The Demise of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act: Reappraising the 'Battle for Free Speech'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2013, Bill C-304 repealed Section 13 (s. 13) of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Although the law used broad language, it had not garnered much attention until a concerted campaign sought its repeal. This thesis argues that the key to understanding s. 13's demise is the way in which the hate speech backlash exploited the growing ideological belief that Islam is antagonistic to, if not incompatible with, democracy. This is evidenced by the fringe bloggers that coalesced around a conspiratorial theory of 'Eurabia' to turn s. 13 into a national debate. Yet, the debate changed significantly once in the mainstream to reflect a concern for free speech based upon manufactured and negative perceptions of Muslim hate speech complainants. Consensus among major Canadian newspapers is an indication of how Canadian identity was (re)constructed as essentially Western and against Muslim Others who were seen as parasitic upon the tolerant excesses of liberalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".