Barbara Kay: Canadians can’t allow the online harms bill to snuff out free speech

Bill C-63 would punish mere expression and give draconian new powers to government. It's unfit for a democracy

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Published Sep 08, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Woman with her mouth taped shut Photo by Getty Images/Jupiterimages

The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist of the hourglass. Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 16, and the Liberals will urgently seek to pass Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, now in its second reading.

If passed in its present incarnation, this deeply flawed bill will drastically curtail freedom of speech in Canada (which, to be fair, is not an outlier on digital crackdowns in the West. Switzerland, of all places, just passed similar legislation).

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We already have hate-crime laws in the Criminal Code that address advocacy for genocide, incitement of hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred. Apart from its laudatory intentions in removing online content that sexually victimizes children, Bill C-63 seeks to curb all online hate speech through unnecessary, inadvisable and draconian measures inappropriate to a democracy.

The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aperçu by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.

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Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.

One group experiencing alarm for their survival under Bill C-63’s proposed strictures is the Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms (C3RF). C3RF educates Canadians about their Charter rights and freedoms, and proposes legislation and regulatory frameworks that guard freedom of expression. They have published numerous critical articles on topics such as gender ideology, critical race theory and vaccine mandates: hot-button issues that are sure to offend some person or group, and that a human rights tribunal might well deem hateful under the online harms law, worthy of punishment sufficient to shut them down altogether.

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I’m a fan of C3RF’s founder and director, Royal Canadian Air Force Major (ret’d) Russ Cooper, a decorated CF-18 combat pilot, and an expert in the field of post-9/11 civil aviation security. Cooper came to my attention in 2017, when the House of Commons passed M-103, a non-binding motion, after some controversy. M-103 called for a “whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia.”

The government was eager to pass it quickly, but a significant number of concerned citizens balked at their unwillingness to define “Islamophobia.” Was it hatred of Muslims, or of Islam? If it was bigotry against Muslims, why wasn’t “anti-Muslim” good enough? The difference is existential.

As the Liberals’ stonewalling on the definition continued, it became clear to a significant swath of the population that if M-103’s wording was accepted in future legislation, the Trudeau government would effectively have facilitated an Islam entitlement, similar to others in Europe granted by the European Court of Human Rights to preserve “religious peace” (except it hasn’t). Cooper moved so swiftly and competently to harness their collective energy that Conservative MPs received upwards of 900,000 critical emails within a few days of the M-103 vote.

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Since then, C3RF’s membership has swelled to tens of thousands embedded within a network of other like-minded freedom- and truth-seeking organizations. As Cooper told me in an email, “If there is one good thing you can say about the draconian measures foisted upon the regular folk of Canada in the days since M-103, it’s that these vexations have unified a whole new cadre of discerning citizens, tired of being pushed around and taken for granted.”

C3RF, in conjunction with allies like Veterans for Freedom and Act! for Canada, are working on a House of Commons petition calling for the cancellation of Bill C-63. Once a parliamentary sponsor seizes that baton and sets it in motion, I will be sure to alert readers. It would be wonderful if it were signed by every one of the 32 per cent of Canadians at large who, according to a Maru poll, believe that “we are on the verge of a revolution in our society to take our freedom back from governments who are limiting it.”

National Post

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