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Toleration Without Hate Speech: The Keegstra Decision, American Free Speech Exceptionalism and Locke's Letter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2016

Samuel V. LaSelva
Samuel V. LaSelva*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1Z1, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper re-examines the issue of hate propaganda under the Canadian Charter of Rights and the US Bill of Rights. It also reconsiders the significance of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. What the paper attempts to show is that one strand of Locke's famous argument supports First Amendment exceptionalism and Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions in Abrams and Schwimmer, but another strand buttresses the Keegstra and Butler decisions and the Report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada. In the contemporary context of the debate over free speech and its limits, Lockean toleration has communitarian as well as libertarian dimensions, and the control of hate propaganda in Canada's multicultural and multinational polity becomes more clearly an important part of the liberal tradition.

Résumé

Ce papier réexamine la problématique de la propagande haineuse sous la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés et la Déclaration américaine des droits. Il analyse aussi sous un jour nouveau le sens de la Lettre sur la tolérance de Locke. Ce papier cherche à montrer qu'un axe de la célèbre argumentation de Locke appuie l'exceptionnalisme du Premier Amendement, ainsi que l'opinion dissidente du juge Holmes dans la décision Abrams and Schwimmer, alors qu'un autre axe étaie les décisions Keegtra et Butler et le Rapport du comité spécial sur la propagande haineuse au Canada. Dans le contexte actuel du débat sur la liberté d'expression et ses limites, la tolérance lockéenne possède des dimensions tant communautaires que libertariennes, et le contrôle de la propagande haineuse au sein de l'organisation politique du Canada, marquée par le multiculturalisme et le multi nationalisme, devient plus clairement un marqueur important de la tradition libérale.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 699 - 718
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 2016 

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