The Liberal government’s internet regulation bill, C-10, has gone through a convoluted path.

First, user-generated social media content was exempt.

Then, that exemption was stripped away during a heritage committee meeting.

Then, Minister Steven Guilbeault said the exemption wasn’t necessary (ignoring the inconvenient fact that he had presented it as essential when it was first put in the bill.)

Then, Guilbeault changed his mind – again – and promised to exempt content Canadians post to social media from regulatory oversight by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission after all.

Confused yet?

This week, committee members accepted a Bloc Quebecois amendment to ensure regulation of social media content is done in a manner consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But wait, I thought the point was that content wouldn’t be regulated at all?

It’s been easy to get political whiplash trying to follow the flip flops and contradictions that have been ubiquitous throughout C-10’s review.

The Conservative party’s principle objection is that the bill will infringe on free speech rights by giving a government agency, the CRTC, license to regulate the web. The Liberals have, in turn, taken every opportunity to accuse the Conservatives of paranoia and conspiracy theorization.

I don’t believe Guilbeault plans to plant himself in a darkened Ottawa office day and night deciding which tweets and Facebook posts get spiked, but the bill does give the CRTC the right to regulate content by giving it the authority to determine who can post content.

This is a far cry from the “modernization” and “protection of Canadian content” goals the government insists are at the forefront of this overhaul of broadcast regulations.

The Liberals seem to be the only ones buying into this naïve version of the bill. Even a handful of former CRTC officials signed a petition warning C-10’s reforms “curtail freedom and seek to control parts of the internet’s infrastructure in ways reminiscent of actions taken by authoritarian governments.”

One of Canada’s leading experts in internet law, University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, has been sounding the alarm about C-10 for months, and the government simply isn’t paying attention – or is willfully ignoring the alarm bells.

C-10’s committee review has revealed bigger problems in Canadian politics, however: there is a startling lack of political diversity among the country’s political parties.

After the 2019 election, the Conservatives took credit for reducing the Liberals to a minority. This would force them to be accountable, then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said. Of course, it was Scheer who ended up out of a job, not Trudeau. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet often mouth off at Trudeau in the press, but when push comes to shove vote in lockstep with the Liberals.

Of the four opposition parties, only one – the Conservatives, and barely – actually does any real opposing.

This isn’t a call for gridlock, but rather for opposition parties to summon some semblance of independence. Right now, we have a Liberal majority without the advantage of transparently seeing it as such, because of an NDP too broke for another election, a Conservative party too terrified to push for one, and a Bloc Quebecois too content with its results from the last election. (And a handful of Greens just along for the ride – can’t forget about them).

This is a recipe for a Liberal government with carte blanche to do what it wants, taking hold of the internet included.

The aforementioned Bloc motion has no doubt granted Blanchet political cover for him to help the Liberals steamroll C-10 through committee and debate to pass it before the House of Commons rises for the summer in a couple of weeks. Whether this can happen, and if it does, whether the Senate will play ball, stands to be seen – but that it’s being tried in the first place is concerning.

This is not a confidence motion, meaning election-shy opposition parties could defeat it and not disrupt the status quo. That this hasn’t happened is evidence these parties are either too scared or too complacent to invoke their own power ­– power that’s supposed to be the greatest benefit of a minority parliament.

The same thing happened with the Liberals’ assisted suicide bill, C-7: the opposition parties lobbed their rhetorical grenades, but the bill ended up passing with Bloc support.

In the absence of any real measure to hold the government accountable, the “opposition” is but an illusion – just like internet freedom if C-10 passes.

Photo Credit: The Canadian Press