Toleration Without Hate Speech: The Keegstra Decision, American Free Speech Exceptionalism and Locke's Letter

Abstract

AbstractThis paper re-examines the issue of hate propaganda under the Canadian Charter of Rights and the US Bill of Rights. It also reconsiders the significance of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. What the paper attempts to show is that one strand of Locke's famous argument supports First Amendment exceptionalism and Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions in Abrams and Schwimmer, but another strand buttresses the Keegstra and Butler decisions and the Report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada. In the contemporary context of the debate over free speech and its limits, Lockean toleration has communitarian as well as libertarian dimensions, and the control of hate propaganda in Canada's multicultural and multinational polity becomes more clearly an important part of the liberal tradition.