Article Toronto Star by February 29th, 2024:
"In March 2022 I was appointed, along with other Canadian academics and advocates, to the Federal Expert Advisory Group on Online Harms. We held a wide range of beliefs on hate propagation and online safety and we argued, cajoled, agreed, disagreed and in the end came up with a proposal for legislation that we believed Canadians not only needed but demanded. It was tabled this week as Bill C-63, The Online Harms Act.
Hate was killing us! It did so on Jan. 29, 2017 at a Mosque in Quebec City where a lone gunman murdered six Canadian Muslims at prayer; it did so again just a year and a half later on April 24, 2018 on a busy north Toronto intersection when a woman hater known as an incel used a rented van to murder 11 innocent people in a terroristic murder spree; and only recently four generations of a Canadian Muslim family were deliberately run over in a vicious hate killing that was also labelled as a terrorist crime in London Ont. As well as those who were murdered many others were left with life changing injuries.
This is not simply a Canadian phenomenon. Only a few months after the incel killings in Canada, on Oct. 27, 2018, a spiteful antisemite walked into the “Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh Pa., where he murdered 11 American Jews on a quiet autumn Sabbath, wounding four others. And then, only five months later, on March 19, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, a right-wing extremist attacked two mosques leaving a bloody trail of 51 deaths and 49 injuries in his mass Islamophobic murder spree.--"