Canada's response to anti-Semitism assumes many forms. We have Criminal Code provisions and anti-discrimination human rights commissions to prevent hate crimes and propaganda; we have special hate crime units in our police forces; we have expansive Holocaust education programs; we have aggressive representative Jewish organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress; we have a lively and generally supportive media; we have vigorous public debate; we have human rights education for a strong and independent judiciary, and we have a consistently- articulated public policy against anti-Semitism.

We have all of this, and yet we too have experienced the renewal of anti-Semitism other countries have experienced since 2000. Laws and policies are not enough. What also is required to fight this discrimination is the ongoing willingness to acknowledge it exists and to confront it publicly.

Canada's history, it will surprise no one to learn, was not immune to the pre-Second World War anti-Semitic prejudice and discrimination that denigrated and excluded Jews in the rest of the world. There were quotas on university admissions, restrictions on employment opportunities, signs on beaches that said, "No Dogs or Jews Allowed", restrictive covenants on the sale of land, and, most shamefully, as the book None Is Too Many disturbingly reveals, Canada had the worst immigration record of any Western democratic country when it came to allowing entry to the Jews of Europe.

This was the painful Canadian status quo for Jews until the 1950's, when the Holocaust's anti-Semitic horror finally engaged the country's conscience and led to the promulgation of anti-discriminatory human rights codes and the establishment of Human Rights Commissions. These quasi-judicial administrative tribunals, established in each of Canada's 10 provinces, consisted of human rights experts appointed by the government who gave Canada its anti-discrimination jurisprudential foundations, giving human rights the expansive and vigorous enforcement it required. Canada's courts, on the other hand, were, regrettably and with rare exceptions, routinely denying those rights oxygen with such sclerotic interpretative zeal that a national Bill of Rights, passed in 1960, fell into disuse.

Then the culture changed. The 1960's brought not only critical public scrutiny of our traditional laws, institutions, and approaches, they produced a chorus on behalf of human rights groups and issues, leading to legislation protecting our bilingual and multicultural heritage and, with the creation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 1977, protecting our pluralistic population.

The seismic shift came when we constitutionalized matters in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. This single event transformed the public's entitlements and expectations, the judiciary's composition and muscularity, and the government's responsibilities and, indeed, frustrations. With the Charter we developed, at last, a consensual national human rights culture. And that is the new context in which our leading cases on anti-Semitism have been decided.

It is a context that acknowledges and applies two different kinds of rights theories -- human rights and civil liberties -- recognizes that there is a distinction between them, and treats anti-Semitism as a breach of the former. This context led to a unique Canadian approach to human rights and, particularly, to equality.

The civil libertarian concept of equality is based on individualism. It is equality as sameness, and is based on the right of every individual, regardless of differences, to be equally free from an arbitrarily intrusive state. This leads to assimilation as the ultimate human rights goal. Canada's human rights paradigm, on the other hand, focuses not only on the rights of the individual, regardless of differences, but on the extent to which perceptions and stereotypes about that individual's group identity unfairly affect his or her social, political and economic access.

For us, differences are to be acknowledged, respected and accommodated, and our human rights goal is integration based on group differences, not assimilation.

And so, when our Supreme Court interpreted our constitutional right to equality for the first time in 1989, it adopted the human rights approach which said that equality gives everyone the right not to be the same, but to have the same right to be free from discrimination, notwithstanding group differences.

This is the background for how our courts have dealt with the constitutionality of our hate speech legislation.

We amended our Criminal Code in 1970 to make it an offence to advocate or promote group genocide or group hatred. Our Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these provisions in the 1990 Keegstra decision.

Jim Keegstra was a school teacher who, for 12 years, vilified Jews in his classroom and taught his students that the Holocaust did not happen. The Court held that hate propaganda, because of its denial of respect and dignity to others, undermines democratic values and is, therefore, not entitled to the protection given to political speech. This approach led the Supreme Court in a case involving anti-Semitic recorded telephone messages, to uphold the constitutionality of the provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that prohibits the communication of hatred. It confirmed that the importance of preventing the serious harm caused by discriminatory hate messages far outweighed the right to freedom of expression.

We also have new amendments to the Criminal Code allowing the seizure, judicial scrutiny and deletion of hate propaganda on the Internet. And, in 1996, the Code was amended to permit judges to increase sentences for offenders motivated by, among other things, racial or religious prejudice, a provision that resulted last year in the Alberta Court of Appeal more than doubling a one-year sentence imposed on a person convicted of arson at a synagogue.

Those are the basic legislative tools we use in Canada, but the relentless ebb and flow of anti-Semitism shows how progress in human rights can never been presumed. While we have come an enormous distance from the discriminatory environment that protected anti-Semitic conduct from censure, we appear not yet to have succeeded in eradicating the prejudice that motivated that conduct. We have witnessed the routine hostility and intimidation experienced by Jewish students on university campuses, the vandalism of Jewish schools and institutions, the threats to Jewish officials, and, above all, the attacks on Israel's legitimacy.

This new anti-Semitism seems to have started after the Middle East peace talks broke down in 2000, took flight with the rampant racism at the UN Conference Against Racism at Durban, and spiralled out of control after 9/11. Once again, we hear demonizations and vitriol; once again, we are admonished to put it in context, and once again, we are urged as mature democracies to yield our anxieties over anti-Semitic speech to the centrality of freedom of expression.

So I close with this. About a year ago, I found something written by a young Jewish lawyer, who, along with his wife, survived several years in concentration camps. He was head of the Displaced Prison Camp in Stuttgart after the war, and this is the introduction he wrote for Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited the Camp in 1948: "We welcome you, Mrs. Roosevelt, as the representative of a Great Nation, whose victorious army liberated the remnants of European Jewry from death. We shall never forget that aid rendered by both the American people and army. We are not in a position of showing you much assets. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future."

That man was my father, and I was one of those few children. That history taught me that it is not just what you stand for, it is what you stand up for.

Madam Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Ontario Court of Appeal represented Canada last month at the Conference on Anti-Semitism of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. This article is adapted from her remarks.