U.S. President Donald Trump’s much disliked visage will soon be passing, by biology or the Constitution, from screens. But it will take a bit for Canadians to ally openly with the United States, whatever the compelling geographic and economic reality .
Yet in their passion to dish on Trump, Canada seems to now align instead with China and the European Union. This shift could hasten Canada’s descent into its own authoritarian future. As a few leftist academics move to Canada to escape Trumpian proto-fascism, let’s look at how Canada’s new friends view free speech.
China’s free-speech efforts are an oxymoron; a permanent one-party police state does not exactly encourage debate. The European Union, for its part, thinks of itself as a bulwark of individual liberty, but it behaves in ways that are “ post-liberal. ” Restrictions on speech deemed to be hateful or, in some cases, simply disrespectful of authorities, has occurred in both Germany and Italy . The EU has ignored popular votes when they favour right-wing populists or seek to limit Brussell’s power.
Today in Europe, free speech is just a mild irritant . More worrisome still are developments in the U.K., the place that brought free speech to this continent. Instead of the Magna Carta, we see a great country becoming ever more authoritarian.
Take this. By some accounts , police in England and Wales made 10,000 arrests in 2024 for “communications offences.” The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport in 2025 was particularly chilling.
Canada seems to be moving in this same illiberal direction. To be sure, there are the promises of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms , which guarantee the right of “free expression.” But the Charter also provided a breezeway for censorship by stating that speech is subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
This leaves power in the hands of the Prime Minister and Parliament to define “reasonable limits.” The growing Canadian thought police recently enacted the Combating Hate Act . And a bill that would impose strict new speech limits on social media companies is currently working its way through Parliament. As the American free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff says , Canada’s speech is moving from free to “free … ish.”
This approach is also reflected in the ever more out of control Human Rights Tribunal. Former Chairman David Thomas claims the Tribunal has been almost completely taken over by notions of victimization popular on college campuses, including questioning any aspect of “trans rights,” a particular priority of the cultural left and the professional institutions they have captured. He compared the Tribunal to a “state funded extortion ring” that seeks to force those it attacks to make a deal in order to avoid greater financial and professional harm.
We can see where this is going by recalling the crackdown against the Covid era “ Freedom Convoy ,” with its pattern of arrests and defunding. Canada has long seemed a bastion of tolerance, sexual freedom and democracy, but how does that work when Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that Muslim values and those of his country, a product largely founded on European culture and Christianity, are the same. Perhaps the urbane PM is unaware of the lack of freedoms for women, gays or dissenters in virtually every Muslim country.
Islamism is not the only force pushing authoritarian approaches. Chinese penetration of Canada’s political system also does not seem to bother an elite raised in universities preaching anti-colonial indoctrination . In the last century, American, Canadian, French and British schools worked to promote loyalty to their countries, now they increasingly agitate newcomers against themselves.
Much of the problem, notes Kate Marland, executive director of the Canadian Free Speech Union, lies with Canada’s lack of the U.S. first amendment rights which are very broad. Canada’s Constitution lacks such guarantees which provides a path for government-led censorship.
“In the US,” she notes, “you have a First Amendment, and you don’t have censorship.” In Canada, the priority of preserving “a cohesive society” often takes priority over freedom of speech.
In the U.S., the Constitutional structure has made it difficult to fulfill the Trumpian dream of becoming. A fatter version of Mussolini, Trump faces constitutional constraints including a larger right of center Supreme Court , that ruled against actions of tariffs, birthright citizenship, immigration and federalization of the national guard. All these rulings even a leading leftist academic dubbed “enormously important.”
In addition, Trump’s power is already waning, even among his Congressional minions , particularly as he becomes a lame duck, and may lose one or both houses of Congress. Trump can harrumph all he wants, but the Constitution has proven stronger even his ego.
Of course, Trump seeks to demonize his tormenters but just ends up looking stupid, even by their low standards. More worrisome to basic freedoms may be the rise of the Democrats in America, who, like Liberals in Canada, embrace the idea of becoming more like Europe, including in terms of regulating speech. Then there’s the Democrats’ emerging far-left, now dominated by the Democratic Socialists of America, which embrace a frank Marxist-Leninist worldview, never a good thing for free speech.
Canadians are right to despise Trump, but in rejecting the U.S. model on speech, they are also turning away from the tradition of open debate that has long blessed both of our countries. Josh Dehaas of the Canadian Constitution Foundation notes that the current “anti-American” mood has allowed politicians like Justin Trudeau, and even more so Carney, to push for “more speech regulations” that are more in line with European and potentially even China.
I would be the last to suggest Canadians should embrace everything about the American model, largely based on distrust of government which leaves us more dissatisfied with our democracy than more potty-trained Europeans. But dissent is not always a bad thing, particularly when it checks government power. In this one thing — free speech — America is very much in the right. Sometimes even an ogre has something good to offer.
National Post
