"To attack the rights of one man is to attack the rights of everyone": Conservative Rights Talk and Canada's First Hate Speech Laws

In 1970, the Canadian government amended the Criminal Code to include the nation's first provisions banning hate propaganda. This article examines the parliamentary debates over these provisions, from their introduction to their adoption, to assess how members of the two mainstream political right and right-of-center parties responded to the proposed amendments to the Criminal Code. It considers what this response-and the way in which it was articulated-reveals about how self-identified conservatives understood rights and freedoms, and how they conceived of the role of the state in securing these rights and freedoms in the context of Canada's expanding legislative human rights framework. I argue that these debates over hate speech are illustrative of a coherent form of conservative rights-talk in 1960s Canada, one that varied from, and in some respects was in opposition to, a more dominant liberal discourse of rights.