Canada Reports Progress in Campaign for Outlawing Hate Literature

A campaign for federal legislation to ban dissemination of material inciting hatred or racial and religious groups and of members of such groups is making concrete and steady progress, a Jewish leader in the campaign reported to a community rally here.

The report was made by Sidney M. Harris, chairman of the Joint Community Relations Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai B’rith. In recent months, many major Canadian cities have been flooded with such hate literature. Many Christian religious groups, as well as civic organizations, have protested the material and have asked authorities for action.

Mr. Harris told the rally that the Canadian Jewish Congress “intends to proceed fearlessly and with full vigor” in its efforts to obtain such legislation. He said that, in addition to pressing the Federal Government for such laws, the Canadian Jewish Congress was seeking to stimulate public opinion on the issue. He added that “the responses from municipal councils, national organizations, church groups, national trade movements and countless local service clubs, congregations and associations have played no small part in arousing the favor with which our approach to Parliament has been met.”

He said that present laws were not sufficient and that amendments were needed “to accomplish our purpose.” He said the approach was that peddlers of hate should be brought under “legal quarantine or control, even as the law of the state recognizes its duty to protect its citizens from contact with plague, disease and crime. Hate is all of these and more. Its epidemic propensity for evil is all too well known to us Jews.”

SUSPENSION OF MAIL PRIVILEGES CITED; BILLS PENDING IN PARLIAMENT

In a related report, the Canadian Jewish Congress summarized efforts to cope with the problem, which it said included the task of disabusing public opinion of the idea that “the law upholds some kind of inalienable right to convey patent lies, incitement to violence and the advocacy of force able suppression of the rights of others.”

The CJC said that the legislation it sought would give individuals “a completely free choice in expressing themselves” but with notification to them of “the legal risks they run if their use of freedom of expression goes too far in the circumstances.”

Among advances cited by the CJC was the suspension of mail privileges of the National States Rights Party of Birmingham, Alabama, and the sustaining of the ban by a Board of Review in Ottawa. Two private bills before the Canadian Parliament on the problem, introduced by David Orlikow of Winnipeg, and Milton Klein of Montreal, are before the Parliamentary Committee on External Affairs. The committee has heard several witnesses.

In its decision to ban the hate mailings by the National States Rights Party of Birmingham, the Board of Review had called that organization’s materials “indecent,” “obscene” and “immoral.” The three-man board, headed by Justice Dalton Wells, of the Ontario Supreme Court, compared some of the publications sent out here by the Alabama racists as comparable to the “obscene” anti-Semitic publications of the German Nazis under Hitler.

A committee of specialists in law and social sciences has been set up under the chairmanship of Prof. Maxwell Cohen, dean of the McGill University Law School, with the task of working out an effective bill to deal with the problem. The committee is responsible to Minister of Justice Guy Favreau. The CJC meanwhile has been making representations to provincial attorneys general on enforcement of existing laws, and has presented evidence to Attorney General Wishart on 16 persons known to be distributing neo-Nazi material.