Article content continued

“We have experienced 16 months of invective hurled at us, and at any time when anybody has tried to speak up and correct misinformation, gross distortions, caricaturizations, then the very next day there’s been some full-frontal assault through the blogs, through mainstream media. I have a file. I’m sure I have 1,200, certainly several hundred of these things,” she told the Post in 2009. “There is an agenda out there… I’m not going to sit by. Others are afraid to speak out because they know they’re going to be attacked. If you Google my name today you’ll see how I’ve been attacked.”

A broad reluctance among liberals to either defend the status quo or propose viable reforms — notably by the Liberal Party of Canada, whose human rights legal grandees, such as Michael Ignatieff, Irwin Cotler and Dominic LeBlanc, refused to take questions on the issue — meant most voices in the debate were critical and often shrill. Ms. Lynch lamented the “completely unbalanced” discussion in which she was cast as the Queen Censor, or even the Chief Commissar.

She once famously compared hate speech to popcorn.

If you Google my name you’ll see how I’ve been attacked

“It’s kind of like microwaving popcorn, you know? For the first while on the Internet, there was this little pop, pop, pop. And now, the popcorn is in full popping formation. It’s just omnipresent, 24/7, popping up here, popping up there, and so it seems to make it difficult for measured voices to respond,” she told the Post in 2008.

Much of her response to the scandal, including a 2009 report to Parliament that recommended scrapping the hate law’s penalty provisions, was in vain. The law, known as Section 13, was doomed to be repealed. Though it was technically saved as constitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada, the days of Ms. Lynch’s investigators inviting white supremacists to mediation with complainants are over. The legal test of whether a message is “likely to expose” a protected group to “hatred or contempt” is now all but defunct at the federal level.