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Kathleen Mahoney is professor of law at the University of Calgary, Canada. She has written about the relationship between hate speech and equality. She describes recent developments in Canadian law in the following passage:
We are at the crossroads, in both the U.S. and Canada, of ground-breaking legal developments concerning freedom of expression, harm, and equality. . . .
The Canadian Supreme Court decisions in Keegstra and in Butler balanced freedom of expression guarantees against the competing right to equality in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, finding in favor of equality. . . .
With the advent of the Charter, Canada became a different kind of society from the one it had been. Our social as well as our legal culture changed. We are no longer just a democratic federation whose constitutional players are federal and provincial governments, fighting over powers. In 1982, the people of Canada received much enhanced roles. Equality proponents, in particular, by virtue of the most massive lobbying effort in Canada's history, achieved an amazingly comprehensive set of equality rights. An affirmative action clause was enacted, as well as a blanket guarantee of gender equality in the exercise of Charter rights and a multiculturalism clause, mandating that the Charter be interpreted in a manner consistent with preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians. . . .
[I]nstead of adopting the "framers' intent" approach, the Canadian Supreme Court came down firmly on the side of a purposive approach to constitutional interpretation. . . .
The most profound effects of the purposive approach can be seen in cases that directly or indirectly engaged equality rights. . . .If a claimant is a member of a group that has experienced persistent disadvantage on the basis of characteristics such as sex or race, and if the measure the claimant is challenging continues or worsens that disadvantage, that measure violates the equality guarantee. Intention to discriminate is not relevant, and only those who fall into persistently disadvantaged groups may claim protection of the equality guarantee.
Reference: Kathleen Mahoney, "Recognizing the Constitutional Significance of Harmful Speech: The Canadian View of Pornography and Hate Propaganda," p. 277-281, in The Price We Pay.