, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In the age of promiscuous online speech, the sentiment of two university protestors seems more apt: “Free speech for all. Even douchebags.”

Marc Lemire, the cherubic-faced webmaster of white supremacist Freedomsite, is the latest unpalatable hero in the fight to fix Canada’s hate speech laws. On September 2, the Canadian Human Rights Commission vice-chairperson, Athanasios Hadjis, acquitted Lemire of hate speech charges for comments on the site accusing gays of conspiring to spread AIDS. Hadjis also declared the Section 13 hate speech provisions of Canada’s Human Rights Act unconstitutional. The decision is not legally binding. But it should be.

In addition to Canada’s rarely applied criminal laws against hate speech, human-rights commissions have had the authority to prosecute hate speech since 1977. This was expanded to include internet-based hate in 2001. The tribunal has a staggeringly low burden of proof compared to most legal proceedings; for instance, it’s easier to prosecute someone for hate speech than it is for libel. And until Lemire’s case, no one had ever been acquitted of hate speech by the CHRC, a record that would be scandalous for any other court. It puts Canada at odds with the hate speech laws of most other nations. It also puts us at odds with our own values.

We protect religion and equality because we recognize that these freedoms make individuals’ lives better. But we protect expression because unfettered dissent is the only way to protect democracy. When a government official sits across from conservative blogger Ezra Levant in a 25-square-foot conference room and asks him to explain his decision to publish the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons, she is asking a single citizen to justify his political beliefs before the power of the state. Levant may be a blowhard, but that scenario should give everyone—left, right, whatever—serious pause.

The stated reason for upholding hate speech laws is that they protect minorities from greater harm. Or, as Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, ominously puts it:, “Racist war, from the ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, to the Balkans, to Darfur, to the Holocaust, did not start in a vacuum. Hateful words do have an effect.” We need a better justification than comparing ourselves to far-flung genocidal regimes. In Canada, we already prosecute rare hate-based assaults, murder, and yes, genocide. Hate speech laws punish people for creating the mere potential for violence, even though violence rarely materializes.

Even if hate speech rarely leads to violence, it is true that it demoralizes minorities and threatens tolerance. After anti-Islamic comments by Levant and Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn made headlines, a poll found that 45 percent of Canadians believe Islam promotes hatred and violence. The CHRC is right to worry about this kind of view taking hold. But trying to ban speech, especially on the internet, only gives it wings. When Levant posted the videos of his CHRC hearings to YouTube they received over 500,000 hits, and clips were featured on numerous mainstream media programs.

The (re)legalization of hate speech would be difficult and unpalatable. But we don’t have to approve of what the douchebags say—we just have to let them say it.

Should we be telling bigots to just shut up? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Bronclune.

A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

Clearly, there are cases where silencing homophobic commentators only serves to elevate them. But there are other cases where homophobic speech can contribute to violence against queer people, and where it seems to have genuinely vicious consequences.

Section 13(1) doesn’t require that hate speech include a call for violence, only that it be “likely to expose a person or persons [of a certain protected group] to hatred or contempt,” which is a pretty fuzzy line. Increasingly there are people, both liberal and conservative, who do not believe the Human Rights Commissions are best qualified to decide what sort of speech crosses that line. Partly, this is because the HRCs seem to think everything does: not one person accused of violating this fuzzy provision has yet been acquitted at the first round of hearings.

Section 13(1) is not the only provision that protects queer people and other minority groups from hate speech. Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code (to which Egale’s Stop Murder Music campaign has also made reference) prohibit public incitements to hatred or violence against protected groups. The only thing distinguishing Section 13(1) is a lower standard of proof, and the fact that lodging a Human Rights complaint is free.

It’s not clear that the mounting convictions under Section 13(1) and the associated penalties are actually doing us any good. While there’s something satisfying about fining someone for spreading bile on the internet, doing so does not actually alter people’s hateful convictions — it just pushes them underground. Or worse, it makes loud indignant martyrs out of the people who hold those convictions.

Are Maclean’s sorry for publishing an article declaring that Muslims were going to breed Western civilization out of existence, for which they were issued an ultimately unsuccessful Human Rights complaint? Not one bit: they’re mad as hell and they won’t shut up about it. Ditto Ezra Levant, whose magazine The Western Standard was the subject of a Human Rights complaint for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons, and who is now one of the country’s most vocal opponents of the Human Rights Commissions.

Breaking down homophobia, racism and religious intolerance takes time and education — the last of which might be a more efficient use of government money than the current human rights apparatus. But ultimately, the Human Rights Commission’s biggest cost might be that it silences our enemies — whom we would be far better off knowing.