Tuesday, March 12, 2024

[Post Title Redacted - Offense Perceived]

In case anyone is confused, the Liberals have no intention of protecting children or guarding educated adults from harm.

They DO want to resurrect Section 13, the ability for anyone to engage in legalised vendettas against anyone for the slightest thing uttered or a decade-old tweet.

Any such bill purported to protect the public is, in truth, censorship.

The Liberals can't be tyrants without it:

It seems Justin Trudeau isn’t only a dick – he also gets his ideas from one. Philip K Dick, to be precise. Trudeau’s government has proposed a new law that would give judges the power to put an individual under house arrest if they fear he might commit a hate crime. That’s right – might. It’s right out of The Minority Report, Dick’s 1956 dystopian tale of a future America in which a ‘Precrime’ police division uses intelligence from mutants known as ‘precogs’ to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence. Welcome to woke Canada, where Dickian nightmares come true.

It is courtesy of Bill C-63 that the pitiable citizens of Canada might soon find themselves languishing in court-ordered confinement despite having committed no crime. The bill is devoted to tackling ‘hate’ on the internet. As is always the case when officialdom puffs itself up and declares war on mean words online, it is riddled with draconianism. For example, the mad law, if passed, would allow people to file complaints (shorter version: snitch) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission if they spot ‘hate speech’ online. Those found guilty of this sin of making a nasty utterance could be ordered to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation.

Imagine the levels of grift this would give rise to. The offence-seeking snowflakes of the phoney left would finally be able to monetise their hurt feelings. Call a ‘transwoman’ a fella and he (yes, he – sue me) could potentially drag you to the CHRC for a nice little payday. The law would incentivise complaint-making. Worse, it would foster self-censorship. Who would risk getting angry online, far less logging on when drunk to wind up the woke, when it’s possible they’ll have their pockets turned out by a misnamed Human Rights Commission so that some professional victim can be compensated for the pain of having seen a word or idea he doesn’t like?

It really is possible it will be ideas, not just blind hatred, that will be punished under C-63. The justice minister Arif Virani’s promise that speech that is ‘awful but lawful’ will not be censored, and that a ‘high threshold’ will have to be met before people are penalised for what they post, is not reassuring. After all, Canada’s a country in which entirely legit publications have found themselves under investigation by the Human Rights Commission just for publishing controversial matterMaclean’s magazine had its collar felt by the human-rights overlords following a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. The CHRC also launched an investigation into Alphonse de Valk, a priest, after he raged with passion against same-sex marriage.

I’m not confident that a nation that has such an inquisitorial body, a body whose very description of itself as a ‘human rights’ commission is a brazen act of Orwellian deceit, will keep its promise of permitting the expression of ‘awful’ thoughts. So much is branded ‘hate speech’ these days – from correctly calling ‘transwomen’ men to saying Islam has a lot of dumb ideas – that it feels inevitable that the expression of fairly normal ideas that Canada’s woke regime just doesn’t like will get swept up in this crusade against ‘hate’. Indeed, under Canada’s C-16 gender-identity law, ‘deliberately misgendering’ a trans person is treated as a potential ‘violation’ of their human rights. I predict that C-63’s incentivising of snitching will cause an explosion in complaints of ‘misgendering’. Perhaps Canada will become a no-go zone for thoughtcriminals like JK Rowling.

But it is C-63’s proposal to introduce something like precrime into Canada that has caused most waves. The idea is that individuals who are talking shit online, especially if they’re aiming their invective at minority groups, could be ordered to stay indoors or to wear an electronic tag if a judge fears there could be an ‘escalation’ in their behaviour. Precrime, then. Dick’s idea made flesh. The newspaper headlines give a sense of how chilling this suggestion is, how headlong Canada’s descent into dystopia has become. ‘Justice minister defends house-arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future’, says the Globe and Mail. Mate, when you’re defending the confinement of people who’ve broken no law, it’s surely time to stop and think.

In keeping with Canada’s Orwellian theme, these precrime confinements are referred to as ‘peace bonds’. In short, we’re riding roughshod over the first principle of justice – that no one should be punished unless they deviate from the law – in the name of ‘peace’. ‘War is peace’, said Big Brother. ‘Stripping an individual of his fundamental liberties is peace’, says Big Trudeau. Canada really has become a cauldron of authoritarianism. From using wartime emergency laws against protesting truckers to depriving protesters of their legally raised funds, from demonising the accurate description of a person’s sex to launching investigations into unwoke publications, truly Canada is at the forefront of woke tyranny.

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Beware of governments making laws to “protect the children,” warns Ian Runkle. Bill C-63’s rules aimed at stopping online child exploitation and revenge porn seem well-intentioned. But the online harms act is so broad, it could end up censoring popular streaming entertainment, says Runkle, a lawyer specializing in civil liberties and host of the Runkle of the Bailey YouTube channel. More worryingly, as Runkle tells Brian Lilley this week, it’s all wrapped up with stiff new penalties and powers against supposedly harmful ideas that are so prone to abuse they can only encourage platforms to pre-emptively block Canadians’ speech — including yours.

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Next, we might consider: What powers is this new commission to be granted? For starters, it can regulate any “social media service,” which is, by the definitions set forth in the bill, any service that enables a user to communicate content to the public. Let that sink in. We are now producing in Canada a new bureaucracy to monitor all public communication for “harm,” which can be defined in any way the new bureaucracy sees fit, under the guise, most particularly, of protecting children from sexual exploitation. Who can object to the latter? No one decent. But in what manner does it enable the former? In every manner imaginable — and then some.
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Let’s concentrate on a few particularly egregious examples from the bill in question, which make the full danger apparent only once you also understand that you or anyone else who uses social media can be denounced anonymously by anyone anywhere for any reason and that you will be investigated without the right to confront your accuser or even to know who it was. So don’t be thinking this just applies to the giant evil corporations idiot politicians enjoy lambasting for their own self-aggrandizement. Any technologically-equipped modern person falls under the purview of Bill C-63, and by design.
First, in our analysis, we might note the means of investigation: the Digital Safety Commission or any of its representatives will be able to enter a place of business without a warrant and take and/or reproduce anything there — and with full cooperation, or else.
Second, note the powers of the Commission: its edicts will have the full force of a Canadian Federal court, despite the fact that it will not be bound (this is literally in the bill) by “any legal or technical rules of evidence.”|
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Third, Bill C-63 also amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to create the offence of “communication of hate speech.” Now the problem with this is not that there is no speech that is hateful, because it is obvious that such speech exists. The problem, as it always is, is “who defines hate?” And the answer to that question is always two-fold: those you would least want charged with that task, and those who hate speech. It is no different here. Note the potential scope of your malfeasance and liability: you can be reported (and by anyone anywhere) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission not only for anything you post after this bill comes into existence, but for anything you ever posted anywhere.
This, combined with the much lower evidentiary standard employed in the course of these proceedings, absolutely guarantees that anyone with any contentious opinions whatsoever will be immediately made subject to endless lawfare — particularly by the devious radicals and psychopaths who have already learned to weaponize such ill-conceived systems of governance and policing. Fines of up to $20,000 to the complainant and $50,000 to the Crown (of course) follow — but that’s only the beginning. Bill C-63 also adds a “hate crime” offence to the Criminal code, which could be laid in conjunction with any legal violation “if the commission of the offence is motivated by hatred.” The potential sentence? Life in prison — which is a sentence that in the case of this bill in the hands of this government and the increasingly captured judiciary that now serves Canada is a sentence very likely to be enforced, and for purely political reasons.
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Fourth: hatred is defined in this bill as an “emotion.” The danger in making that a crime should be self-evident: who defines the offending emotion? It is currently in vogue among the activists most likely to misuse such provisions and their definitions to allow the existence of such criminal sentiment to be determined by the offended “feelings” of the hypothetical target. Furthermore—and this is dangerous almost beyond belief—the protected social classes protected by Bill C-63 include the now-familiar and entirely imaginary categories of “gender identity” and, worse, “gender expression.” The first is the radical re-imagining of the concept of sex that is currently and purposefully wreaking havoc in our society, particularly among the easily manipulated and young. The second is something literally indistinguishable from fashion, as it is nothing but means of self-presentation, however conceived. It is exactly the inclusion of such a concept that indicates just how dangerous the concept of “group rights” can become.
Fifth, and finally, we might and should note what is much worse in this bill, and there is plenty: Bill C-63 allows not only for the creation of a new, giant, power-mad bureaucracy, aimed squarely at the prosecution of free speech, under the guise of harm reduction, but for the invention of an entirely new and ominous crime — pre-crime, really — the “possibility” of offending. Under the changes to the Criminal Code proposed, you can be denounced by anyone in the manner already indicated for being a probable future offender — on the basis of their “fears.”
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Hate speech is punishable under criminal law, but in the past, it could also be met with a civil penalty under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. In 2014, the penalty was killed by Stephen Harper’s government after being badly abused. In 2021, the Trudeau government tried to resurrect Section 13 in Bill C-36, but the bill died when an election was called. Now, it’s back for a third time as Bill C-63, and is as dangerous as ever to freedom of speech and the free press.
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The civil penalty for hate speech will result in self-censorship, intrude into press freedom and result in frivolous complaints arising from online flame wars where the process becomes the punishment. These frivolous complaints will clog up the already overburdened Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) which is supposed to deal with complex societal problems, such as discrimination in transportation or by government agencies. All are supported by a taxpayer-funded bureaucracy.
We’ve already seen this story play out.
In 2007, the CHRC launched an investigation into Maclean’s magazine based on complaints brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress alleging violations of Section 13 the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). The complaints were about articles published by the magazine between 2005 and 2007, including a book excerpt from “America Alone” by author Mark Steyn.
In 2008, the CHRC began an investigation into Fr. Alphonse de Valk, a Basilian priest and pro-life activist who publishes in the monthly magazine Catholic Insight. De Valk’s impugned speech involved opposition to same-sex marriage and quoting the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals. Like the complaint against Steyn, this complaint was made by a member of the public to the CHRC under Section 13 of the Act.
There was widespread opprobrium from the public over the abuse of the hate speech complaint process, which up until the early aughts had largely been uncontroversial because it had almost exclusively been used against skinheads, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. But suddenly, human rights commissions were investigating complaints about speech that were much closer to mainstream views: concerns about Islamist violence, immigration, demographics and same-sex marriage. Further, complaints were now being made against mainstream publications, like Maclean’s, the Western Standard and Catholic Insight.
It was in this context in June 2008 that Prof. Richard Moon was asked by the CHRC to write a report on the regulation of hate speech on the internet, focusing specifically on Section 13 of the governing act. Moon recommended that Section 13 be repealed, finding that the prohibition of this narrow category of extreme expression fits awkwardly into a human rights law that is concerned with the eradication of discrimination. He concluded that the Criminal Code’s prohibitions on hate speech were sufficient, and that state censorship of hatred should be confined to a narrow category of extreme expression, which threatens, advocates or justifies violence against members of an identifiable group.
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In 2008, the complaints against de Valk and Steyn were ultimately dismissed, but not before they incurred huge costs; $20,000 in legal fees in de Valk’s case, undoubtedly more in Steyn’s. The process becomes the punishment even if the case does not proceed past an investigation.
Individuals who complain bear no costs in bringing a complaint — not even the costs of a lawyer. Under the previous Section 13, if a complaint was dismissed as frivolous by the CHRC, the defendant could not ask for costs as is possible in civil court. Under the new version of Section 13, defendants can ask for costs if the tribunal finds there has been an abuse of process. But that doesn’t save the defendant costs associated with a commission investigation that doesn’t proceed to the tribunal. And if it does proceed, abuse of process is guarded by such a high legal bar it is essentially useless.
If the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal were to find a hate speech violation under the proposed C-63, defendants could face fines of up to $50,000, and could be made to pay up to $20,000 to complainants. The process financially incentivizes complaints at essentially zero cost.


Also:


(Sidebar: this Freedom Convoy.)


And - from the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

Ottawa has rejected a Public Order Emergency Commission recommendation to disclose documents pertaining to potential future usage of the Emergencies Act, saying that cabinet confidentiality outweighs the public interest.
    “The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that the constitutional     convention of cabinet confidentiality is essential to good government as it     protects the public’s interest in ensuring that the executive branch of     government can conduct its internal business in private,” the federal     government said in its March 6 response to the Public Order Emergency     Commission (POEC).
Ottawa invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14, 2022, in response to the Freedom Convoy protest, which saw protestors and their vehicles encamped in Ottawa to demonstrate against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.



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