The example of Kinsella taking a picture of the swastika in the public washroom, talking to his son about what the symbol meant, and then getting the owner of the rink to wash the graffiti off is a terrific example of how ordinary hatred can be easily dealt with by individuals without the intervention of the state. Kinsella turned the incident into a “teaching moment” for his son and alerted the owner to the problem, all without outsourcing his civic duty.

As for the HRC, as I understand it, this institution was originally intended to provide a kind of extra-judicial response to incidents like, say, ethnically-diverse employees at a company being discriminated against because of their race. Instead, the HRC appears to have been used as a tool for a privileged white lawyer named Richard Warman to collect substantial financial judgments and to disseminate hate speech (indeed, as Ezra and Mark point out, it seems there would be far less hate speech out there if you stopped paying HRC employees to write the stuff on neo-Nazi websites). The chilling effect the HRC has already had on publishing in this country is a whole other ball of bile.

We’re better off without the HRC, and I’m very glad Ezra and Mark got the chance to tell our politicians what’s what.

A few reasonable limits are worth supporting, such as hate propaganda, violent pornography or any other forms used solely or deliberately to incite violence or cause harm. Yelling “fire” in a movie theatre is an oft-used example of the latter category I remember from my own poli sci classes.

I don’t know if those exceptions are adequately captured under “uttering threats”, but we certainly need to better define what limits are reasonable and then come to terms with how to enforce such limits in a transparent and appropriate fashion. The new ways in which information is distributed in this digital age certainly makes that debate overdue.