Calgary police have charged a father and son in connection to complaints regarding the use of offensive signs in the downtown core.
On Friday, police charged 72-year-old Milan Papez with four counts of public incitement of hatred and one count of defamatory libel.
Complaints surfaced last week after Papez Sr. was seen standing on a street corner in Chinatown with signs comparing members of Calgary’s Chinese community and a prominent attorney to Nazis.
One day after his father was formally charged, 53-year-old Milan Papez Jr. was charged with three counts of public incitement of hatred and one count of defamatory libel.
Police remind the public the Charter of Rights guarantees freedom of speech but that freedom is not absolute. The Criminal Code allows for charges in situations where an individual advocates genocide, publically incites hatred, or promotes hatred.
"In this case if you take into consideration the message, the words that were used, where the message was being delivered, the targeted audience and the method of delivery," explains CPS Cst. Eric Levesque. " You take that all together yes the threshold is met for the public incitement of hatred."
Milan Papez Sr. was on the 2013 Calgary mayoral ballot and finished a distant ninth in a field of nine candidates. Papez Sr. received 474 of the 262,577 votes.
