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FUREY: Trudeau Liberals ram through online censorship bill -- and only the Senate can save us now

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It was shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning that the Trudeau Liberals hastily wrapped up the committee process on their controversial Bill C-11. Normally, such a bill would receive much more time to be debated but the federal government wanted no such thing. So just like that, while Canadians were sleeping, the government rammed through a bill that will see Canadians’ social media subject to government censorship.

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Despite the over 150 amendments proposed and despite protestations from leading experts on the issue, the bill was passed through Committee to return to the House of Commons where it will almost definitely be approved by the Trudeau Liberals and Jagmeet Singh’s New Lapdog Party. (Hat tip to Lorne Gunter, who coined that most fitting term in a recent column.)

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Bill C-11, described most generously, is about modernizing Canada’s broadcasting laws to allow it to regulate streaming services such as Netflix as well as social medal sites like YouTube, Spotify and TikTok. Its aims are in part to promote Canadian content on these services and provide for more funding for such content.

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But the part of the bill that has caused the greatest alarm is the section that would give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), a government agency, the ability to regulate and censor what they call user-generated content (your posts!).

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The Liberals and CRTC have gone out of their way to say they don’t intend to act on these new powers. That’s nice, experts respond, but then why don’t you just take out the offending provisions then?

We already know the Liberals are obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with the idea of regulating social media. Take, for example, then Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s claims last year that public servants need to be shielded from online scrutiny or how the government wants to create an Orwellian-named Digital Safety Commissioner, who would be granted the discretion to block websites.

Describing the committee meeting, University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist writes in a blog post that: “This sham process notably excluded debate on many of the proposed amendments on regulating user content … The debate was cut short by the 9:00 deadline, where the chair moved directly to voting on amendments and the Liberals, NDP and Bloc all voted against. The effect was that despite numerous witnesses, including creators, platforms, and experts raising concerns about the implications of the bill on their creativity and expression, the government literally cut off debate on many of the proposals to address their concerns.”

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The life of this bill is akin to The Walking Dead does Ottawa: It was first put together the other year as Bill C-10 but experts denounced its censorship components. The Trudeau Liberals acted like they were walking it back and promised they’d fix any concerns. But then the bill came back to life with a vengeance as Bill C-11, with expert concerns largely unaddressed.

The political timing is something. There was massive non-partisan public outcry last time around but instead of solving the problem, the government waited it out. In fact, they slyly brought the bill back in the winter when all eyes were on the convoy taking root in Ottawa.

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Peter Menzies, a former vice-chair of the CRTC, described the bill as “thuggish” in a Financial Post analysis on attempts to revive C-10, and made it clear that “Posts by ordinary citizens would also have been under the guise of the regulator.”

There is only one group of people who can fix this mess now: Canada’s Senators, who are expected to receive C-11 in the Upper Chamber later this year. If sober second thought counts for anything, it should be that they take extra time going through a piece of legislation that the Liberals rammed through without even reading all of the proposed amendments before forcing a vote.

Our freedoms quite literally depend upon it.

Listen to Anthony Furey and Michael Geist discuss Bill C-11 on an episode of the Full Comment podcast here.

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