The Decibel - Charlie Kirk, free speech, and Canada’s new hate law

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

A fierce debate about free speech has erupted in the U.S. in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. Government officials have encouraged reporting against Americans in their reaction to Kirk’s death, with some, like talk show host Jimmy Kimmel having his show briefly suspended under government pressure.This debate over what is acceptable speech extends to Canada, as the federal government introduced a new bill in expanding Canada’s anti-hate laws. The Decibel is joined by James L. Turk, director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, to talk about the state of free expression, censorship and what happens when speech crosses the line.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since the killing of right-wing activists and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, there's been a fierce debate around freedom of speech in the U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said those who celebrated Kirk's killing should lose their jobs, and people have. Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show was taken off the air under government pressure, though on Monday, parent company Disney announced Kimmel would return on Tuesday. The conversation around what people can and can't say doesn't stop at the border. People in Canada have also been suspended or put on leave after making public remarks about Charlie Kirk.

And the stakes for the discussion around free speech here are getting even higher. On Friday, the Canadian government tabled a new bill that would expand Canada's anti-hate laws. There's a lot to untangle when it comes to free speech, freedom of expression, and how, things are different here in Canada. So today, James Turk is our guest. He's the director for the Center for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Jim, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. I'm delighted to be here. So you represent a center that defends freedom of expression, and at this moment there's a fierce debate over what free speech is and how much society

should allow. I just want to know, like, how are you feeling about this moment? I'm excited that we're having that discussion. It's a discussion that comes and goes for most of human history. I mean, go back to Socrates, who was put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. And it's particularly important in a democracy because at its heart, democracy is about an ongoing public discourse about what's legitimate and what's not legitimate. And a majority can never bring that discussion to an end or you're moving from democracy to authoritarianism. So the good thing about what's happening now is it's causing a national and international

discussion of what are the limits to expression. In every society, there are limits, but those have to be discussed. And what's happening in the United States is a particularly poignant example of what can go wrong. So I think it's important to kind of define what we're talking about. And this is kind of a simple question, but broadly speaking, When we talk about free speech, what do we actually mean? So freedom of expression is one of the rights, human rights,

that's in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's also one of the four fundamental freedoms in our charter. And it means two things. It means the right to express yourself. And I prefer how we talk about in Canada's freedom of expression as opposed to freedom of speech because expression can be in many formats. It can be oral. It can be written.

It can be in dance and music and theater and so forth. That's one part of it. The other part of it is the right to hear and receive information from others. Okay. And so you mentioned that here in Canada we have a way of looking at freedom of expression. Can you kind of unpack what is the difference between what we see here in Canada versus what is freedom of speech in the U.S.? Well, arguably the First Amendment in the United States is a broader protection for freedom

of expression than our charter. It does not allow any restriction of expression based on the content of the expression. So it doesn't have hate speech laws, for example. We do have hate speech laws. Yeah, can you tell me what does that and how does that differ than the U.S.? Well, I mean, there's just not a provision for hate speech in the U.S. So it's criminalized in Canada or Section 3191 and 2 of our criminal code. What's tricky is a lot of expression certainly is hateful in the popular sense of that term.

But our courts have imposed a really high bar before something is illegal They'll hate speech. So the content of what somebody's saying can be the basis for restricting their expression. Whereas theoretically in the United States at least, content is not to be the basis on which you do that. There are things that are not protected in the United States or in Canada, violence. I can't punch somebody in the face and say, well, I'm just expressing my disdain for your point of view.

In Canada, you can't threaten violence. We can't harass or discriminate. We can't defame people. So there are limits to freedom of expression. In practice, the differences between Canada and the United States are not huge. Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Can you kind of help me understand? Like, the way you're explaining it, is it more free in the U.S. that is in Canada? Well, theoretically, I mean, in terms of how the law is written or how the First Amendment is written, but it was 100 plus years before there were decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that were actually consistent with the First Amendment. And as we're seeing right now, the First Amendment would seem to preclude all sorts of things that the Trump administration is doing. So how they get sorted out, we're waiting to see. Right. And just to step back here for a second, you talked about hate speech in Canada. And so that is, it's illegal to incite or promote hatred against an identifiable group other than in a private conversation.

How does that? Actually, there's two different sections. You were reading the first part of the first section. it's where you express something in public that is hateful toward an identifiable group and is likely to lead to a breach of the peace. I mean, the first provision is such a high bar that there are relatively few charges under that. The second provision 3192 of the Criminal Code is what's illegal is the willful promotion of hatred.

And that's the matter on which most charges are laid in Canada. And then it comes to me, well, what is the willful promotion of hatred? And so our courts have had a series of decisions to try to spell that out. Okay. I want to bring it back to Charlie Kirk here because people say, though, what he said was harmful when he was alive. I'll give one example here. There's a number of examples of some of the things he would say. But in 2023, he said, quote, happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to target white people.

That's a fact. It's happening more and more. I'm curious. Would Charlie Kirk be legally allowed to say something like that in Canada? Yes. I mean, I found many of the things that Charlie Kirk said, detestable. The first and key point is nobody should be murdered because of their expression. So that's the first point.

But the irony, you know, he claimed he was a champion of free expression when in fact he called for the limits on others' expression and even in some cases justified violence. his supporters defending him as this champion of free expression, what are they doing now, but trying to stop the expression of critics of his? You know, I mean, there's a real irony in what's happening at the moment. Why is it important for people to be able to say offensive things in a democracy? Because in a democracy, if you take Canada, we're a really heterogeneous society. People have wildly different ideas, perspectives, viewpoints. And what I would find offensive, others see is wonderful. If a democracy is going to be open to everybody in the

democracy, then the fact that some people find something offensive is not grounds to stop other people from hearing, seeing, or engaging with that offensive expression. That's why our courts and our laws try to say, there is a point at which the expression fundamentally undermines the democracy. So violence is an example of that. But something that is something that is a it's offensive that you find harmful, disgusting, that isn't enough to stop others from hearing it or saying it through the law. Now, we have other social ways to deal with things. If I'm at a gathering of people and somebody tells a racist joke, it's not illegal to say

racist things, but I feel it's an obligation to say, well, I find what you said offensive. And there could be consequences as well, right? So say you say something and, you know, your work could fire you if you said something racist. Yes. Yeah. But we're talking about what the law prohibits because the state intervening in expression is a concern. And that's a real concern of what's going on in the United States right now.

Yeah, let's get into that. Because what would you define as government overreach when it comes to free speech? Like when is it considered censorship? Well, it's considered censorship when the government says, you can't publish this, you can't say this, you can't teach this, you can't have this book in your library, or you can't have any of this class of books in your library. There's been a norm in the United States, thank goodness, that the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission are not

political agents of the president, but rather body set up by Congress whose job is to uphold the law. And what we're seeing in the United States in the most extreme form in my lifetime is the president and his administration transforming those institutions from neutral ones that try to enforce the law to ones that are his agents

for going after his opponents. Let's talk about a tangible example here. I think Jimmy Kimmel is something that comes to mind, right? And the fact that he was taken off the air by ABC after the FCC chair criticized what he had said in a monologue about Charlie Kirk.

What do you make of that? Can you kind of explain what happened there a little bit? Sure. Well, the president claims, well, he's just a bad comedian, his ratings were down, and ABC just got rid of him for that reason, which is just not true. His ratings were lower than Stephen Colbert's, but still higher in others. He had an audience over $1.7 million. What really happened, and you alluded to it,

the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasting in the United States, both television and radio, has enormous power over those broadcasters and the companies that own the stations. And the current chair, Brendan Carr, is a loyal fan of Donald Trump. He had indicated he found what Kimmel had said was unacceptable and said that ABC was going to have to deal with this. So it was Trump's takeover essentially of the Federal Communications Commission, getting it to be an instrument of his retaliation against comedians he doesn't like. And so when the FBI can do that. The Department of Justice and all their mobilites to do that. It's such a threat to democracy and to freedom of expression in a democracy.

We'll be right back. We are seeing some reverberations here in Canada when it comes to the reaction to Charlie Kirk's death. For example, there was a UFT professor who was placed on leave after posting a controversial comment on X, saying, quote, shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascists, expletive, unquote. What do you make of her being put on leave? Well, it wasn't just her put on leave. There was also a professor of law at the University of Alberta who was put on leave for some social media posts that were quite innocuous. So innocuous in the University of Alberta put her on what they called nondisciplinary leave for security reasons, while they invest.

investigated. So that was worrisome that the university would do that. And this is the university that has probably the strongest statement on freedom of expression of any university of the country, which is just blatantly violated by how it treated her. The U.T. professor, you didn't read the full comment she made. They really are at the edge, not of illegal speech. She has the freedom of expression rights to say that. But faculty are also bound by academic freedom, which is to protect their freedom. right to express themselves, but it's different than freedom of expression. So the question in the case of the Toronto professor were her remarks so offensive that they raised questions about her credibility as a faculty member. I don't know the answer to that. It's on the line, but they were really ill-chosen and deeply inappropriate. But there's lots of others. There's a Canadian journalist, Rachel Gilmore.

Yes, Rachel Gilmore, yes. Yeah, who shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, expressed her concern that some of his supporters may use this an excuse to have some serious violence in the United States. And she was denounced not only, and she received death threats and so forth, but we had Andrew Shearer, the MP from Saskatchewan and for the Conservative Party, publicly denounce her for having expressed this. I mean, he was sounding like a MAGA champion of Trump in the way he went after. What do you make of the fact that a politician is now weighing in on a person's or a journalist's comments on something like this? Well, politicians are free as all of us are. If a journalist writes something, they'd say, I think there's a piece of garbage, it's wrong, it's, it's, you know, hateful. I mean, they can say whatever they want.

They have freedom of expression too. So he had the right to do. What troubled me is it looked like there was the kind of MAGA approach to things manifesting itself in Canada. Now, we know there's quite a number of Canadians who are sympathetic to Trump and what he's doing in the United States. But it's really troubling when the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada feels that he can act in the way that Trump is acting in terms of this vitriolic denunciation of a journalist for saying that there's a serious danger that some of Kirk's supporters can respond to his assassination with violence. So we're just seeing some of that same approach to trying to effectively limit speech in Canada and even in the leadership level that we see in the United States. I want to turn to something else that's happening here in Canada.

On Friday, Attorney General and Minister of Justice Sean Fraser introduced a bill that would expand Canada's anti-hate laws. We are also moving forward with an additional offense of the willful promotion of hate through the use of hate symbols. Specifically enumerated will be particular symbols associated with a period of history involving Nazis' discrimination against Jews and the targeting of Jews in the Holocaust, as well as the symbols specifically tied to listed terror organizations. So how would a bill like this change the laws around expression? Well, this bill, which is Bill C-9, is quite worrying. What it wants to do, the first thing is to charge someone with a violation of the criminal code provisions on hate speech, it requires permission of the Attorney General. And that's to prevent the police using it in an overly broad way.

It also stops private prosecutions, which can be law. launched and take court time and so forth. And so the bill eliminates that, so it makes it easier to bring charges. It introduces a provision that makes the display of the flag of a group listed by the government as a terrorist or otherwise unacceptable organization as a criminal offense. And it specifically makes reference to the swastika, but also flags of any group that's listed like Hamas or Hezbollah. We are also moving forward with an additional offense of the willful promotion of hate through the use of hate symbols.

Specifically enumerated will be particular symbols associated with a period of history involving Nazi's discrimination against Jews and the targeting of Jews in the Holocaust, as well as the symbols specifically tied to listed terror organizations. The key here, though, is that this is not a blanket ban on particular symbols. It is a new offense that deals with the willful promotion of hate through the use of those symbols. So if somebody is at a demonstration has a Hezbollah flag, does that mean automatically they're expressing hatred to Jews? Hezbollah claims to be not anti-Semitic, but anti-Zionist. And a lot of people, including me, say there's a fundamental, we have to separate the two, that one can be highly critical of the policies of the government of Israel without that being anti-Semitism. Because if it is anti-Semitism, then there are hundreds of thousands of anti-Semites protesting the streets of Israel.

So the fact that you're waving a flag, how are they going to prove that you had the flag and you were being anti-Semitic, which is illegal, as opposed to anti-Zionist, which is not illegal? What about a Nazi flag, though, then? Or like, are a Nazi symbol? Like, would that be more, I don't know, black and white here? Well, yeah. I mean, a Nazi symbol is deeply offensive, right? Yeah. I'm just not sure we should deal with it by sending somebody to jail for two years.

In other words, if that's all they do, they should be denounced for doing that. But usually somebody raising a Nazi symbol is trying to promote hatred and would be captured by our current laws. In other words, our current law is a willful promotion of hatred. Well, waving a Nazi symbol as doing other things could easily qualify under willful promotion of hatred. So I'm not sure that this is necessary. That is, a present law is, in fact, generally the problem with the new bill is it's unnecessary. That is, almost everything that it wants to prohibit is already illegal in Canada. Welfare promotion of hatred is illegal, blocking people from going into a religious institution or a cultural center that's related to an identifiable group.

In other words, we have a provision in our criminal code on mischief, which gives the police the tools it needs to deal with anyone who, impedes or blocks access to institutions. Now, the bill has another feature that, again, is worrisome, and that is anyone who violates the criminal code or any other act of parliament can be rules about what you do in national parks or whatever and is motivated by hate is deemed to be committing a second offense. So if a person robs a store that's owned by a a Jewish store owner, and they determine that the person was motivated by hatred, the person is guilty both of robbery and of this new hate offense. So this is an attempt to try to deal with hate by saying, well, we're just going to jack up

jail time, and somehow that's going to stop it. And there's no evidence that that works at all. And we should say that Minister Sean Fraser did say that the bill was designed not to affect peaceful protest, even if it's new. a religious building. Well, yes, but it's what it makes illegal. One of the things that makes you legal, what it calls intimidation. And it says, if someone acts with the intent to provoke a state of fear in order to impede

access to a building, now, that's a pretty vague thing. I mean, what might cause fear in me is different than what might cause fear in you. The point is, if you're impeding somebody from going into a building, that's against the law already. Some people might have heard of something that also happened on. Friday. The Canadian government banned the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap from performing in Canada, accusing them of advocating for political violence and glorifying terrorism. The group is vocally pro-Palestinian and has allegedly brought Hezbollah flag on stage in the past.

And there's also a video of them saying up Hezbollah, up Hamas, but they say that was taking out of context and they don't support Hamas or Hezbollah. What do you think of the government's actions here of banning the group from coming into Canada? Well, the law in Canada says that the government can ban a group for an action it takes in another country, that's illegal in that country, and also illegal in Canada. Now, the main charge against NECAP was that they waived a Hezbollah flag in the U.K. And it's against the law to have a Hezbollah flag or display a Hezbollah flag in the U.K. Ironically, it's not illegal in Canada. Now, I mean, if this bill passes, it would become illegal.

but it's not illegal. So they, it was just, it struck me as the government responding to a lot of political pressure not to allow them in, but I'm not sure that there was any legal grounds by which the government has done when it's done. Okay, just to end here, James, I want to talk about kind of a broader conversation here. Like we're in a moment of a lot of polarizing politics. How do we make sure that free speech doesn't just add to more polarization? That's a difficult question to answer.

because the very free speech that is protected in a democracy can make things worse, but it's the only way to make things better. The freedom to contest viewpoints is the only chance we have to go in a good direction. Now we have different notions of what's a good direction and what makes these discussions difficult and what makes it hard to deal with censors is almost everyone in every one Every side thinks they're doing the right thing. Why do you think this moment in particular feels so tense, like the good and bad directions here, but it just feels like there's no connection in the middle.

I don't know. Well, it's in part because we certainly have seen since the mid-2010s the rise of a political movement within the Republican Party that casts a son. all the norms that are important in a democracy, that the objective here is to find a way forward that benefits everyone. You know, the MAGA movement in the United States, and there have been movements like that in Canada and the United States before, movements like that aren't interested in coming together.

They're interested in taking power so they can use the power of the state to impose their ideology and their approach. And that is a fundamental rejection of democracy. It's a fundamental move to authoritarianism. It's saying, well, we're so sure we're right, we're going to use all the instruments at our power to stop you from challenging us or having any effective means of undoing what we want to do, and that is pure authoritarianism. So there are periods where there are political movements like that, and it's only with robust

protections for freedom of expression that we can counter them. In other words, it's the First Amendment that protects the critics of MAGA and the critics of Trump. And it's those rights and protections that Trump wants to overthrow. He was, you know, he's so explicit in that. And just over the weekend, his staff were saying, well, what Donald Trump is opposed to is hate speech. And that's what we're trying to stamp out. And Trump came on and said, essentially, what I'm opposed to is people who hate me. That's what I want to stamp out.

Do you see the pendulum swinging in the other direction at any time? The problem with the question of the pendulum swinging, the pendulum only swings if we make it swing. This moment and the kind of polarization, which is really harmful to a democracy, is it only going to end if we're able to mobilize against it. Jim, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. It's been such an interesting conversation. Thanks for being on the show. My pleasure. That was James Turk, the director of the Center for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland.

This episode was produced by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.