In my latest Spectator column I’ve written about Justin Trudeau’s dystopian Online Harms Bill. Here’s how it begins:
You’d assume the reaction to the SNP’s new hate crime laws would make other authoritarian governments hesitate before introducing similar legislation. Humza Yousaf has become a laughing stock and his approval ratings have fallen by 15 points. But apparently not. The new Irish Taoiseach, Simon Harris, is determined to railroad through the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, Donald Tusk’s government in Poland wants to introduce a new law that would make it a criminal offence to ‘defame’ a member of the LGBT community and Justin Trudeau is pressing ahead with an Online Harms Bill that makes our own Online Safety Act seem like the First Amendment. It’s as if all these ‘liberal’ leaders are saying: “You think Humza Yousaf is the West’s foremost opponent of free speech? Hold my beer.”
The Canadian proposal is, by some distance, the worst. It’s so dystopian, even George Orwell and Philip K. Dick failed to anticipate it. Discrimination is already banned under the Canadian Human Rights Act, but the new law will expand the definition of ‘discrimination’ to include online speech “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group”. To those worrywarts who are anxious about the risk that this new law might be weaponised by woke activists, the government has said that ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’ are not the same as ‘disdain’ or ’dislike’, which will still be permitted (thank you, Mr Trudeau), or speech that ‘discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends’.
Which raises the question: who gets to decide what speech falls foul of this new standard? And what qualifies them to make these Solomon-like judgments, parsing the difference between ‘dislike’ (acceptable) and ‘detest’ (verboten)? That job will fall to a new national agency called the Digital Safety Commission, comprised of five commissioners and an army of bureaucratic busybodies, which will have the same powers as a federal court, save for the fact that it won’t be bound by ‘any technical or legal rules of evidence’. (Points to Kafka for anticipating that.)
Worth reading in full.
I end by inviting anyone interested in helping me set up a Free Speech Union of Canada to contact me on tobyyoung@freespeechunion.org.
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