EZRA LEVANT | Trudeau's new censorship bill is the worst ever seen in the free world
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
166.79465
Summary
Bill C-63 is a censorship bill that could see you get a life sentence for hate crimes, hate speech, child pornography, revenge porn, and other types of hate crimes. It's a new kind of hate crime, and it could be the battle of the year.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, my friends. I'm back on today about Bill C-63. That's Trudeau's new censorship law.
00:00:07.100
Yesterday, I went on at great length. Today, I'm going to give you sort of my more considered
00:00:10.260
thoughts. Keep it shorter. We're going to interview John Carpe, the boss of the Justice
00:00:13.800
Center for Constitutional Freedoms. I think this is going to be the battle of the year for us,
00:00:18.480
and whether we want it or not, frankly, I think Trudeau has built this law in part to take us on.
00:00:25.860
But before I get to today's show, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:30.440
It's $8 a month. You get the video version of the show. The $8 a month, I think it's worth it. You
00:00:35.280
get a ton of great stuff. But actually, there's another reason I think it's worth it. It's because
00:00:39.080
we don't get any money from government. So we need that $8 a month to pay our bills.
00:00:43.400
You know, $8 might not sound like a lot of money to you, but you put it together with thousands of
00:00:47.420
other people paying $8. We can run a whole freedom-oriented company here. So I think that's
00:00:51.800
a reason to do it, too. Please go to rebelnewsplus.com. All right, here's today's podcast.
00:01:00.000
Tonight, I'm still in shock at the details of Trudeau's new censorship bill. Here's my
00:01:17.320
thoughts after 48 hours. It's February 28th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:21.760
You're ready for freedom. Shame on you, you censorious bug.
00:01:28.100
Hey, I don't know if you saw the show last night or the full two and a half hour live stream
00:01:43.340
I did in the middle of the day. It was good, but it was plodding. I was going through slowly
00:01:49.240
learning along with you. I had not read the full thing before, so I was sort of going slow,
00:01:54.240
and I was going in chronological order, just sort of page by page. I want to do now, instead of doing
00:02:01.240
a two and a half hour version, I want to see if I can get it down to 15 minutes. Not just 15 minutes
00:02:05.780
to summarize it, but my thoughts on the whole thing a couple days in. I think the first thing
00:02:10.700
is what this bill is not about. It's not actually about child pornography. That's been banned by the
00:02:18.100
criminal code for decades. It's not about revenge pornography, where you filmed a partner, and now
00:02:26.200
you're estranged, and they're an ex, and you upload it to the internet in vengeance. That happens these
00:02:31.260
days. That's been criminalized for 10 years. Stephen Harper passed an amendment to the criminal code in
00:02:37.480
2014. Five years in prison if you do that. This law is not about getting social media companies to put
00:02:45.580
a block button to ban, to allow you to ban people who harass you. All of these things, child pornography,
00:02:53.180
revenge porn, social media safety, that's already in effect. If you feel yourself saying, yeah, that's a good
00:03:00.760
idea. We should ban that, or we should regulate that. Okay, good. We're doing that already. That is not what
00:03:06.920
this law is about. That's a distraction, a misdirection, an illusion, a trick. When Trudeau rolled out
00:03:15.120
family members who had child abuse issues, he was actually using them. He was re-abusing them
00:03:22.600
by making them human shields, cannon fodder, to distract from his real goal. It's not just the
00:03:29.040
child pornography. This bill talks about banning incitement of violence, banning incitement to
00:03:35.980
terrorism. I think you probably know those are already against the law. We toughened up our
00:03:41.620
anti-terrorism laws after 9-11 and inciting violence as being a crime even before Canada
00:03:48.220
was born. Now, this is really about censorship. It's obvious. This bill creates not one, not two,
00:03:56.400
but three new offices and agencies dedicated to censoring the internet, each one of which has their
00:04:04.140
own office, their own staff, their own budget, their own CEO. Plus, in addition to those three
00:04:10.900
new agencies, it beefs up the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights
00:04:16.480
Tribunal. To show you how important the censorship is, the Justice Minister has a new title, Justice
00:04:23.180
Minister, Attorney General, and Minister of State for Online Harms. As I said yesterday, there are hundreds
00:04:30.600
of laws in Canada. The criminal code has hundreds of sections. The only one that is now part of the
00:04:37.080
Justice Minister's new title is this censorship bill. Censorship is the heart of it. The most shocking
00:04:45.220
detail is a new standalone hate crime offense punishable by life in prison. I didn't know the
00:04:53.040
liberals believed in life in prison. They certainly don't believe in it for murderers or rapists or
00:04:57.300
terrorists, but for hating the wrong people. Life in prison. Something equally shocking to me is the
00:05:04.640
pre-crime nature, where a judge can preemptively punish someone, arrest someone, put them under house
00:05:11.020
arrest, if they fear they will, in the future, commit a hate crime. Put them in house arrest. Put an ankle
00:05:19.820
bracelet on them. Make them undergo regular drug and urine tests. Seize their lawful firearms. Ban them from
00:05:26.320
talking to any particular person. Ban them from going to any particular place. And if they resist
00:05:31.260
these, going straight to prison for not complying. All before they've done a thing. There's other
00:05:38.060
shocking things, like a requirement that social media companies like Facebook or Twitter take down
00:05:43.640
offensive posts within 24 hours or face huge fines, which means that they will have no time to
00:05:50.440
investigate or to hear the other side or to properly look into it. They'll simply take everything down
00:05:56.160
when someone complains. I think one of the most personal aspects of this is the renovation of
00:06:04.560
Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. You may know that that's the provision that I campaigned
00:06:09.480
on repealing when Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister. Based on my own experience publishing the
00:06:13.940
Danish cartoons of Mohammed, we lobbied the Canadian government and Parliament passed a law repealing
00:06:20.060
the hate speech section to those putting it back in. And this time it's even worse. He rewards
00:06:27.760
complainants with $20,000 payments. That is, if you complain against Rebel News, you can get up to
00:06:37.180
$20,000 from us and cause us to have to pay $50,000 to the government. You could complain for every single
00:06:45.600
article we post because we tweet and use other social media for all of our journalism. Literally
00:06:54.260
every single news story could attract a complaint to the Human Rights Commission for hate because it's a
00:07:02.500
moneymaker now. This will create and fund an army of professional internet complainers. I should say
00:07:10.280
that hate speech to complain to the Human Rights Commission now specifically includes criticizing
00:07:16.480
gender identity or gender expression. You might not even know what those words mean. They're so
00:07:22.920
newfangled. Gender identity is when you look like a fella, but you just say, man, I feel like a woman.
00:07:29.540
You can have a beard. You can have your twig and berries. But as long as you identify as a woman,
00:07:35.320
you're a woman. And you can go into a change room or a bathroom or a rape shelter. Every one of those
00:07:42.240
things has happened in Canada. You can go into a women's prison. Gender expression is when you shave
00:07:47.760
your beard and put on makeup. But if you criticize either of these practices, you could be prosecuted for
00:07:54.260
a hate crime under this bill. What's even more terrifying, and this is something new, this was not
00:08:00.640
the case when I was prosecuted in Human Rights Court, complainants can now keep their identity secret,
00:08:07.340
even from the accused. So a complaint could come in about a broadcast we do here.
00:08:14.720
Who complained? Was it a competitor? Was it someone we wrote a critical article about?
00:08:20.360
Was it someone in the Liberal Party? Was it an ex-employee or a personal friend who turned sour?
00:08:28.280
Those are all relevant facts when you're accused in a real court. So you can say, oh, I know this guy.
00:08:33.760
He's just mad because of that. Or I know that guy. He's full of it because of this.
00:08:37.940
You don't know who's coming at you now. The ability to look your accuser in the eye is removed in this
00:08:43.920
bizarre law. I used to think, I used to think my first reading of the bill, I thought this is a war
00:08:50.740
on Elon Musk because he's taken over Twitter and made it for freedom of speech. It is, but it's also
00:08:57.460
a war on every big tech company. I think Justin Trudeau looks at those companies and says, well,
00:09:04.140
I want you to censor more for me. But really, he looks at them and he sees money. In fact, one of the
00:09:10.300
most shocking parts of this bill is a proposal that 8% of a social media company's global revenues
00:09:16.240
be a fine, an 8% fine of their entire world revenue. What? So by the way, I Googled it yesterday
00:09:24.840
and I think Facebook had revenues of about $140 billion US last year. So 8%, you've got a 10 billion
00:09:31.960
US amount that the government of Canada thinks they'll just take from Facebook. We'll see how that
00:09:38.620
goes down. But of course, Trudeau thinks he can spend money better than anyone can spend their
00:09:43.300
own money. There's something else that is terrifying. The power to get into the internal
00:09:48.760
records and the computer files of any of these social media companies, not to do some police
00:09:55.060
work, but to do advocacy and education. But I don't think it's in the end really about hunting
00:10:01.920
Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. I think in the end, it's about hunting you. If you have written a
00:10:09.280
Facebook post or a Twitter post five years ago, 10 years ago, even one that you've forgotten about,
00:10:16.160
the law specifically says if there is an offensive publication online that's still online and you
00:10:21.440
could delete it, you have the power to delete it, and you don't, you're liable for it. Literally
00:10:27.100
everything and anything you have ever written online can be used against you. You can be prosecuted
00:10:33.560
for it. A $20,000 punishment, if a complaint comes at you, plus a $50,000 fine, to fight that would
00:10:43.760
probably cost you $20,000 in legal costs. This is going to be rushed through Parliament, of course.
00:10:50.260
Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau has just renewed their vows in their coalition.
00:10:53.500
So what's the public reaction mean? So far, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association,
00:11:01.440
the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms
00:11:04.660
have all said this is very troubling. But there's people who will profit by it.
00:11:10.960
Bernie Farber is one such name. He was the chair of the so-called anti-hate network that gets millions
00:11:17.480
of dollars from American sources, as well as the Trudeau government. Farber is a misinformation
00:11:23.900
expert. Here he is, claiming that a pamphlet in Florida, an anti-Semitic pamphlet in Florida,
00:11:30.140
was actually being distributed in Canada. He used the exact photograph of when it was shot in Florida.
00:11:37.420
The guy's a liar. But he makes money out of whipping up hate. So of course he loves this.
00:11:42.560
He's going to get rich off this. I saw Stephen Camp, the former hate speech officer at the
00:11:47.960
Edmonton Police Service, who now works for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, paid for by
00:11:52.800
taxpayers. So what I'm saying is all the race hucksters, the anti-hate hucksters who grift for
00:11:57.640
a living off of this, they love it. Because they no longer have to apply for grants to get their money.
00:12:05.240
They can just file complaints for cash. Let me quote to you from an access to information request
00:12:11.540
that we did with the government about this Canadian anti-hate network and how they get
00:12:16.480
funded to file complaints. Take a look at this. This is that group that Bernie Farber was associated
00:12:21.540
with. This is the hunter-killer group that likes to smear conservatives. This is from their grant
00:12:26.980
application to the government. We got this through an access to information request. Look at this.
00:12:31.360
We continue to file professional and lawyer-reviewed criminal complaints that provide evidence of
00:12:36.180
criminal activity by members and supporters of hate-promoting groups. However, since applying for the grant,
00:12:41.440
we have been disappointed to find that engaging law enforcement in this way is not particularly
00:12:45.620
fruitful. Now, while we still file those complaints, we put less of an emphasis there and pursue other
00:12:50.940
legal avenues in cases of criminality too, e.g. lawyer drafted complaints to social media platforms.
00:12:56.880
I have no problem with the language in the agreement in regards to law enforcement as in version one.
00:13:02.060
However, if you have no objections, I have admitted references to law enforcement in section one and
00:13:06.880
section three. Anyhow, I won't continue on, but you can see that this is a letter from the Canadian
00:13:12.240
Anti-Hate Network to the government of Canada saying, we need money and we will take your
00:13:17.840
taxpayers' dollars and we will use this to file legal complaints and lawsuits against Trudeau's enemies.
00:13:26.720
That's how they operated until now. But now they're going to be given the legal right to live off of us
00:13:32.740
and off of you and anyone they complain against. I think it's going to be how they kill Rebel News,
00:13:38.820
by the way. Every single news report we do will be hit with a complaint for up to $70,000 per
00:13:46.180
incident, $20,000 to the complainant, $50,000 to the feds. It's sort of like what they're doing to Trump.
00:13:51.740
Endless nuisance suits just batter us repeatedly, distract us, waste our time and energy.
00:13:56.540
So what are we going to do about it? Number one, spread the word to Canadians, make videos about it,
00:14:03.200
write news stories, send out emails, raise the alarm globally, let the world know, especially our
00:14:07.520
American friends who care about freedom of speech, what's going on in their next door neighbor.
00:14:11.480
We have a petition so we can show the government how wrong it is. Stop the censorship.ca. If we can
00:14:17.220
get hundreds of thousands of names, show the government how serious this is. And I want to
00:14:23.380
prepare for litigation now. What do I mean by that? This is not law yet. It was just introduced this
00:14:28.660
week. Hasn't been voted on yet. Hasn't been gone through the Senate yet. Hasn't been proclaimed yet.
00:14:37.460
The Human Rights Tribunal hasn't been staffed up yet. These three anti-hate censorship offices
00:14:43.880
haven't been hired yet. It's probably going to take months, maybe even until 2025. So we do have some time.
00:14:53.380
But you know the instant that the power switches are flicked on. I can't imagine Rebel News wouldn't be
00:15:00.660
sued the very first day they're alive. Not for that life in prison stuff, but for the $70,000 battering ram
00:15:08.660
every day, every day. That's how they're going to come for us. And the moment this law is live, we will go to
00:15:17.260
court if we have standing, if we have to see the final version of the law. Are they coming for us?
00:15:22.780
Are they complaining against us? Are they investigating us? The moment we can, I want to be
00:15:28.240
ready. I want to do our legal research now. I want to prepare the litigation now. So the first time this
00:15:34.480
law is used, we pull the trigger and we go after it. I want the facts to be solid and I want the lawyers
00:15:39.380
to be great. I want the best arguments. I don't want the first test case to be with a crummy lawyer or a
00:15:44.600
crummy fact pattern. We're starting now. Rebel News really has no choice here. We have no choice in the
00:15:52.200
matter. Don't you think, don't you agree with me that of every news agency, of every contrary voice
00:15:59.540
in this country that would be targeted by this bill, Rebel News would be at the top of the list.
00:16:04.080
But don't you also think that if anyone can fight back, it's going to be us. And by us, I mean,
00:16:12.640
we and you. Go to stopthecensorship.ca. Stay with me. John Carpe is next.
00:16:20.460
Well, yesterday, if you joined my live stream, you'll realize there's a lot to talk about here.
00:16:36.940
There's a lot of camouflage, a lot of distraction. The example I gave yesterday
00:16:40.900
was the promise to ban revenge porn, as in you had an intimate photo of a loved one and you're
00:16:48.280
estranged and you publish it as vengeance. Yeah, it's a good idea to ban that, which is why
00:16:52.640
Parliament banned it in 2014. The reason that's included in this bill is a distraction, a camouflage
00:16:59.580
from what's really going on. Child pornography has been illegal since pornography was illegal and the
00:17:05.500
law is updated routinely. The idea of having a block button on Twitter and Facebook is such a good
00:17:11.420
idea that those companies have been doing it for years. All of those parts of the bill are
00:17:16.980
misdirection, to get you talking about those things we all agree on already, that just already
00:17:23.180
happened to be law. So that if you disagree with the other parts, you'll be told that you don't care
00:17:28.720
about children. It was really gross to me to see Arif Arani, the justice minister, flanked by moms of
00:17:35.260
children who basically said, how dare you question this? He's using them as human cannon fodder,
00:17:41.360
as human shields to hide what he's really up to. What he's really up to is the greatest infringement
00:17:47.860
in civil liberties that I have seen for any democracy in the world, let alone for Canada.
00:17:55.320
And I've seen censorship bills in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Ireland, in the United Kingdom,
00:18:03.040
in Australia, in New Zealand. I've never seen anything like this. And joining me now to talk
00:18:10.020
about it is our friend John Carpe, the boss of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
00:18:18.280
John, it took me two and a half hours to go through the bill. It's about 100 pages long.
00:18:22.740
There's so many poison pills in it for our democracy, so many shocking things. If I had to ask you
00:18:29.240
what the worst part of it is, I know you couldn't answer me with one example, but tell me what the
00:18:34.400
most worrisome parts of this bill are to you and the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
00:18:41.660
At the top of the list, or close to the top of the list, is the power it gives to the federal cabinet
00:18:47.000
to pass new laws, known as regulations, which have the force of law, where they get to define
00:18:54.320
what is a social media provider. And so without consulting parliament, without transparency,
00:19:00.900
cabinet meetings are held in secret. The cabinet can secretly talk about, plan, and then declare
00:19:06.240
into being new regulations that could define a social media provider, or a social media service
00:19:13.760
could be something like a church or a non-profit or a citizen's advocacy group, or independent media
00:19:20.740
like The Rebel and True North and Epoch Times and so on. You could be deemed by the federal cabinet
00:19:27.320
to be a social media service. And so we could have federal bureaucrats looking at the content
00:19:34.420
of the email newsletter that the church sends out to its members and supporters. That is frightening.
00:19:42.560
They can decide that. They get to finalize the definition of harm. There's this wide latitude.
00:19:49.380
If this bill is passed, federal cabinet can turn this into an Orwellian nightmare without any democratic
00:19:58.360
accountability whatsoever, unless and until there's an election and a change of government.
00:20:05.400
But the power of regulation is frightening, because it takes the legislative authority of parliament
00:20:13.040
and transfers it to the prime minister's office, effectively.
00:20:16.140
You know, isn't that incredible? I went on for two and a half hours yesterday. I didn't even think
00:20:20.220
of that risk. I mean, I sort of thought, okay, social media provider, I know what that is, Twitter,
00:20:25.400
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, but says who?
00:20:29.440
You know, and if the bill said social media provider means Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, X, whatever,
00:20:37.860
okay, it would still be a terrible piece of legislation for so many reasons, but at least we would have
00:20:42.060
certainty on that front. But they could decide that the rebel news is a social media service,
00:20:49.520
you know, because you're sending out emails and posting YouTube videos.
00:20:53.920
Nothing stops the federal government from declaring a church, a non-profit, a charity,
00:20:58.260
an independent media to be covered by this. The other frightening thing is you've got...
00:21:03.960
Let me stop you for one second. Hold that thought. Don't lose that thought. Don't lose it.
00:21:07.000
Because I want to add a clause to what you just said there. If we are deemed to be a social media
00:21:14.640
company, then that gives them all sorts of invasive powers to come in and root around in
00:21:20.260
our material. I did cover that part. I just thought, okay, they want to snoop around Elon Musk's
00:21:25.380
business. They want to look through his files and do education and advocacy. I did think about that
00:21:31.780
yesterday, but I only thought of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as the target. Deeming us a social
00:21:37.100
media service lets bureaucrats come into our office and have access to our computers. I didn't
00:21:43.620
understand the threat until you just said that. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I wanted to say
00:21:47.100
what happens if we're deemed a social media network, because I never contemplated that until you
00:21:51.460
put the fear into me. Anyhow, sorry to interrupt your flow. You were about to make a second point
00:21:56.180
before I interrupted you. I just noticed it because the bill says expressly that the federal
00:22:03.420
cabinet gets to define what is a social media service. They get to define that. It's not defined
00:22:10.980
by the law that is passed by parliament. If it was defined as being limited to Facebook and Twitter,
00:22:18.820
again, it would be terrible legislation, but we wouldn't have to worry about that. But now we do.
00:22:22.880
Are they going to go after charities and say, we want to look into your electronic records and we
00:22:29.280
want to monitor and control what you're putting into your email newsletter that you're sending out
00:22:33.480
to your donors and supporters? In conjunction with that, we're going to hire a vast new army of
00:22:40.320
bureaucrats that will have the power to shut down. These regulations also empower the federal cabinet to
00:22:49.560
create penalties and to specify what kind of content is allowed or not allowed.
00:22:55.080
We've already got a situation. I've been thinking about this chant. I'm sure you've heard it and
00:22:59.720
many of the viewers of The Rebel have heard it. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
00:23:05.480
Now, in Estonia and Germany and Czech Republic, the authorities have declared that to be criminal speech.
00:23:12.760
It was somebody was charged with it in the Netherlands and then ultimately acquitted by the Dutch Supreme
00:23:18.760
Court saying it was not criminal speech. We had a man in Calgary charged with saying that charges were
00:23:25.240
stayed. But do we really want the government parsing political slogans, however offensive they might be?
00:23:32.280
Because this is this is the real risk. They're increasing the penalty for advocating genocide. So let's advocate that the
00:23:40.120
killing of a people group, presumably based on ethnicity or religion or otherwise. Maximum penalties five years. I think that's
00:23:47.800
enough of a deterrent. It's already dangerous considering how the government could use its power to define advocacy for genocide.
00:23:56.280
But no, that's not good enough. That penalty for advocating for genocide, just words alone, you could go to
00:24:04.120
prison for life for that. I think that five years maximum penalty is more than adequate as a deterrent.
00:24:11.640
And by the way, there's this new standalone hate speech crime that they're proposing that doesn't just cover that
00:24:17.960
example. There's a list of prohibited characteristics that you're not allowed to offend.
00:24:23.400
Or they're phrases to foment hatred towards. And in that list, there's the ones that we're used to.
00:24:31.800
Race, religion, sex, national origin, things like that. But there's sexual orientation and there's two new ones.
00:24:41.640
Gender identity and gender expression. And what do those words even mean? Gender identity is you say,
00:24:49.000
well, I don't care what you say. I feel like a woman. I feel like a girl. Sure, I have a beard and
00:24:56.360
I still have my twig and berries, but I identify as a woman. So I'm going into the girls change room
00:25:02.040
now and I'm going to swim against the girls. That's gender identity. Gender expression is,
00:25:07.400
okay, I shaved my beard, I put on makeup and I'm pretending to be a girl.
00:25:11.400
If you run afoul of those two banned characteristics, you could be liable for a hate crime.
00:25:20.440
I mean, listen, we don't have the details here yet, but that standalone hate crime is life in prison.
00:25:26.440
It's not just, I mean, and think about what a controversy transgenderism is in the country.
00:25:37.880
Anyone who dares to challenge it can be charged with a hate crime. Am I wrong on that, John? You're
00:25:43.720
the guy who's been looking at this through a legal lens. Is it true that if you criticize
00:25:49.320
transgenderism and someone complains, you could either be hit with a criminal prosecution, you could
00:25:56.600
be hit with a recognizance order where you're put under house arrest, you could be prosecuted before
00:26:01.720
the Human Rights Tribunal and subject to $20,000 in compensation and a $50,000 fine. If you fight against
00:26:08.600
transgenderism in a way that the government doesn't like, you could be fined or even jailed or put under
00:26:15.000
house arrest. Did I get that right? You got it right. And this gets back to the duplication because
00:26:21.000
the gender identity and gender expression have already been added to the criminal code of Canada.
00:26:27.000
So the willful promotion of hatred against a group on the basis of gender identity or gender expression
00:26:33.960
is already a criminal code offense as things stand right now. So potentially, if you were a vociferous
00:26:41.080
critic and maybe you didn't choose your words wisely and you came out with a sledgehammer,
00:26:46.120
maybe you used an atomic bomb to kill a fly. If you go over the top on criticizing this transgender
00:26:53.080
ideology and the activism, you could be facing criminal charges. But there you would have the
00:27:00.280
defense of truth. You would have the defense of discussing a topic in the public interest. You would
00:27:04.520
have other defenses available. The other duplicative thing, and this is really interesting,
00:27:11.800
the criminal code already empowers judges to impose a more severe penalty if the judge has reviewed
00:27:21.320
the facts and has looked into it. If the judge is sentencing somebody for murder or assault or vandalism
00:27:31.320
or any other crime, if the judge determines that that crime was motivated by hatred, the judge already
00:27:39.320
has the authority to impose a stronger sentence. Now, I'll give you an example. If there's a bunch of
00:27:47.560
idiot thugs who very mindlessly put a bunch of graffiti on the wall, on the outside wall of a
00:27:54.040
synagogue, but they don't really care where they're doing it and they're just using any old wall,
00:27:58.920
they're guilty of vandalism, property destruction, which is a criminal code offense.
00:28:03.080
However, if they're painting swastikas and slogans like death to the Jews on the synagogue wall,
00:28:11.160
they could get a more severe punishment because that would be a hate crime. So the judges already
00:28:17.000
have the authority that if a crime, property damage, murder, assault, whatever, if a crime is motivated by
00:28:23.560
hate, the judge can impose a more severe sentence. That's already on the books. And this gets back to this
00:28:29.880
grandstanding of, you know, oh, well, now we need a standalone hate crime. No. It's one thing to
00:28:37.080
have a stiffer penalty where there is evidence that the crime was motivated by hate, but you have to
00:28:42.920
actually be found guilty of doing something criminal. Of that other crime, of the underlying crime.
00:28:48.280
And then you can get a higher penalty. But a standalone hate crime is, it's just Orwellian.
00:28:55.000
Yeah. I want to ask you about the thing that I'm actually worried about from a practical point of
00:28:59.160
view here at Rebel News. You talked about the slippery definition of social media and I had
00:29:03.240
frankly never thought of that before. The criminal code provisions, I think that they'll probably go
00:29:08.440
after egregious cases. I think a lot of them will be stayed. I think for the first few years, police
00:29:14.120
and prosecutors, while they figure it out, they'll probably overcharge and then, you know, maybe abandon
00:29:19.640
in certain cases. I'm not worried in an extremely acute way about the criminal side for me and Rebel
00:29:26.360
News. What I am absolutely worried about is the Canadian Human Rights Act changes, which I don't
00:29:34.520
know if you remember, but about a dozen years ago, Stephen Harper repealed the hate speech provision in
00:29:39.560
part based on the experience that myself and Mark Stein went through being prosecuted for human rights
00:29:45.800
offenses for hate speech. In my case, it was for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
00:29:50.040
Those are back now, but there's a wrinkle. Anyone who files a complaint under the Human Rights Act,
00:29:56.440
and so you don't need to be a policeman, you don't need to be a prosecutor, just any person,
00:30:00.840
you don't even have to be a Canadian citizen, any person can file a complaint. And for, you know,
00:30:07.400
let's say we did an article criticizing a transgender swimmer in a girl's change room.
00:30:12.040
If that can foment hatred against a trans person, I don't know, could be, I suppose. Well, then we have
00:30:19.800
to pay the complainant $20,000, up to $20,000, and we have to pay the government up to $50,000. So it's
00:30:26.200
a $70,000 hit per incident. But the crazy, so first of all, you're stimulating a whole cottage industry
00:30:33.160
of complainers. You're basically saying you don't have to just shout into the wind or heckle on Twitter.
00:30:38.840
You can make money off this. You can file a complaint every day. And if even only one in
00:30:43.880
ten of your complaints comes true, you've got yourself a six-figure living. But here's the
00:30:48.280
insane part, John, and it's so scary to me, and I don't think this has got enough attention.
00:30:53.720
You can make these complaints in secret. Your identity can be withheld from the person you're
00:30:59.560
complaining against. And if you find it out anyways, he can be hit with a court order not to
00:31:04.840
tell anyone who you are. So you can have secret grudges by rivals, by competitors, by spurned
00:31:11.640
exes, by professional activists, by rival political parties. You can be hit with hundreds,
00:31:19.960
why not thousands, of nuisance complaints. You'll never know who they are. You'll have to pay each
00:31:25.960
one of them up to 20 grand if you lose. That's how they're going to kill Rebel News, in my view.
00:31:32.280
Not through a state prosecution for a crime. I don't think they'd win. But by unleashing a thousand
00:31:39.000
woke complainers just to bury us under paperwork. I think that's the future here.
00:31:43.880
Well, I agree with you, unfortunately. I wish I could disagree. If this bill passes,
00:31:51.720
an atheist in Vancouver can file a human rights complaint against a Christian lady in Halifax who
00:31:59.000
makes derogatory comments about a mosque in Toronto, even if the members of the mosque in Toronto are not
00:32:04.360
offended by what she said. So it's all traditionally in law, both on the criminal side and the civil side,
00:32:11.000
you have a victim or you have a plaintiff who has suffered damage.
00:32:14.600
You need standing. You need a reason to go to court. It's not for busybodies. There's a phrase in
00:32:19.640
law, an officious intermeddler. You can't be a meddler. You can't be a busybody. You don't get to
00:32:26.120
go to court just because you want to pick a fight with someone. You need standing. This bill lets
00:32:31.000
anyone complain about anyone and stay secret. Well, the chilling effect on, I'm sure you've covered this
00:32:38.040
to a great deal. But the chilling effect is horrendous. Many Canadians, including you and
00:32:44.680
I and many others, will just continue to speak the way that we always have and we will state our
00:32:48.920
opinions. But a lot of people are going to suffer from this chilling effect. Because right now,
00:32:54.840
let's say that you made some very vociferous, very aggressive and even unfair
00:32:59.720
criticisms against Islam. And you cited certain passages of the Quran and you said, you know,
00:33:05.800
that you said that the Quran was advocating murder or whatever. So you make all these anti-Islamic
00:33:12.680
comments. You're probably not, you're not that likely to get criminally prosecuted. In fact,
00:33:20.280
there's a defense there of expressing an opinion based on a sincere belief on a religious text.
00:33:26.200
So, but with the human rights thing, it's a totally different ball game because the
00:33:33.320
prosecutor only needs to prove on the balance of probability. You don't need a victim who suffered
00:33:38.520
harm. It can be an anonymous, busy body. And, you know, as you wrote so eloquently in your book,
00:33:46.440
Shakedown, a number of years ago, which I enjoyed reading, when you go to a lawyer, he's probably going
00:33:52.280
to tell you, you know what, don't bother spending $50,000 on a legal defense. Just write the $5,000
00:33:58.920
check, issue an apology and get on with your life. That is a chilling effect. And so people are,
00:34:04.680
a lot of people are just not going to speak freely. And that's how, uh, freedom of expression dies,
00:34:15.160
We could talk about this for hours. I mean, I, I went on for two and a half hours yesterday,
00:34:19.400
and Marty joined us, Marty from your shop at the JCCF. I think that the liberal government is
00:34:24.840
deadly serious about this. This is their third internet regulation bill in a year, C11, C18.
00:34:31.880
Now this one, C63. The justice minister actually had his title changed. I don't know if you caught
00:34:37.720
that, John. He's now the justice minister, attorney general, and minister of state for online harms.
00:34:45.000
It's literally added to his title. There's hundreds of laws on the book, hundreds of sections of the
00:34:50.680
criminal code. The only one that's in his job title is online harms. This is the most important bill
00:34:55.800
in their minds. It's one of three censorship laws. They've obviously cut a deal with the NDP. They're
00:35:01.560
going to fast track through parliament. This is their last gasp, their Hail Mary pass. And it's the,
00:35:09.160
it's the battle of Armageddon. This is the final battle, I think, John. And, and I think rebel news,
00:35:14.040
whether we want to or not, it's going to be the pointy ends of that spear. Because I just,
00:35:19.160
I can't imagine we wouldn't be hit with these provisions, one of the first people in the country.
00:35:25.320
I just think, I just think that they think of us when they think of who they target. Maybe that's
00:35:30.600
a little bit of narcissism on my part to think we're more important than we are. But we've been hit
00:35:35.160
with so many of these nuisance actions before. Trudeau personally attacks us. His cabinet
00:35:41.160
personally attacks us. We are looming large on their radar screen. I cannot imagine a future
00:35:47.640
where they don't come at us. I just don't think that would ever happen. We will be thrust into
00:35:52.680
this fight. And so we should prepare for it now. Last word to you, John.
00:35:57.400
Well, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
00:36:01.480
So Canadians need to roll up their sleeves, contact their federal MP, especially if you're,
00:36:07.800
and we are, I am strictly nonpartisan, but just from a political tactics and strategy viewpoint,
00:36:13.800
particularly if, if your member of parliament is, is liberal or NDP and is planning to vote in favor
00:36:19.160
of this, that's all the more reason to contact them because MPs do take into account the number of
00:36:25.240
emails and phone calls that they are getting. So people, uh, need to be, uh, active and actively
00:36:31.160
involved in the democratic process. And, uh, ultimately at the end of the day, it's, it's,
00:36:35.800
it's we as citizens, assuming our responsibilities as citizens to be fully engaged in the democratic
00:36:41.400
process. That's going to win the war, uh, for freedom and justice and truth.
00:36:45.960
John, keep up the fight out there. We're glad you're on this file.
00:36:50.760
All right. You too. There you have it. John Carpe,
00:36:53.320
the boss of the justice center for constitutional freedom. Stay with us more ahead.
00:37:09.800
Hey, welcome back to your letters to me. James Friesen said,
00:37:12.600
this needs to be challenged in court immediately if it passes. Yeah. As I, as I said a little bit
00:37:17.560
early in the show, you can't sue yet because it's not enforced yet. Uh, even once it's proclaimed as
00:37:23.160
law, they have to set up those 300 killer censorship agencies. It will probably be months, maybe even
00:37:29.320
a year, but we want to get ready now. Hobbes says, surely Trudeau's vilification of the truckers
00:37:36.040
and unvaccinated has caused hatred towards them by some. I wonder if he will hold himself to his own
00:37:41.000
party standards. Well, that's the thing. It's like Lavrenti Beria said in the Soviet Union,
00:37:45.400
show me the man. I'll find you the crime. Everyone is guilty of this law. Everyone in
00:37:50.280
the country is. You, you've never felt the feeling of hate in your heart. If so, you're not a normal
00:37:55.720
human. Every human feels love and hate, contempt and respect, happiness and sorrow. That's part of
00:38:01.720
a full personality. Being a grownup, we don't act out. We don't like a two year old might smash things
00:38:07.000
if he's full of anger. Um, when you're 22 or 52, hopefully you're more restrained and more
00:38:12.360
constructive and a social, you know, you're sociable and you're a good part of society.
00:38:17.880
But this is about regulating feelings. Every single person has some hate in their heart. We're not
00:38:23.640
saints. We're sinners. And what this does is it criminalizes a feeling, not a real damage. Like if
00:38:30.840
someone stabs you or steals from you or smashes you, that's real damage and you've suffered a real loss.
00:38:36.600
But if someone has a feeling in their heart towards you, how is that a crime? Well, this law makes
00:38:41.400
it a crime. CS says Canada's MAID program clearly violates one of those provisions.
00:38:47.480
It is amazing how the importance of mental health is stressed here, yet ignored when it comes to the
00:38:51.560
pronoun gang and their confused sexuality. You know, I don't, I don't know how closely the MAID issue is
00:38:58.920
linked to the censorship issue. I just don't, I'm not seeing that very clearly right now. But I think
00:39:05.000
this touches on pretty much anyone who's contrarians. Pierre Pauliev was pretty close to the mark
00:39:10.200
when he said hate speech is just speech that Trudeau hates. And that gets back to that
00:39:14.200
Lavrenti-Berry. You know who I'm talking about, the secret policeman under Stalin.
00:39:20.520
This law gives them the power to arrest anyone. And theoretically, God forbid, put them in jail for life.
00:39:26.680
Because every single human being is guilty of having some hate in their heart.
00:39:31.720
And this law says that is enough to put you away.
00:39:36.360
Well, that's our show for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,
00:39:40.920
to you at home, good night. And keep fighting for freedom.