A British Columbia tribunal has ruled that sharing a COVID-19 video in a student chat group is not hate speech, and the student who posted it did not discriminate against anyone.
Adjudicator Ijeamaka Anika described it as “offensive” to some viewers. But the point is that offensiveness is not the same as illegal, and a government tribunal just confirmed that distinction holds.
The 21-minute video, posted in 2020 in a University of Northern British Columbia student union chat, argued the pandemic was engineered to impose “technocratic and totalitarian government worldwide.”
It referenced vaccines, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and Western leaders. It was standard pandemic-era content. The kind of thing millions of people were sharing in private group chats that year, and still to this day.
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The complaint, as reported by Blacklock’s, came from the Chinese-Canadian executive director of the Northern B.C. The Graduate Students’ Society, which argued that the video targeted Chinese people. The Tribunal looked at what the video actually contained.
China and Maoism appeared twice. “Specifically, it references Maoism in the context of discussing global governance models,” Anika wrote. “However, the vast majority of the video focuses on other actors and theories.” No Chinese individuals or leaders were named as perpetrators. The complaint did not survive contact with the facts.
So-called “hate speech” under the Human Rights Code requires that content “expose or tend to expose any person or class of persons to detestation and vilification” in the view of a reasonable person. That is a real legal threshold, not a vague sense that something was upsetting or poorly reasoned.
The Tribunal also found that Code violations require calls for specific discriminatory effects, not general commentary about global governance or pandemic origins.
This is important beyond one student’s cleared name. The complaint was filed over a video shared in a small private student chat. It wasn’t a broadcast or public campaign. The idea that human rights law reaches into private online conversations to adjudicate the political content of what members share with each other is worth examining.
The federal government had issued guidelines during the pandemic urging Canadians not to blame any ethnic group for COVID-19. Those guidelines were public health messaging. They were not law, and they did not transform every pandemic video into an act of discrimination. The student who posted the video into a small group chat was not the Chinese-Canadian executive director’s problem.
The chilling effect of the opposite ruling would have been real. If forwarding a “conspiracy” video in a student chat exposes you to a human rights complaint and an adjudication process, people stop sharing. They stop talking. They second-guess every forward, every link, every political video with the wrong kind of content. That self-censorship happens quietly, before any order is ever issued, and it spreads well beyond the original case.
The Tribunal got this right.
