Scheer is letting Trudeau bring back Canada’s internet “hate speech” law — but we're fighting back!
Episode Stats
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Summary
Justin Trudeau wants to bring back Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which makes it illegal to hurt someone's feelings. Why should others go to jail when you're not allowed to have hard feelings about another person? Ezra Levenrant explains why.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. Today I talk about Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
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I have a bit of experience in this, as you may know.
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I was prosecuted on the Alberta equivalent of this law for 900 days
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for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed a dozen years ago.
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Well, Stephen Harper repealed that bill in the federal parliament in 2013, a great achievement.
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I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop Trudeau,
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but Andrew Scheer seems to be going along with it.
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We have a show today. It's 100% on censorship. I hope you'll watch it.
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Hey, before I get out of the way, can you please go to the rebel.media slash shows
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You get access to the TV version of this podcast. I think it's worth watching.
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You get access to Sheila Gunn-Reed's show, David Menzies' show,
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and your $8 a month. That helps keep the lights on here, folks.
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Tonight, Stephen Harper repealed the Section 13 Internet censorship law.
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So why is Andrew Scheer letting Justin Trudeau revive it?
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It's June 11th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it
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In 2013, Stephen Harper's Conservatives voted to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
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That's the censorship provision that made it an offense to hurt someone's feelings.
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Or actually, even worse, it made it an offense to potentially cause one person
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It really was a feelings crime, a thought crime, not even a word crime.
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Here's the text of the now repealed Section 13.
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It was illegal to publish anything, including on the Internet, that, quote,
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is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.
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So that created the counterfeit human right not to be offended,
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What that really was was government power, the power to silence you,
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but now Justin Trudeau's liberals are looking to bring it back.
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They're studying this at Parliament's Justice Committee right now.
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And to my horror, Andrew Scheer's conservatives haven't lifted a finger against it.
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They're not actively cheering it on, that I can see.
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But they have made a team decision, a party-wide decision,
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specifically not to champion freedom of speech.
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I can't name a more important issue for conservatives, actually.
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It's more important than taxes or immigration or fighting terrorism
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It's more important than any trade deal, more important than criminal justice,
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you can't talk meaningfully about any of those other issues.
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The liberal government, really, any government, it's not just liberals,
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all politicians, they don't like their critics,
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but the liberals in particular are seeking to shut down criticism of them
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on key political issues, especially immigration, by the way.
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They're looking to silence speech that isn't governed by our criminal code.
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But they're looking to silence legitimate political criticism
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because it's easier to shut someone up than debating them.
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Here's a mashup of Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan,
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both of them personally attacking us here at The Rebel, for example,
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claiming that we're fake news that ought to be condemned.
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and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
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It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
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It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
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But I have no problem with politicians bad-mouthing me, feelings mutual.
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It's a sign that we at The Rebel are not bought and paid for,
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like, say, the CBC, who seem to specialize in sending female reporters
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on first-date-style walk-and-talks with Trudeau,
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where they ask really tough questions like this.
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Last book you've read or the book you're reading?
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I just finished The Patch, which was Chris Turner's history of The Oil Patch.
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But I'm also about to start the new Ken Fawlin,
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the third book that is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth.
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It's just a sweeping historical epic, I'm sure, but I haven't started it yet.
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What kind of music are you listening to right now, if you have time?
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I run regularly, and I've tried to do the podcast thing,
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I don't like people talking in my ears when I'm trying to run.
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Yeah, I'd rather be hated by Justin Trudeau than to be his concubine.
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But the problem is that Trudeau isn't just arguing with us here.
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He and his point person on the job, Karina Gould, have made it crystal clear they want to silence Trudeau's enemies.
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This was first told to Facebook directly by Trudeau, to their chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg,
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that if Facebook didn't silence critics like us in the run-up to the election, Trudeau would force them to.
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That's what he calls anyone who disagrees with him.
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And he's now demanding that social media companies comply with him.
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Trudeau met with other censors in Paris recently.
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Emmanuel Macron, the hated president of France, who's really at war with his own people.
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And Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, who has been revealed recently to be beholden to Chinese interests
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and is pursuing a very Chinese-style policy of government censorship.
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So Trudeau and Macron and Ardern met behind closed doors in Paris with social media companies
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to announce that they have persuaded most social media companies to crack down on their critics in the next election.
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We see purges of conservatives already from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
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But if you're purged from those companies, you're silenced, but you're still free.
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You're not dragged through a court system for years.
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And that extra edge, though, that punitive side, that embarrassing, time-consuming, grinding,
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psychological warfare side of Section 13, the prosecutions, that is what appeals to Trudeau and his liberal party.
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By the way, it comes from the Latin word for freedom.
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The left is generally happy when a conservative voice is silenced online.
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They want them out of a job, or they boycott a company, or they harass someone's employer.
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But Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act would go further than any of this.
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It would expose any conservative voice to tens of thousands of dollars in fines and legal costs.
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And the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, it's a kangaroo court run not by real judges, but by non-judge activists.
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They have tremendous power to do weird and strange things that a normal court couldn't.
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I remember when I was prosecuted by the Alberta version of the Canadian Human Rights Commission,
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that Alberta version literally demanded, in writing, that I not only pay cash to a radical Muslim activist who was offended by me,
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but the Human Rights Commission actually demanded that I give him two full pages in the magazine that I published back then,
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unedited, for him to say literally whatever he wanted to say about me.
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I'm serious. That's actually what the Human Rights Commission demanded from me,
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that I give up two pages of my magazine to some Sharia law thug from Pakistan.
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No normal court would even think of that. It's so weird.
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But Human Rights Commissions aren't real courts.
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That's what this is about. It's not even about censoring people now.
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The social media companies do a pretty good job of censoring for Trudeau already.
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This is about humiliating conservatives, deterring conservatives, demonizing them, costing them money.
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I won't get into all the procedural reasons. It's built that way.
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But a few examples include the fact that, unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court,
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in a human rights kangaroo court, the complainer doesn't have to pay for his own lawyer.
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Unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court, if you're wrongfully sued and you win,
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you don't get your costs paid by the false accuser.
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Unlike in a criminal lawsuit in a real court, you don't have to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Unlike a criminal lawsuit in a real court, you have no legal aid help if you're poor.
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It's the worst of all worlds, these kangaroo courts.
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He tried to let his criminal friends like SNC-Lavalin off the hook.
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And he tried to convict innocent people like Vice Admiral Mark Norman.
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He couldn't get away with that in a real court.
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That's why I call these human rights commissions a kangaroo court.
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That's one reason why Harper shut down Section 13.
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And it's a big reason why hucksters like Trudeau like him.
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And the very offense itself, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.
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But it's all in the future, so you can't even say, I didn't do it.
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You don't actually have to have done anything wrong to be guilty of it.
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Just maybe something in the future could happen, but you could be charged.
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So by writing something on the internet, or making a video, or drawing a cartoon, or sharing
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something on Facebook, you could expose someone to the human feeling of hate.
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Oh, that minute, when I was young and I saw the movie Schindler's List about the Holocaust,
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it gave me hard feelings towards Germany, or at least some Germans, or at least the Nazis,
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But is that movie likely to, as in maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, expose a person
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There's a new movie out there right now called The Hate You Give.
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If you watch that movie and have some hard feelings, whoever made the movie is guilty
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Emotions are a natural part of the human personality.
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As in, in fact, I think that's the point of art and all communications, fiction, nonfiction,
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to cause an emotional response as part of being human.
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And not all emotions are comedies and laughter.
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Could a powerful piece of art or political commentary or even just a joke expose a person
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to feelings of hatred or contempt by another person?
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In fact, without a doubt, since there's no way to measure hurt feelings or being offended,
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I should point out that truth is not a defense to section 13.
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You can say something true that makes a person have hard feelings.
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In fact, the truth is much more enraging than fiction, isn't it?
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The only test is did you or didn't you say something that might in the future cause
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someone to have hard feelings about someone else?
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So of course this law had a 100% conviction rate for a quarter of a century on the books.
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Every one of us is guilty of this law every single day unless we literally talk to no
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Every one of us does something that could maybe cause offense in the future.
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And of course the lawyers and the bureaucrats want it back.
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Free money, free bureaucracy building, lots of power, free way to stick it to their enemies list.
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You know, when he ran for the leadership of the conservatives and he eked out that razor
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Back then, Scheer promised to fight for free speech, especially on campus, by the way.
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But, you know, since then he's literally deleted that policy from his website.
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And he's gone wobbly out of fear of the media mob.
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During recent hearings on hate speech at the Liberal-run Justice Committee, Michael Cooper,
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a conservative MP from St. Albert, dared to push back at the hateful assertion by a Muslim
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lobbyist that conservatives were to blame for a mass murder in New Zealand.
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Now, Cooper pushed back saying the terrorist in New Zealand himself denied that he was a
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conservative, in fact said he admired communist China.
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Mr. Suri, I take great umbrage with your defamatory comments to try to link conservatism
00:13:47.840
They have no foundation, they're defamatory, and they diminish your credibility as a witness.
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But after the Liberals all claimed that they were offended, it's easy to say, isn't it?
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Andrew Scheer literally fired Cooper from the committee, saying it was inappropriate.
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Michael Cooper's words were likely to cause hatred or contempt.
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And worse, and weirdly, Andrew Scheer ordered the remaining conservatives on the committee
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to vote to turn off the video cameras when Mark Stein, Lindsay Shepard, and John Robson
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The conservatives invited those public figures to testify.
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They invited them to come to Parliament, presumably to testify for free speech, and they showed up.
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And then, when they were all sitting in Parliament about to give their testimony,
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the conservative MPs literally voted to turn off the cameras on them.
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So the world could not see them arguing for free speech.
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According to Andrew Lawton, our friend who was right there,
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the order to have these conservatives vote against the cameras came from Scheer himself,
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to literally vote to turn off the cameras on their own witnesses they had invited.
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Why did Scheer's point person on the free speech battle
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literally cheer for Karina Gould in committee earlier this year,
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and telling her she should go harder and faster on the censorship?
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So I'm asking you, please, if you are ready in regards to the social media platform,
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willing to make the hard decisions, to take the hard actions,
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Why is not a single conservative MP allowed to even talk about this issue?
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Why are they not just being passive, but actually voting to suppress free speech witnesses
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and calling for Karina Gould to go faster and harder on censorship?
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How does this possibly help the party politically?
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Don't they have any sense of self-preservation, even knowing that all the people censored will be conservatives, of course?
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Does Andrew Scheer think that if he is very, very quiet, the censorship tiger will devour him last?
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How did the party of Stephen Harper, which voted to repeal Section 13, unanimously they voted to repeal Section 13,
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how is that party now cheering or at least standing quietly for Trudeau to revive Section 13?
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Well, I guess because there was one man who did not vote to repeal Section 13.
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Andrew Scheer himself, who was Speaker of the House that day and thus didn't vote.
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He was the man who, as Speaker, controls everyone else's freedom of speech in Parliament.
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The man who was effectively the judge of the Court of Parliament, who could rule a word unparliamentary,
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Maybe he fell in love with the power to regulate speech.
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If he himself could tell a prime minister or a cabinet minister to sit down and shut up and retract a word,
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That defending free speech isn't cool now like it was back in 2013.
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With the mean girls in the media party, that is the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC,
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the new junk websites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and Vice, they all hate free speech now for some reason.
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Because they know conservatives use free speech to get around the leftist mainstream media.
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So if Andrew Scheer were to stand up for free speech today, all those media reporters would attack him hard.
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Much harder than Stephen Harper had to deal with back in 2013.
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In fact, back then, most media, at least grudgingly, supported Harper's move for free speech.
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Today, the same media party would love to censor any conservative because the media had become politically radicalized.
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But also out of their own business interests, they would love to silence online competitors, even us.
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I know that most people who watch my shows are conservative party members.
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I would ask you to sign a petition to Justin Trudeau to have him stop Section 13.
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But I know that, of course, Trudeau wouldn't listen.
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But what if I asked you to sign a petition not to the prime minister or to Karina Gould,
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but to Andrew Scheer himself, to ask him to take off the whip from his own MPs,
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to ask him to let his own MPs be true conservatives, or at least to speak their conscience,
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to allow them to stand up for freedom of speech.
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I'm not going to ask Andrew Scheer to let Michael Cooper back in.
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He has too much pride invested in that weird firing.
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But to stop Section 13 itself, a great effort by countless grassroots conservatives for years
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finally convinced Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party to repeal it.
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And that repeal has stood for six years, and we're all the better for it.
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Don't let Stephen Harper's achievement be undone.
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Don't go quietly along with Justin Trudeau and Karina Gould.
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And don't, for God's sake, be an active participant in it by voting to turn off the cameras on Mark Stein and Lindsay Shepard and John Robson.
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So I've drafted a petition, but it's to Andrew Scheer.
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Look, I know he can't stop Section 13 on his own.
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But if he and his MPs make a proper fuss about it and engage the remaining true journalists left in this country,
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and perhaps engage the larger civil society and use all the tools in their toolbox,
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like the remaining conservatives in the Senate, and use whatever rules of Parliament,
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maybe, just maybe, this awful decision by Trudeau to ram through censorship on the eve of the election could be stopped
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or even slowed down just to delay it till after the election, it could be done.
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I mean, Trudeau could still force it through for sure.
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But if Andrew Scheer made a big enough fuss, I think he could make this too costly for Trudeau.
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And Trudeau would abandon it, as he abandons many things that get tough to do.
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But it won't happen if Andrew Scheer won't do it, and he's not doing it.
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Stephen Harper's achievement will be wiped out.
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So please sign our petition right now to Andrew Scheer.
00:21:00.840
We call upon Andrew Scheer to stand up for freedom of speech
00:21:04.100
by opposing the revival of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
00:21:09.120
He promised he'd be for free speech when he ran for conservative leader.
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The Conservative Party was unanimously for free speech under Stephen Harper.
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If he's worried about what the country thinks, he'll be in good stead.
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But these days, I'm worried that Andrew Scheer cares more about what the media party thinks
00:21:41.760
And I will personally deliver it to Andrew Scheer myself.
00:22:03.200
I want to show you a clip spoken by Karina Gould,
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the extremist democratic institutions minister.
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I call her extremist, although looking at her, she seems young and charming,
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and she doesn't raise her voice or shout or swear.
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She's not like old yeller, Catherine McKenna, the global warming minister.
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She's very calm on the outside, and that may be boring even.
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And that may be one reason why she gets away with things that few other politicians could.
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I'm going to show you a Q&A by a reporter in Parliament, en français,
00:22:38.520
We've got a translation that will play for you.
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If this had been spoken by Doug Ford at the provincial level, Jason Kenney at the provincial level,
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a conservative cabinet minister saying they would consider turning off Twitter or Facebook
00:23:02.860
or any other social media if they didn't censor the enemies of the government,
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I put it to you, you would have heard this clip before now hundreds of times.
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Here, without further ado, here is Justin Trudeau's cabinet minister, Karina Gould,
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musing about literally turning off Twitter like North Korea and China have done.
00:23:26.860
There was an expert that said in a committee last week,
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I don't know about cutting the signal, but he said, well, do we have to shut the tap
00:23:37.020
and cut off these large organizations as long as they're not responding to requests?
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The government is looking at all the different possibilities.
00:23:52.960
As I said, on many different occasions, we're taking a whole-of-government approach
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There were witnesses who suggested cutting the signal, cutting them off.
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We are considering all the different possibilities.
00:24:17.660
Yes, you can imagine that because she's a Trudeau cabinet minister.
00:24:20.600
But can you imagine the docility and the passivity and more than that,
00:24:26.080
the just sheer lack of curiosity from the media party that greeted that?
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Yet the only other journalist I know who has dug into this matter
00:24:39.420
is our friend Andrew Lawton of TNC.news, who joins us now via Skype.
00:24:50.600
And, you know, there's a really shameful part of this, Ezra.
00:24:56.220
Number one is that a minister of the crown would dare to say that.
00:24:59.780
And there's another clip from the same press conference
00:25:05.040
And the other tragedy here is that, as you mentioned, that's almost a week old.
00:25:09.420
And there has been effectively no English-language mainstream media coverage of this.
00:25:15.140
There was one story in Le Journal de Montréal, which is where I learned about it.
00:25:22.140
But as far as actual reporting, I have not seen anything from the mainstream press on what is,
00:25:27.140
in effect, the democratic institutions minister, with the emphasis on the institutions and not the democratic,
00:25:33.860
saying quite literally that her government would consider shutting down private companies
00:25:39.100
that aren't even Canadian companies if they don't comply with what the federal government's doing.
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And that a minister would say that is reprehensible and that the media would not hold her feet to the fire for it
00:25:51.380
Andrew, I'm so glad that you corrected me to point out the Journal de Montréal,
00:25:54.920
which is a very large newspaper in Quebec owned by Pierre-Carl Pelletot, actually,
00:26:01.360
I'm so glad that you corrected me because, of course, they did break the news.
00:26:09.980
But the fact that you and I and French is not either of our mother's tongues,
00:26:15.400
the fact that we had to learn about it from a French tabloid in Montreal is embarrassing to the media party.
00:26:23.500
What do you think of my question that I posed earlier, Andrew, that if, I don't know,
00:26:30.000
if Stephen Harper were prime minister and a Jason Kenney, a Pierre Polyev, a John Baird,
00:26:37.380
or some cabinet minister of the day would have said,
00:26:40.200
yeah, I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Twitter.
00:26:42.340
Yeah, I'm thinking of going full North Korean and shutting them down if they don't do my...
00:26:48.280
They're already liable for, you know, other crimes on the books.
00:26:53.180
The fact that Karina Gould is demanding they censor politics and she's threatening to pull the plug,
00:27:04.260
And like you say, just the slightest murmur in English Canada, nothing more.
00:27:10.340
No, and I think that there's an important point here.
00:27:12.920
And, you know, one observation I've made in the past is that what the media accuses Donald Trump of doing,
00:27:18.960
Justin Trudeau's government has actually been doing.
00:27:21.280
When you look at the SNC-Lavalin affair, firing the attorney general,
00:27:25.640
I mean, these things that really the media is in hysterics and has been for years about Trump doing,
00:27:30.940
the Trudeau government does with relative impunity.
00:27:33.900
And here we have, and I don't use this word lightly,
00:27:36.960
and I want to make very clear that I say this word because of the gravity of the word,
00:27:42.380
but this is a fascist proposition for the government to threaten to shut down private enterprise
00:27:48.820
for noncompliance with a government restriction on speech.
00:27:53.040
And again, I know the media calls everyone fascist and, you know, Nazis and the new Hitlers and all of that.
00:27:58.980
And I'm not using this with the same level of looseness that they do.
00:28:03.700
I am talking about what is at its core a fascist principle for government to want to shut down social media companies.
00:28:11.440
And by the way, Ezra, this is not, for my part anyway, a defense of social media companies.
00:28:16.460
I find that they themselves are quite reprehensible in the way they engage with free speech.
00:28:24.640
So it's not that I'm sympathizing broadly with social media companies.
00:28:29.120
It's that the Canadians who use those platforms to communicate are the ones that are actually being punished here,
00:28:37.160
If government shuts down Twitter, it's not just taking away Twitter's speech.
00:28:41.300
It's taking away the speech of anyone who uses Twitter.
00:28:48.660
There's the right to speak, but there's also the right to hear.
00:28:51.560
I mean, for example, here at The Rebel, we have almost 200,000 followers on our Rebel Twitter account.
00:29:02.040
But those, I don't know, 180,000 people or whatever it is, surely they have the right to hear from us.
00:29:08.520
It's a mutually consenting adults point of view.
00:29:13.660
Normally, liberals are all for pro-choice for consenting adults.
00:29:22.560
Andrew, I remember a dozen years ago when I was interrogated by a bureaucrat in the province of Alberta.
00:29:32.940
On behalf of the Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
00:29:36.640
And what struck me about my meeting with her, which I put on YouTube a decade ago,
00:29:42.180
was how banal it was, how boring it was, how bureaucratic it was.
00:29:46.100
In fact, I think that the top thing on her mind was it was a Friday afternoon and she just wanted to get out of the office.
00:29:53.180
It was not in a police dungeon with one light bulb hanging and someone shouting at me.
00:30:02.560
And I think you look at Karina Gould and she's nice enough and boring and doesn't raise her voice.
00:30:10.240
Because that's how censorship comes in, not with a jackboot.
00:30:15.080
But in the year 2019, it comes in friendly, bureaucratic buzzwords and, quote, in partnership with social media companies.
00:30:25.500
They're not yielding to her, so she's getting mad.
00:30:29.140
But imagine what YouTube, Facebook, Google have already agreed to behind the scenes all politely.
00:30:36.900
Yes, and the core of that is the Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity Online.
00:30:43.100
And I don't want to make your team work here, but I would love if they could put this up in post.
00:30:47.760
Because there's one line of this that I think is very important in the preamble.
00:30:52.260
And the preamble talks about how social media plays a valuable role in healthy and resilient democracy.
00:30:59.520
However, these platforms have also been used to spread disinformation in an attempt to undermine free and fair elections and core democratic institutions and aggravate existing societal tensions.
00:31:12.780
And of those three things here, to undermine free and fair elections, to undermine core democratic institutions, and then that third, to aggravate existing societal tensions.
00:31:23.940
This is one of these terms that, like Islamophobia in M103, is entirely defined by its lack of definition here.
00:31:32.780
Because what the media will call a societal tension, what the government will call a societal attention, we have no idea.
00:31:40.280
It could be a spirited debate about immigration.
00:31:43.400
It could be a spirited debate about free speech.
00:31:46.300
It could be a spirited debate about anything that I view as part of a democracy that the government views as aggravating a societal tension.
00:31:55.420
And the challenge is that the very premise of this exercise in wanting to get social media companies to be partners, as you say,
00:32:03.620
is not just to prevent Russia from buying a million dollars of Facebook ads.
00:32:09.220
It is in the very text the government is putting forward to social media companies to try to deal with what is effectively summarized as simply disagreement,
00:32:22.460
Because I'd say that liberal versus conservative versus NDP, that's an existing societal tension.
00:32:27.780
So why are we trying to pretend those are things that social media companies should be not fostering, but shutting down?
00:32:37.760
I mean, the other day I saw some NDP member of parliament saying that there should no longer be any divisive witnesses called to parliament.
00:32:46.120
You know, the word division, that's actually a technical way of calling for a vote in parliament.
00:32:52.420
I mean, in the olden days, MPs would stand up and go exit the parliament to different lobbies and literally be counted.
00:33:02.280
They would divide like the Red Sea before Moses.
00:33:05.640
Now the votes are done electronically or by voice vote.
00:33:15.560
And that the best way of dealing with them is through free speech and a democracy.
00:33:19.680
If they're trying to make it so you can't have societal tension, you can't change human nature.
00:33:27.840
And if you're driving it underground, if you're banning it, it will express itself in non-peaceful ways.
00:33:33.780
I think this is deeply, deeply anti, anti, well, it misunderstands human nature and democratic nature.
00:33:44.240
They're natural and you have to let them express themselves peacefully and orderly or they'll express themselves violently as they do in places around the world where free speech is banned.
00:33:54.200
This just seems like a misunderstanding of what democracy is all about.
00:33:57.660
Well, and even if we can all say that there have been problems from polarization, which I agree, I think society is very polarized, I would take polarization 100 times out of 100 if the alternative is state-mandated, state-enforced unanimity.
00:34:14.080
And this is the challenge here is that you have to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.
00:34:20.340
And in this case, it's far, far better to have the disease if the disease is polarization and the cure is censorship.
00:34:28.220
Well, polarization implies that we have a deeply divided public.
00:34:31.920
There are some issues that's going to be polar.
00:34:35.600
Abortion, I suppose there is a middle ground on that, but that's an example of an issue that by nature will be polarizing.
00:34:41.400
You know, you read the word societal tensions, and we've done a show on that digital charter before, but we will certainly come back to it.
00:34:48.860
You and I have been in the United Kingdom together, reporting together on the, you were one of the real reporters, and I know you're coming back again with us on Tommy Robinson's trial.
00:34:57.240
They use something there called an antisocial behavior or an antisocial order.
00:35:09.260
It deems you to be engaging in any sort of antisocial behavior, even if you're by yourself.
00:35:15.280
And if you don't immediately leave, you will be arrested for not leaving.
00:35:20.900
And this was originally brought in to deal with football or soccer riots decades ago, but now they're used for any politics.
00:35:28.720
I saw them used in Tommy Robinson's political campaign last month.
00:35:32.640
That antisocial behavior, antisocial order is such a catch-all.
00:35:45.340
I'm worried about the vagueness of the language here, Andrew.
00:35:48.080
Yes, I'm worried about the vagueness of the language, but at its core, I also think that there is no amendment to the language that would make it justifiable for what Karina Gould is saying is on the table to shut down social media companies to happen.
00:36:04.300
And, I mean, there's a practical issue here in that these companies do not exist in Canada in many ways.
00:36:13.020
Twitter and Facebook have very small teams here.
00:36:15.340
But, really, they exist outside of the country's borders.
00:36:18.220
So, what she's actually talking about, I would presume, is not just going to Twitter and flipping a switch, but going to Rogers, to Telus, to Bell, to all of these other companies and say, you need to flip the switch so that Twitter is not accessible on your ISPs.
00:36:34.640
And now, all of a sudden, we're not just talking about slapping one company on the wrist.
00:36:38.840
We're talking about an entire approach where government is the gatekeeper of the Internet, which is supposed to be the exact opposite of what the Internet is to Canadians.
00:36:50.620
You know, I should tell you, just yesterday, I received an email from Twitter that there had been a complaint about one of my tweets criticizing a terrorist group called Hamas.
00:37:09.720
I have been notified in the past by Twitter that Pakistan, the government of Pakistan, has objected to some of my tweets.
00:37:18.480
Now, some of them were so old, I didn't even care.
00:37:20.980
Like, obviously, someone's looking through almost 10 years of my tweets.
00:37:25.440
But, I mean, that's the kind of company we'll be in.
00:37:29.460
Pakistan is literally blocking some of my tweets from their country.
00:37:33.520
Pakistan tried to, I presume it was Pakistan, or maybe it was Hamas itself, tried to get me to delete a tweet.
00:37:39.500
That really is the company that Karina Gould would have us keep.
00:37:44.900
And that's not a place I think most Canadians would go to.
00:37:49.560
Is there a reason why the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, who would go absolutely ape if these words had been said by a Harper cabinet minister?
00:38:07.680
Where's the Canadian Civil Liberties Association?
00:38:11.900
Where's the Canadian Association of Journalists?
00:38:13.960
Where's the Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression?
00:38:16.340
Why are they all like they have a laryngectomy or something?
00:38:20.800
You know, I'm sympathetic to some of those third party groups because the media has not actually done its part in making Canadians aware that this issue is going on.
00:38:32.020
So I think that some of these groups where I agree there have been some tenuous relationships with free speech, they can't comment on something they don't know about.
00:38:43.120
So I give them the benefit of the doubt for a period of time.
00:38:49.420
I think people need to either wake up or be accepting of a willful disregard here.
00:38:55.280
Look, you and I both know there's $600 million on the line to mainstream media.
00:38:59.620
And we've talked about the possibility that that will influence coverage.
00:39:03.760
This may be a practical example of that in action.
00:39:06.840
I mean, when you mentioned your experience with having the Pakistani government reporting tweets, I mean, everyone in Canada has been for years talking about the threat of outsourcing Canadian jobs to Pakistan.
00:39:19.840
And now we have Pakistan outsourcing its job of censorship to the Canadian government.
00:39:24.740
So apparently this is now we're finally on the receiving end of outsourcing, but not the type of job we should want any part of.
00:39:30.740
The media needs to realize that it is the one that's going to suffer, because if the government is licensing itself to be able to shut down social media companies because it doesn't like what is on those companies in election times, it's not a big jump to get to the government being able to shut down the National Post website, shut down the rebel, shut down TNC.news.
00:39:57.280
So you have to look 20 yards, 40 yards, 80 yards down the line here.
00:40:02.100
You can't just look at what's right in front of you.
00:40:04.460
You know, you've been very generous with your time today, Andrew.
00:40:06.840
I just want to show something that happened over the weekend.
00:40:13.060
And this is the online version, but it's actually on the front page of the print edition on websites they hate.
00:40:22.420
You can see Lauren Southern there, Gavin McInnes, Faith Goldie.
00:40:26.420
In the top right, second from the right, you can see Candace Malcolm of TNC.news.
00:40:36.600
Basically, every way is Tommy Robinson on there.
00:40:39.940
Everyone the New York Times doesn't like politically.
00:40:43.380
They're trying to demonize for being on YouTube.
00:40:47.000
So you've got this strange mixture of legacy media like the New York Times hating their online competitors.
00:40:54.100
You've got politicians like Karina Gould hating their critics.
00:40:58.460
And you've got Silicon Valley tech companies that, on the one hand, want to control their media.
00:41:04.180
But on the other hand, there's a lot of social justice warriors within them.
00:41:09.600
And in the next six months, we're going to see if Canada can withstand that.
00:41:13.240
Because those are three forces that would censor people like you and me.
00:41:16.560
I just wanted to show that story in the New York Times.
00:41:20.100
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, other than we just all got to keep doing what we're doing.
00:41:24.680
Yeah, so just jealousy that I wasn't on the grid.
00:41:32.380
And we'll keep watching TNC.news for your good work over there.
00:41:38.980
And he's going to be going back to the U.K. with me on July 4th and 5th to cover Tommy Robinson's contempt trial.
00:42:02.320
I don't understand why Andrew Scheer isn't grabbing on to this Section 13 fight.
00:42:08.340
I think Stephen Harper showed that the opposition to free speech is a lot weaker than it looks if you just listen to the media party.
00:42:16.360
There's a few self-interested lawyers and extremist identity groups that'll squawk, but they always do.
00:42:21.820
Ordinary people say, yeah, free speech, that's Canadian.
00:42:24.300
A lot of newcomers to Canada from different backgrounds who Trudeau might say, oh, well, they don't want free speech.
00:42:29.620
No, they came to Canada, they want free speech.
00:42:34.560
The conservative base is unanimously for free speech.
00:42:37.000
The targets of censorship are overwhelmingly conservative.
00:42:41.820
But I think Andrew Scheer is too terrified of the media party.
00:42:44.420
In other words, he's more afraid of the media party than he's afraid of you.
00:42:47.780
And that's why I'd ask you to go to stopsection13.com.
00:42:53.680
Or else the kind of censorship you saw Karina Gould say, I can't believe no conservative's gone after Karina Gould.
00:43:02.960
And if you're trying to shoot down government ideas that are cockamamie, it's good morally, it's good politically.
00:43:12.240
We've got to give Andrew Scheer proof that Canadians care about it.
00:43:21.820
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.
00:43:27.040
Keep fighting for freedom while you're talking.
00:43:48.320
For more on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.