A revealing, and often troubling, examination of the language used during Canadian hate-crime legislation debates.

Debating Hate Crime examines the language and argumentation used by parliamentarians, senators, and committee witnesses to debate Canada’s “hate-crime” laws. These lively, and at times raucous, legislative debates and committee hearings reveal much about party politics, public policy, and social issues of the day, including citizenship, nationhood, and Canadian values. Drawing on discourse analysis, semiotics, and critical psychoanalysis, Allyson Lunny explores how the tropes, metaphors, and other linguistic signifiers used in these debates expose the particular concerns, trepidations, and anxieties of Canadian lawmakers and the expert witnesses called before their committees. In so doing, Lunny reveals and interrogates the meaning and social signification of the endorsement of, and resistance to, hate law. The result is a rich historical and analytical account of some of Canada’s most passionate public debates on victimization, rightful citizenship, social threat, and moral erosion.

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This book is indeed a fascinating read and an insight into how attitudes toward the language of hate crime laws have evolved over the years.

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This contribution to UBC’s "Law and Society" series analyzes parliamentary debate touching on sexual identity and gender expression at the federal level. Lunny explores ways this debate provides a forum for, and a reflection of, the struggle over social meaning in Canadian society … The work fits squarely within scholarship that sees the social meaning of, and discourse around, identity and social inclusion/exclusion as mutually constructed. It is also relevant to those who study balances between individual and group rights, federal and provincial governance, and parliamentary and charter precedence in Canadian politics today while providing a comparative study for those who have examined similar issues in US or European discourse. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.