Joel Kotkin: Carney aligns with the anti-free speech China and EU

Chinese President Xi Jinping (3rd-L) and Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney (2nd-R) meet at the Great Hall of the People on January 16, 2026 in Beijing, China. Photo by Vincent Thian - Pool/Getty Images

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.