Prime Minister Minister Mark Carney cannot be trusted with our Charter-protected right to free expression.
The man has been clear: during the election campaign, Carney spoke scornfully of our most essential freedom, our speech, from which all our other freedoms flow.
Carney has hinted that his Liberal government will bring back some iteration of Trudeau’s tyrannical — there is no other word for it — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which was killed when the former prime minister prorogued parliament this January. You will recall that this now-defunct legislation would have granted judges the ability to mete out life sentences for hate speech, and would have created a government “Digital Safety Commission” to police Canadians’ speech, and impose life-destroying fines upon those whose speech was deemed hateful by our government censors.
It was frightening legislation. But not, apparently, to Prime Minister Carney.
In April,
Carney’s
, he announced his government’s proposed plan to tackle crime and improve public safety. “Large American online platforms have become seas of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate — in all its forms. And they’re being used by criminals to harm our children. My government will act,” said Carney.
Sound familiar? It should.
We have heard this before: Carney is using the same tactic of his predecessor. It was Justin Trudeau who first attempted to manipulate Canadians with fear for our children’s safety as a means to sneak in repressive, anti-free speech legislation.
Consider then-prime minister Trudeau’s words from a February 2024 news conference in Edmonton: “We know and everyone can agree that kids are vulnerable online, to hatred, to violence, to being bullied, to seeing and being affected by terrible things online. And we need to do a better job as a society to protect our kids online,” Trudeau said,
one week before tabling Bill C-63
.
And now, back to Carney last month: “New online platforms have created new threats, including and perhaps especially for children… And as much as we, as parents, want to protect our kids, we can’t always be there. We can’t always be looking over our kids’ shoulders to see what they’re doing, or what they’re exposed to online. And so while protecting children is, first and foremost, a parent’s responsibility, it is also a collective responsibility. And with the support of Canadians, my government will act to protect children online and bring those who seek to harm them to justice. We will first introduce legislation to protect children from online exploitation and extortion.”
Using Trudeau’s old manipulation tactic, Carney has found an additional excuse to promote and justify government censorship. He revealed it at his April rally in Hamilton: “One of the issues we’re dealing with… misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution that’s online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States… and, that’s fine… I can take the conspiracy theory and all that, but the more serious thing is when it affects how people behave in our society. When Canadians are threatened going to their community centres or their places of worship, or their schools,” said Carney.
Much like Trudeau first weaponized child safety to push for censorship, so too is Carney is using Canada’s despicable rise in antisemitic hate crimes, since the October 7 attack on Israel, to try to convince Canadians that what we really need protection from is, first and foremost, words on the internet.
Do not fall for it.
Carney has no proof that online discourse — our free expression — is directly responsible for hate crimes or violence on our streets. And even if he did have the proof, it still would not justify censorship. Nothing does.
In the introduction to his book Free Speech, Danish human rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama reminds us that the powerful have good reason to detest new technology, or, in Carney’s case, “new online platforms”: “New communication technology is inevitably disruptive and every new advancement —from the printing press to the internet — has been opposed by those whose institutional authority is vulnerable to being undermined by sudden change,” Mchangama writes.
In Carney’s case, his institutional authority is indeed vulnerable. It’s not merely that he rules via a minority, made possible only by the collapse of Canada’s New Democratic Party, but that the entire political agenda of Canada’s left is on shaky ground. Our youth are moving right. But it’s more than that: on climate, fossil fuels, immigration, race, gender, identity politics, and free speech, too — leftist social justice perspectives on each of these topics, which were orthodox throughout the Trudeau era, are falling out of favour.
Carney knows this.
We mustn’t be lulled into a false sense of security with Carney’s promises to end child exploitation, antisemitism, or any other devious or violent crimes — if only his government can control the information we have access to. Such promises have nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with power.
While Canada’s economy can likely withstand four more years of asphyxiating Liberal policies, I’m not certain that our country can survive such a sustained attack on our freedom of expression.
National Post
