A new poll suggests a majority of Canadians feel their right to freedom of speech is in danger.
The Leger online survey found 57 per cent of respondents who said free speech in Canada is under threat.
Of those, 34 per cent said it was “somewhat” threatened, while 23 per cent said they consider the threat a serious one.
Former Finnish Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen, who has been tried and unanimously acquitted by two courts, has had her free speech case appealed to the country’s Supreme Court. The prosecution calls for tens of thousands in fines.
Räsänen, a medical doctor and active parliamentarian, was first investigated in 2019 for a tweet that questioned the involvement of her church in a Helsinki LGBT ‘Pride’ event, with reference to the Bible’s Book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 24-27: “The men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
Where did Bill C-63 come from?
Lobbying is a reality in politics. Special interests groups lobby money to get certain agendas pushed, and to get money for their causes. This is hardly news. Searching the Federal Lobbyist Registry, the following names come up:
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, CIJA, has been prolific in lobbying Ottawa for changes to the Human Rights Act, and to the Criminal Code. This group has pushed for stricter definitions around so-called hate crimes and antisemitism. Their recent efforts include making Holocaust denial punishable by prison time, and removing religious protections. See here and here.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims, NCCM, specifically lists Section 13 of the Canadian Rights Act. They want laws against Islamophobia, and condemn “white supremacy”. Other efforts include anti-racism initiatives, such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Something is off when both the “Official Muslims” and the “Official Jews” are both pushing to undermine our right to free speech.
An open letter to Canada’s political leaders – for the sake of the country’s future
We, the undersigned, are calling on you to address urgently the rise of incivility, public aggression and overt hatred that are undermining the peace and security of Canadian life. This issue is so important that it transcends partisanship.
Whether they are connected to geopolitical events happening thousands of kilometres away or derived from homegrown causes, one cannot deny that tensions are on the rise in our streets and on our campuses.
We believe this phenomenon is part of a broader, worrisome trend. Canadians appear increasingly unwilling, unable or ill-equipped to talk to or live peaceably alongside those with divergent views of complex and divisive issues including, as in the current instance, those with significant geopolitical overtones and implications.
What garbage. I wonder how many of these upper class twits support Canada’s toxic mass immigration, multiculturalism and DEI policies?
Calls for civility, otherwise known as tone policing, are about control, about silencing your public voice.
Feck’ em
One of the past vice-chairs of Canada’s official broadcast regulator, Canada’s Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), has sounded the alarm over recent Conservative-backed federal legislation working its way through the system which looks to severely regulate the internet under the appearance of “protecting children.”
Peter Menzies, who served as the CRTC’s vice-chair for a time after an extensive career in the newspaper industry, and who is not known for being very conservative, wrote in a recent blog post in The Hub that the “[s]tate has no business in the WiFi of the nation,” criticizing in particular Senate Bill S-210.
Remember how totalitarian the CHRC was under Section 13? They’ll be even worse.
OTTAWA – Government officials say online hate speech would have to portray a group as “inherently violent” or “unhuman” to meet the threshold to be probed by a human-rights tribunal under a newly proposed law.
Justice officials briefed reporters today on the Criminal Code provisions in the government’s proposed bill to tackle online harms.
Those changes have come under harsh criticism from civil liberties groups and legal experts who are voicing concerns about the potential to chill free speech.
During the Section 13 Wars the CHRC visited my blog every day. Even Christmas.
‘By allowing these tribunals to offer cost awards, they’re effectively going to be incentivizing complaints,’ says Aaron Wudrick, of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson talks to Aaron Wudrick, the director of the domestic policy program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, about the government’s new online harms bill.
The bill will attempt to force social-media, user-uploaded adult content and live-streaming services to reduce exposure to online content deemed harmful. That means strengthening the reporting of child pornography and better addressing hate propaganda and providing recourse to victims of hate online.
Hard to believe that something could be worse than Section 13 but here it is.
This is about control not “harm.”
I am certain the worst will come to pass.
The Online Harms Act, in all its ominous incarnations, was always going to be all about saving the children.
Except it was never just about that. It was really always about what has been revealed to be its core purpose: suppressing Canadians’ freedom of speech on the internet. The saving the children from exploitation by online predators part is just political exploitation. Either you agree with the bill entirely, its proponents will say, or you don’t want children protected.
The Liberals have bundled their online harms laws into a single bill, but that wide-reaching legislation is really two very different frameworks that have been unwisely conjoined.
The first part, the one actually called the Online Harms Act, is indeed plausibly about online harms. It would create an infrastructure – including statutory responsibilities for social media platforms – that would limit loathsome digital acts such as cyberbullying and revenge porn.
Bernie Farber likes this law, so do the Islamists. Our freedom of speech is being sacrificed to identity politics.
Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending against criticism that the Liberals’ sweeping new online harms bill could have a chilling effect on free speech.
Virani says the legislation is not about censoring “insults launched from a smartphone” but instead giving victims and law enforcement more tools to respond to a rising tide of hate in Canada.
“We’re not talking about insulting, offensive remarks or bad jokes. We’re talking about things like calling for the extermination of a people,” the justice minister told host Mercedes Stephenson in an interview on The West Block.
This bad law grants totalitarian powers that will be used to silence dissent. Our right to freedom of speech should not be trampled to please Islamists or their useful idiots.
“Islamophobia” seems to be everywhere these days – or at least accusations of it. What does it mean?
Too often it leads to silencing people who have questions about Islam and its teachings. I don’t know of any laws preventing people from criticizing or questioning Christianity or Judaism – in Judaism it seems that what is said is based on context!
… Today, in 2024, there seems to be a double standard in Toronto. Although Brazau was charged because language can be a weapon, those calling for the extermination of Israel and the Jews are allowed to speak whatever they want and protest anywhere – without fear. The October, 2023 barbaric massacre of Jews in Israel by Muslims from Gaza led to full-throated Muslim protests.
Trudeau’s new hate crime legislation is a thinly disguised effort to implement sharia law in Canada.
Justice Minister Arif Virani says the Online Harms Act won’t give the federal government the power to determine what is and isn’t appropriate content.
The bill, tabled by the Liberal government Monday, includes an amendment to define “hatred” in Canada’s Criminal Code. That definition, Virani said, does not include insulting or offensive content, but rather recognized hate speech like calling for genocide.
“People insult groups or people or races or religions all of the time. That’s going to continue to be awful but lawful,” Virani told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
“But when you call for the extermination of a people, you’re hitting a hate standard that’s already been entrenched by the courts.”
From the river to the sea Virani will invent the crime that fits me.
The loosely knit collective that vocally opposed COVID-19 health measures has morphed into a movement waging a broader fight against “perceived government overreach,” says a newly released assessment from Canada’s spy agency.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s analytical brief traces the evolution of the “Freedom” movement that began to emerge following the early 2022 protests that paralyzed downtown Ottawa and key Canada-U.S. border points.
Despite having been acquitted of hate speech twice, Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen may still have to face another day in court on the same charges.
The Finnish public prosecutor has appealed the case to the country’s supreme court.
Räsänen, who has been a member of parliament since 1995 and also served as minister of the interior from 2011 to 2015, was formally charged with “agitation against a minority group” in 2021 under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
Canada’s justice minister said he hopes to avoid accusations that the Liberal government is trying to regulate or curb speech with its planed bill to protect people from online harms.
“Where I don’t want this bill to go is down some sort of path where it looks like people are trying to tell you what to think, or how to criticize people,” federal Justice Minister Arif Virani told The Canadian Press in a wide-ranging interview last week.
“That’s absolutely not what we’re talking about.”
