Imagine A Boot Stamping On Kitten Videos Forever

It's all about Canadian content, you see:

Days after the government removed legal safeguards designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content as part of Bill C-10, its Broadcasting Act reform bill, the public and political world have awoken to the troubling implications for freedom of expression. 

Political columnists are comparing Canada to China in censoring the Internet and opposition MPs have launched petitions with promises to fight back against the bill. The issue unsurprisingly became a major talking point during Question Period in the House of Commons yesterday. While Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault retreated to his usual talking points, it is notable that his claims are not even supported by his own department officials.

Here is what Guilbeault told the House of Commons yesterday in response to a barrage of questions from opposition MPs on Bill C-10 and its implications for free speech:

We have said from the beginning, when we introduced Bill C-10, that user-generated content would be excluded, but that online platforms that act as broadcasters would be included in the legislation. This is exactly what the amendments that have been debated in committee try do, and that is what we will do.

While Guilbeault wants Canadians to believe that user generated content is excluded from the bill, his own department disagrees. Owen Ripley, Canadian Heritage’s Director General of Broadcasting, Copyright and Creative Marketplace, described the implications to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage minutes before it voted to remove Section 4.1, the provision excluding user generated content as a program subject to CRTC regulation:

Ms. Dabrusin has signalled the government intends to repeal, or suggest a repeal, of Section 4.1 altogether, meaning that there would no longer be any exclusion for social media services at all. For the benefit of the committee, in our previous sessions, the committee upheld the exclusion for users of social media companies. In other words, when you or I upload something to YouTube or some other sharing service, we will not be considered broadcasters for the purposes of the Act. The CRTC couldn’t call us before them and we couldn’t be subject to CRTC hearings.

But if the exclusion is removed – if 4.1 is struck down – the programming we upload to Youtube, that programming that we place on that service would be subject to regulation moving forward, but would be the responsibility of Youtube or whatever the sharing service is. The programming that is uploaded could be subject to discoverability requirements or certain obligations like that.

If the way forward to is maintain the exclusion for individual users but to strike down the exclusion for social media companies, that means that all the programming that is on those services would be subject to the Act regardless of whether it was put there by an affiliate or a mandatary of the company.

This isn’t complicated. The Liberals established exceptions for users and their content in Bill C-10. In fact, on the day he introduced the legislation, Guilbeault told the House of Commons that “user generated content will not be regulated.” With last week’s change, his own department acknowledges that the content will be regulated. 

More:

The hate speech bill soon to be tabled will create a new regulator with the power to levy fines and require transparency from social media outlets, including about their algorithms. The legislation will also set out a legal framework for prohibiting hate speech, terrorist content, content that incites violence, non-consensual sharing of intimate content, and child sexual exploitative content.

 

(Sidebar: there are already laws against the above. When the Liberals were questioned about Pornhub, they were characteristically cagey. Indeed, they always seem to be non-verbal whenever a sex scandal arises and always rush to defend the Groper. But this is not about obscene material. As Steven Guilbeault said openly, it was about silencing anyone who had anything negative to say about politicians.)

“With the legislation we will be tabling, it won’t matter whether or not the company is Canadian,” Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault recently said, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. “It won’t matter where the company is registered or where their servers are located. Once a publication is flagged, it will have to be taken down within 24 hours.”

Oh, no! 

No more Marvel movies.

Or Instagram.

**

As morally and physically repulsive as Trudeau, is, this attempt to turn Canada in to North Korea would not have been possible without the support of Canadians who enjoy being controlled, who prefer a political off-switch to the personal one they lack when opening their mouths about inappropriate things or cuss words. Treatises on free expression fall, predictably, on decidedly deaf ears:

The state does not own the rights of its citizens. It’s an inversion of the relationship between citizen and government to think so. Citizens give orders to governments. Citizens are the ultimate rulers, which any definition of the word democracy will affirm: demos – people; cracy -rule.

Yet we have experienced a grave dilution of how these rights are presently understood, in parallel with a grave dilution of respect for them. The rot began and was sadly nursed in the very institutions by those which should most defend and explain them. Our decaying universities.

Was it not the universities who pioneered the idea of “free speech zones” on campus? This was the granting of some small and marked piece of campus territory where students, whom the university decreed might say something “offensive” or “insensitive” or “perceived as discriminatory” (unwoke is the current terms for all these categories) would be forced, under edict and threat of expulsion to go to these islands, and only there be “allowed” to speak their minds. All else was forbidden space. “Allowed” speech is the antithesis of free speech, and designated “spaces” wherein that allowed speech could be voiced, a surrender of intellectualism, and a woeful instance of the cowardice of elite institutions.

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It was the universities which played midwife to the new anti-intellectual doctrines such as “speech is violence” with its reverse twin dogma that “violence is speech.” They spread the intellectual acid of relativism. The most faithful guardians, so we thought, of unrestrained thinking became the efficient and sly agents of its curtailment.

Even just a few years ago almost everyone could reference the great negative power the great churches of the West once held, the power to excommunicate, set up heretic-hunting inquisitions, draw up lists of which books could be read, and carried to stake or dungeon those who would challenge its power and self-declared infallibility. How the churches have been scorned for treading on such freedoms.

There is no stake or dungeon today, merely cancel culture. However Twitter mobbing and cries of racism or homophobia, declamations for woke bishops are fine 21st century versions of the same.

Unless stronger measures are taken, Goebbels Guilbeault will get away with this. If not now, then somewhere down the road when the idea becomes more palatable to a populace more attuned with banning words that hurt them.

E-mails simply will not do. A presence on Parliament Hill will. It has to be done before meeting with one's compatriots becomes illegal (and it will). And before financial punishments are inflicted.

Also:

Opposition members of Parliament are criticizing the federal government for what they call an increased use of “Cabinet confidence” to withhold information, this time surrounding a sole-sourced contract awarded to an American IT giant by Ottawa.

Because transparency.