Commentary
The Canadian government’s campaign for complete control over what you can hear, see, and say is rolling like a platoon of tanks across what once were the wide open spaces of the internet.
It’s not enough that its Online Streaming Act puts all audio and visual content under the sweeping Sauron-like eye of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), notorious for its spoon-feeding of approved content to consumers who gag on its broccoli.
Nor is it enough that its Online News Act, which earned royal assent on June 22, and other mechanisms give that same CRTC the power to pry into the ongoings of the nation’s newsrooms, ponder their diversity, and approve how they spend money pried from the grasp of America’s web giants.
Nope. They’ve moved on to pondering the criminalization of certain types of speech.
Picking up on a plea from Kimberly Murray, Canada’s “special interlocutor” on unmarked graves on First Nations land, Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to the idea of making it a criminal act to deny Canada’s troubling Indian Residential Schools’ history and the presence of children’s graves on adjacent territory.
Let’s get this straight: I have stood on the land upon which the former Regina Indian Industrial School stood and been profoundly touched by the knowledge that lonely, frightened children died there and were forgotten. When that space was made sacred again, a wrong was righted.
The fact that crying children were forcibly removed from their homes, driven into compliance with what to them was a completely foreign culture and religion, stripped of their language and then returned home to families they barely knew, culturally confused and clueless as to how to raise their own children, is appalling. Ya, ya, I know the folks in charge of it thought they were doing the right thing, but so did Chairman Mao when he unleashed his own cultural revolution. It was wrong.
But as Terry Glavin pointed out in his Substack, the forces driving for this change are not interested any longer in tolerating any view on these matters other than that which they dictate. And that’s the type of thinking that leads to societies making exactly these kinds of totalitarian mistakes.
Glavin notes that even the head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, former judge and now senator Murray Sinclair, could be subject to the criminalization of questioning for saying something as simple as what he wrote a few years ago in an op-ed column for the Calgary Herald.
“While the TRC has heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care,” Sinclair wrote. “These experiences must also be heard.”
In other words, amongst all the tears and the tyrants, there were some good people trying to do their best for these lonely kids. And some of those residential school students went on to accomplish great things for their people, like Waskaganish Chief Billy Diamond, who negotiated the historic James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.
But in the new world, if Lametti and others in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet follow through, such words could be construed by Crown prosecutors as “residential school denialism.” Complaints would be filed and investigations launched. Even if no charges were ever laid, a chill would fall upon our speech.
Feel free to argue this one back and forth all you want. The big issue here is, seriously, whatever happened to the liberals in the Liberal Party of Canada?
Being a liberal—and I consider myself one in the classic definition of the term—means favouring liberty. It means being open to the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas. It’s about understanding that vigorous debate and the ability to challenge each other’s assumed verities makes for a better, more informed world. And, dare I say it, it’s about being open to the idea that the fact we don’t always agree with each other even when we have a shared understanding of the facts is actually a good thing. Heck, who knows, we might find out we are wrong about something.
But there is nothing liberal at all about Justin Trudeau’s government. It has command and control instincts about everything from economics to education, endlessly intruding into our freedoms of speech, association, and conscience in ways that should send a shiver up the spine of anyone who favours the foundational features of modern liberal democracies.
They misinform, disinform, and gaslight relentlessly all the while claiming their multiple speech and thought control-based legislation (an Online Harms Bill is coming in the fall) is necessary to keep us all “safe” from the same.
They suppress contrary opinions in the name of diversity and have shown themselves, through their relentless PMO spin factory, to be right up there at times with George Orwell’s Big Brother and his claims that “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.”
This ends in one of two ways. Either liberty is honoured in Canada and Trudeau backs down. Or he wins and Orwell’s future, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” becomes that much more possible.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
