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Old 05-11-2015, 11:25 AM   #10
CorsiHockeyLeague
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Cards on table: I support Israel for fairly non-nuanced reasons, but I find the implication that opposition to Israel's policies or actions is tantamount to anti-semitism utterly disgusting.

That said, here's how this goes (in a basic sense).

Any law of this sort is, at first glance, unconstitutional in so far as it violates section 2(b) of the Charter.

At that point, it needs to be saved under section 1, which permits limits on Charter rights as can be justified pursuant to the "Oakes test".

When it comes to section 2(b), certain forms of speech warrant greater protection than others. For example, if you have advertising language, that's subject to lower protection than politically-motivated speech. Political speech gets a lot of protection. Hence, I suspect that any attempt to muzzle this "Boycott Israel" movement (which I admit I know almost nothing about) is unlikely to succeed.

Proponents of silencing these people may point to Keegstra, who was prosecuted under these "hate laws" for being an anti-semite, specifically a holocaust denier. But that was coloured by the fact that he was teaching blatant anti-semitism to kids, not withholding support from a state actors.
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