n of hateful or pro-genocidal material. Section 319 has been found to violate s.2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but to be justified under s.1 of the Charter. Thus, it is considered to be coherent in Canadian criminal law for a somewhat intangible social harm to have been suffered by a group through the publication of literature, and for a remedy to be appropriate. There are problems with this kind of legal protection from social harm if MacKinnon and Cole's assumptions about the legal system are accepted. The sections may take effect only on the initiative of the Attorney General; it is this feature which led to charges against Ernst Zundel [for the publication of literature denying the holocaust and claiming the existence of a Zionist conspiracy] being laid by Jewish activist groups under s.181 of the Code. Thus, Cole's claim that legal redress for the harm of pornography will not be effectively obtained through reliance on intervention by a male-dominated executive branch of government is supported by the failure of another identifiable victim group to have charges laid by the Attorney General in what appeared to many to be a clear case. In isolated cases like Keegstra, where children were the group to whom hateful information was being disseminated, the law recognizes social harms as actionable. It is clear though that the pragmatic barriers to criminal prosecutions for the harm pornography causes to women, as opposed to society's moral intolerance of the offensive content, are immense in a male dominated liberal society. What should not be lost in this pragmatic pessimism is the adequacy of the conceptual foundation of a social harm which arose in Keegstra. In this case, the social harm was seen not only to affect the "targets" of the information, in this case Jews, but to adversely affect "society at large". Furthermore, the type of harm caused to the target group is similar to that seen by feminists a...
