Hate Speech: North and South
Wayne Sumner · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2014
Canadians and Americans share a common border and, to a large extent, a common culture. For the most part we watch the same movies and television shows, listen to the same music, and follow the same sports. However, there are some notable issues that divide us. We Canadians are the ones with a universal single-payer health care system, an unelected senate, and gun control. And we have laws against hate speech. How is this latter disparity to be explained? One possibility, which has been advanced by several commentators, is that it reflects broader and deeper differences between the two countries’ social/political cultures. In his documentary Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore hypothesized that Canadians tend to be less individualistic than Americans, more inclined to favour the collective good even at the cost of some individual freedom. My Toronto colleague Joseph Heath has defended a more scholarly version of this hypothesis in his book The Efficient Society. So perhaps the greater tolerance of hate speech in the United States can be understood only against this backdrop of American individualism and libertarianism, on the one hand, and Canadian collectivism and egalitarianism, on the other.