Editor’s note: In this article originally published in the National Post, Barbara Kay rips the façade off Bill C-63 to expose it for the totalitarian, freedom-crushing piece of legislation that it is. Increasingly, Western countries are using hate speech legislation to silence criticism of poorly thought-out government policies on matters such as immigration and multiculturalism and to prevent citizen reporting about their consequences. Canada is positioning itself as a leader in this censorial trend.
The wrapping to make the horror show that is Bill C-63 more palatable includes regulations against child pornography and online bullying, among other items already covered by the criminal code or that could easily be included as amendments. But the meat of the bill is in the proposed regulations that would crush free speech by empowering the federal cabinet to bypass Parliament in creating legislation and encourage grievance-mongers to make frivolous and malicious accusations without consequence, all while imposing draconian penalties on offenders, or people merely thought (by some anonymous person) to be likely to be an offender. Bill C-63 makes a mockery of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
We hope that readers of Barbara Kay’s article will sign our petition for Parliament to withdraw or (should it be passed) repeal this bill (it is now in second reading). We are currently seeking a member of Parliament to agree to authorize the online publication of our petition. We will notify our members when this has been done and also post the link to our petition on our website. We also invite you to write your member of Parliament and the prime minister to express your concerns. For Canadians who believe in freedom, now is the time to stand up.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article was originally published in the National Post and can be accessed here.