Terrorism and its legal aftermath: The limits on freedom of expression in Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act & National Security Act

Authors

Percy Sherwood, Western UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2019

Volume

3

Issue

2

Journal

UVU Journal of National Security

First Page

19

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://www.uvu.edu/nss/docs/spring2020journal1.pdf

Last Page

28

Abstract

This analysis aims to demonstrate how s. 83.221 in Bill C-51 is likely to violate freedom of expression guaranteed under the Charter. The first section employs the two-step Irwin Toy analysis to show that the speech offense infringes upon s. 2(b) of the Charter. The second section uses the Oakes test to determine whether the breach of freedom of expression is a reasonable limit. On whether the speech offense can be justified under s. 1 of the Charter as a reasonable limit, the legislation fails at the third and fourth step of the Oakes test. Section three of this paper argues that the amendments contained in Part 7 of the National Security Act 8 (also known as Bill C-59) are improvements to the speech crime in Bill C-51 because they are more likely to satisfy a proportionality test.

Notes

The UVU Journal of National Security is published by Utah Valley University and made openly accessible online at https://www.uvu.edu/nss/docs/spring2020journal1.pdf

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Citation of this paper:

Sherwood, Percy. “Terrorism and its legal aftermath: The limits on freedom of expression in Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act & National Security Act.” UVU Journal of National Security 3, no. 2 (2019): 1-15.