Juno News - July 07, 2025


Liberals push SCARY new censorship laws


Episode Stats


Length

29 minutes

Words per minute

159.98744

Word count

4,756

Sentence count

283

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Chris Sims and Candice Malcolm Malan discuss the dangers of government-funded journalism in Canada, and how it threatens to erode our ability to speak freely and freely express ourselves in the public square.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Candace Malcolm Show here on Juneau. My name is Chris Sims. I'm the Alberta
00:00:07.160 Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Thank you so much for joining us today. We've got
00:00:12.920 a lot to talk about on this show, and we're thankful that we can still do that, that we can
00:00:18.860 still talk about things. Because right now, our ability to express ourselves freely in Canada
00:00:25.680 is on a slippery slope, and it's declining. Here's why. Remember back in shop class, or if you've got
00:00:35.580 a garage and you've got some tools in it, you know those table vices where you can put stuff between
00:00:40.980 them and crank it up, you know, making it loose or making it tight, and it's got two sides coming
00:00:45.860 together? Well, here in Canada, we have two sides of censorship, which are tightening upon people.
00:00:54.520 One side of it is the fact that the government is handing hundreds of millions of dollars to media
00:01:04.740 outside of the CBC. So yes, we know that the state broadcaster already takes well over a billion
00:01:11.880 dollars from taxpayers each year, and that the current Liberal government is planning on upping
00:01:17.820 their stipend, thanks to the taxpayer, and giving the CBC more power. That's a given. But what isn't
00:01:25.240 understood by many is that much of the mainstream media is now also on government payroll. There is
00:01:33.840 a motley crew of really weird forms of subsidy, direct payment, tax credits out the wazoo, and there's
00:01:43.460 even a panel, a government panel that decides what is a real journalism outfit and worthy of government
00:01:53.080 money. As a long-time journalist and someone who values free expression, and I need to for my job
00:01:59.860 at the Taxpayers Federation, this is all deeply disturbing. Because bluntly, journalists cannot
00:02:07.860 be paid by the government. Government-funded journalism should be a contradiction in terms,
00:02:14.840 and it is. The moment a journalist is on government payroll, that's propaganda. The sad thing here is that
00:02:24.060 even if there's a journalist, and I've met many, who's still working like the Dickens to be as balanced
00:02:30.080 as possible and as careful responsible as possible with his or her reporting, the very fact that their
00:02:36.680 paycheck depends in some way, shape, or form on the government compromises them, no matter what they
00:02:43.000 do or how hard they work. As in ethics, okay, where there's a perception of corruption, same goes for
00:02:51.700 journalism, where there's a perception of a conflict of interest with the government, trust falls down.
00:02:59.000 And this is exactly what we're seeing with journalism in Canada. Now, a very healthy majority of Canadians
00:03:07.000 believe that journalists are deliberately trying to mislead them with statements they know to be false.
00:03:14.100 That is very alarming, because we need to be able to trust the information that we're being given.
00:03:19.600 Further to this point on the censorship vice. So again, one side of it, we've got government dumping
00:03:26.220 millions of dollars into journalism in Canada. That was perfectly illustrated just before the election,
00:03:36.000 where you saw, I think it was a National Post or a Post Media journalist saying something about the
00:03:42.620 government, like criticizing it mildly and pointing out a discrepancy.
00:03:46.540 And a member of parliament of the government basically saying, pipe down, and this is why we give you a subsidy.
00:03:55.020 Perfectly proving the point of people who are concerned about government funding journalism in Canada.
00:04:00.940 To the reporter's credit, she shot back pretty good.
00:04:04.400 And there's also the scene that happened during the last election.
00:04:08.480 We had a situation where candidate A is saying, hey, CBC reporter standing there on the sidewalk scrumming me,
00:04:17.160 I'm going to give your employer more money.
00:04:20.540 And candidate B saying, hey, CBC reporter standing there on the sidewalk scrumming me,
00:04:26.060 I'm going to defund your employer.
00:04:28.600 How is that supposed to be reported on straight?
00:04:33.560 How is that not an obvious, almost embarrassing level of a conflict of interest and an affront to a free press?
00:04:41.420 Because the term free press might conjure up images of some old-timey newspaper stand in New York City somewhere,
00:04:50.640 where a paper boy is, you know, handing out free newspapers.
00:04:55.000 That is not what a free press is.
00:04:58.100 That wouldn't be super important.
00:05:00.500 A free press is free from government.
00:05:04.780 And we do not have that in Canada at all right now.
00:05:09.020 The other side of the censorship vice is the censorship itself or the potential of it.
00:05:14.200 And that is through legislation, laws that are passed by our legislators in Ottawa.
00:05:20.200 Bill C-11 has already been passed by the Trudeau government previously.
00:05:24.380 It's now working its way through the CRTC.
00:05:27.260 And you need to stay on top of that because it's eventually going to start trickling down
00:05:31.960 and affecting what kind of podcasts you can see and hear and share online.
00:05:37.660 It's going to eventually alter the visibility of what you're even seeing on YouTube, for example,
00:05:43.900 here in Canada.
00:05:45.060 We're already seeing pressure coming from the government in that direction.
00:05:48.740 And the reason why this is really important, of course, is because if you want to express
00:05:53.480 yourself against the government, for example, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we just finished
00:05:59.040 handing out golden pig statues to government and bureaucrats who waste your money.
00:06:04.040 We criticize the government all the time for jacking up your taxes and wasting your money.
00:06:09.960 If that ability of speech is eroded, then your rights are being eroded.
00:06:17.040 So Bill C-11 has already passed into law.
00:06:20.580 Now currently on the table is something called the Online Harms Act.
00:06:25.360 And this is a doozy.
00:06:26.900 So right off the top, there's a big portion of this bill that any decent person would be
00:06:31.640 fine with strengthening.
00:06:33.020 So that's where, you know, monsters who are targeting children online are going to jail
00:06:38.400 for longer or there's more restrictions on them.
00:06:40.680 Like, everybody accepts that that is fine to do.
00:06:44.620 Unfortunately, there's a strange Trojan horse element of this proposed legislation.
00:06:50.540 And that is the ability for anonymous people to make complaints about your expression online
00:06:56.720 that makes them uncomfortable or feel unsafe.
00:07:00.180 Those are all such variable terms, right?
00:07:04.400 Define what you mean by uncomfortable, right?
00:07:06.680 Because a lot of our discourse can get uncomfortable in politics.
00:07:10.080 And here's the kicker.
00:07:11.500 Folks under this legislation could be fined for it.
00:07:15.060 Or if they don't take it down, they could even be put on house arrest, some of the language
00:07:18.900 in this law.
00:07:19.980 Now, this gets pretty extreme and people start imagining things like what's happening over
00:07:23.860 in the UK.
00:07:24.980 If we are going to be able to speak truth to power and hold government to account, we're
00:07:30.060 going to have to be able to speak freely and express ourselves freely.
00:07:34.860 So this is what's at play right now.
00:07:37.300 And that's why it's really important to speak with Peter Menzies about this.
00:07:41.980 What does he have to say about it?
00:07:43.480 Let's find out.
00:07:44.660 Joining me now is Peter Menzies.
00:07:46.900 Mr. Menzies is a fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, past editor of the Calgary Herald,
00:07:53.500 and now a writer and founder of the rewrite that is on Substack.
00:07:59.700 I would encourage anybody who values serious journalism to go subscribe to it.
00:08:05.100 I just did.
00:08:05.980 And I'm very happy with my decision.
00:08:08.420 I wanted to get into a few things with you.
00:08:10.980 I often describe in my talks about censorship in Canada as we're facing two sides of a vice,
00:08:17.820 similar to what you would see in a metal shop.
00:08:19.740 On one side, we have the fact that much of the mainstream media is now, unfortunately,
00:08:26.420 on a form of government payroll, either through direct payment or through massive amounts of
00:08:31.000 subsidy.
00:08:31.740 On the other side are laws, things like Bill C-11, which has already passed, and the looming
00:08:37.620 Online Harms Act.
00:08:39.340 I just wanted to get your bird's eye view first.
00:08:42.120 As a long-time journalist who writes about this quite clearly, where would you rate our
00:08:48.640 state of journalism and free expression in Canada?
00:08:52.100 Are we at a C?
00:08:53.400 Are we at a B plus?
00:08:54.820 Where are we at?
00:08:56.640 Probably the C range.
00:08:58.580 I think that the real issue has been this sort of decline in the willingness to stand up
00:09:04.800 for freedom of speech at all costs.
00:09:08.500 There's been, I mean, we're just emerging right now kind of from a cancel culture era.
00:09:15.160 And what shocked me about it was that instead of media standing up for people's right to
00:09:21.620 speak and that sort of stuff.
00:09:23.460 Now, I mean, there's always social consequences for, you know, whatever language you choose
00:09:29.320 to use.
00:09:29.980 I mean, you're free to use it, but you're not free to use it without consequences.
00:09:33.500 But the consequences during this cancel culture frenzy that went on for a few years were very
00:09:39.160 severe, career destroying and that sort of stuff for the slightest little miscue.
00:09:43.800 Media didn't fight that.
00:09:47.520 They went along with it.
00:09:49.380 And that's really, I thought, sent a bad sort of example for where we might be going when
00:09:56.060 you see that media being the ones who depend the most upon freedom of speech, we're willing
00:10:02.340 to get pretty mushy about it.
00:10:05.060 So right now we're left with librarians who are the only ones who are still really sticking
00:10:11.460 up for free speech.
00:10:13.300 That's so C, I maybe might even slide it to a D, but I just want to leave room for next
00:10:20.220 year's grade.
00:10:20.780 Oh, great point.
00:10:22.820 We just finished releasing a report card on finance ministers.
00:10:25.940 So I understand needing to leave room for the next year's grade.
00:10:29.360 To your point, just on purely not with taxpayers money going to it, just on the pure free expression
00:10:35.820 element.
00:10:36.820 So the Taxpayers Federation, for example, we often will do stunts that are annoying to people
00:10:43.620 and politicians, even insulting in some ways.
00:10:46.400 We just finished handing out golden pig statues to politicians and bureaucrats who waste money.
00:10:51.640 So free expression from a taxpayer's perspective is essential to our work.
00:10:56.940 If we can't criticize the government, if we can't express ourselves freely, we're in some
00:11:01.700 trouble here as a country.
00:11:03.300 And so this is one of the reasons why the CTF took a stand against things like C11.
00:11:07.900 To your point, though, on the pure journalism element, because this is where I spent most of
00:11:11.920 my adult life, I agree.
00:11:14.340 And for the longest time, it was journalists, at least I found, that always defended free
00:11:20.140 expression, but defended free speech.
00:11:23.020 We've seen overseas, you know, what happened with Charlie Hebdo, for goodness sake.
00:11:27.480 You know, one of my most, you know, closest friends in journalism still has, you know, a magazine
00:11:32.540 cover from that magazine in France.
00:11:34.820 And so I'm wondering where you think this changed.
00:11:40.260 Where did we take a turn to where what you were kind of made me think of referencing?
00:11:45.980 I'm going to be careful here because I don't want to upset people.
00:11:48.780 A few years ago in the before times, before lockdown, there was a huge cancel culture push
00:11:54.560 that swept through media in Canada, especially on what was then Twitter.
00:11:59.860 And all that had happened was a couple of more high profile journalists had kind of joked
00:12:06.440 about the fact that now authors aren't allowed to write from a perspective that they are not.
00:12:13.040 Meaning Jack London couldn't write from the perspective of a wolf, for example, anymore.
00:12:19.280 Or a woman writer couldn't write from the perspective of a man anymore because that was somehow appropriation. 0.99
00:12:26.180 And so a lot of fiction writers were having a problem with this, saying this is a little bit silly.
00:12:31.520 And a couple of journalists had chimed in, basically saying, yeah, this is a little bit silly.
00:12:36.340 And all hell broke loose in their own workplaces.
00:12:39.280 They were attacked by their own employers and had their jobs threatened.
00:12:42.860 And I think we reached peak crazy cancel culture at that point.
00:12:46.820 And it was just a few years before the lockdowns.
00:12:48.920 Yeah, it was about the mid-20-teens.
00:12:52.140 I think it started emerging around then.
00:12:55.300 But it kind of coincides roughly with Justin Trudeau's election.
00:13:00.560 Yeah.
00:13:00.720 And I think his approach to world affairs and domestic affairs seemed to give people permission to go a little farther than they had been going.
00:13:13.020 I mean, cultural appropriation.
00:13:14.580 There were all kinds of, oh, what do you call them, social misdeeds that people could commit.
00:13:20.600 But it's one thing to sort of criticize people for it.
00:13:23.760 But it was the full consequences of it.
00:13:26.760 I mean, what was that, the kids from the school in Kentucky and the states who had the, I can't remember their name right now, but that kind of went viral.
00:13:39.080 And even though, I mean, the main kid in that, I think, probably doesn't have to work a day in his life with the settlements he got from the lawsuits he filed.
00:13:48.000 But people were constantly trying to accuse each other.
00:13:51.180 And it was very, you know, Orwellian in a sense, that word gets overused, but kind of Stalinist, where people are, even goes back to the French Revolution when, you know, j'accuse, right?
00:14:03.240 And people were, there was sort of a terror going on.
00:14:07.680 Ben Mulroney can probably speak to that.
00:14:09.740 Yes, he can.
00:14:11.180 Quite a bit too.
00:14:12.260 And I don't know exactly where it came from, other than there had been this sort of long march through the institutions that had been going on for about the previous 20, 25 years.
00:14:25.980 So young people were coming out of schools with this attitude.
00:14:30.000 Young people were graduating from university.
00:14:32.100 Not all of them.
00:14:33.120 I got to be careful not to be too sweeping with this attitude.
00:14:36.440 And like I said, the thing that disturbed me the most about media was that it didn't fight it.
00:14:42.320 Yes.
00:14:43.020 Right?
00:14:43.500 I mean, the National Post initially threw Rex Murphy under the bus for saying, and if you go online, you can find that column, when he said he didn't think Canada was an institutionally racist country.
00:14:57.780 Right?
00:14:58.540 When he, it was like, you, it even, he didn't just, it wasn't like you just had, you weren't able to speak.
00:15:06.660 You were compelled to speak only one thing.
00:15:10.440 Right?
00:15:10.880 You had to, you had to be in agreement.
00:15:12.820 And the Post initially, you know, threw Murphy under the bus.
00:15:16.960 The note is still on that column online.
00:15:19.140 But then they found, they regained their balance.
00:15:24.500 Right?
00:15:24.740 Which was a good sign there.
00:15:26.280 And that, that gave me a little bit of hope when I started to see that.
00:15:29.780 And some of them, you can see, are slightly shifting back.
00:15:33.700 But it was scary that they fell for it in the first place.
00:15:38.000 Because particularly if they're going to get subsidized for being the defenders of democracy, you better frigging defend it.
00:15:45.460 Yeah.
00:15:45.940 So let's take off from there.
00:15:47.300 So I think you've really set the scene well of this just didn't come out of nowhere.
00:15:51.220 All of a sudden, this was already kind of growing and bubbling before the money started flowing from government.
00:15:58.700 And I would also just to throw in, sorry for the inside baseball.
00:16:02.400 But for those of us who've worked in journalism, it wasn't just that.
00:16:06.540 It was a combination of that, of course, this cancel culture frenzy that was sweeping.
00:16:10.780 But also, there's just so few journalists anymore compared to what it was 20 years ago.
00:16:16.580 There's just a lack of bodies.
00:16:18.940 You know, there used to be so many journalists have told this story many times that when I graduated J school from BCIT back in the 90s, there were two full-time salaried paid reporters.
00:16:30.360 Reporters, like paying your mortgage level paid, who worked at the Vancouver Sun only on softwood lumber.
00:16:39.020 That's how much journalism we had.
00:16:40.820 So we had city hall reporters.
00:16:42.140 We had consumer affairs reporters.
00:16:44.820 We had court reporters who went to court every day just to go find a story.
00:16:49.240 And so there's so few of them now.
00:16:51.860 And they're younger and younger and younger and coming out of these universities with journalism degrees without a lot of experience.
00:16:59.460 So it kind of created this perfect storm for the government to back up the money truck and say, OK, we're going to save you.
00:17:07.940 And now a lot of them, unfortunately, either one way or the other, are dependent upon government funding, meaning they're getting paid by the government.
00:17:17.280 Where do you see this going?
00:17:19.540 Do you see more people cluing into the fact that a lot of mainstream media are getting paid by the government and rejecting them because of it?
00:17:27.460 Or is it just a byproduct?
00:17:29.120 It's hard to say because the mainstream media doesn't talk about it very much, do they?
00:17:32.800 They sure don't.
00:17:33.780 So it's kind of like their dirty little secret.
00:17:38.240 Which means that to me that they're embarrassed by it.
00:17:42.400 To be fair, it wasn't the government that went to them that said, do you want some money?
00:17:47.100 They went to the government and said, give us some money.
00:17:49.800 We're the defenders of democracy, blah, blah, blah, which is a lot of nonsense as far as I'm concerned.
00:17:56.080 And just because the Toronto Star or the National Post goes belly up, that doesn't mean that journalism dies.
00:18:03.360 It will find a way, right?
00:18:06.860 Those are merely the vehicles that carry journalism.
00:18:10.400 There are lots of other ways to deliver journalism.
00:18:13.200 And the 21st century is discovering that there are a lot, like you mentioned, a rewrite.
00:18:18.960 I can go on Substack and read all kinds of good commentary from experts in the fields, not journalism's columnists trying to find expertise in them.
00:18:31.000 I mean, God bless them for that.
00:18:32.300 But I can go straight to the horse's mouth there, for instance.
00:18:35.440 So there's all kinds of different examples of that.
00:18:38.400 But they went to the government.
00:18:39.820 Now, what gets me about that when you're talking about the decline of journalism, there was a time not that long ago.
00:18:46.380 And I'm kind of at that age where I don't like saying back in the day or there was a time.
00:18:51.100 But I kind of have to do it.
00:18:52.460 I mean, that's what I can offer now.
00:18:54.560 When no publisher, out of their own sense of self-respect, would ever link themselves to government with money, right?
00:19:06.880 I mean, after the Kent Commission of the 1980s, the government proposed a whole bunch of things.
00:19:11.560 The industry stood up on its hind legs, snarled, and said, get thee away, Satan, right?
00:19:18.560 Stay away.
00:19:19.360 We would never compromise their independence like that.
00:19:23.420 But just like that, they all did this time.
00:19:29.820 So I'm not going to accuse them of pay for play because there's plenty of evidence of some journalists still doing some good work.
00:19:38.280 The fact of the matter is, though, you're going to have a tough time convincing the public of that.
00:19:43.340 And that's the core reason for it.
00:19:45.520 Once you build an association or a codependence like that, you're going to lose public trust.
00:19:51.740 Of course.
00:19:52.340 And they're just not going to believe you.
00:19:53.280 And there's some other practices like the use of unnamed sources and that sort of stuff, which is very liberally applied these days, which have declined.
00:20:01.180 So there's definitely been a decline in the ethics and the application of what were the ethics of journalism organizations in the past.
00:20:11.840 So going along with that trend you're concerned about, censorship, I'm not sure that we can trust them to defend our right to freedom of speech anymore.
00:20:25.040 And journalism, trust in journalism is plummeting.
00:20:28.800 I read a recent, it was an Edelman survey on trust.
00:20:33.120 It was from a couple of years ago.
00:20:35.060 And trust in journalism, I think it was something like 50, high 50%, close to 60% of Canadians believe that journalists are deliberately saying things they know not to be true in order to mislead people.
00:20:49.960 This isn't flubbing something or getting a date wrong or accidentally mispronouncing somebody's name, which all journalists do.
00:20:56.480 It isn't a typo.
00:20:58.240 This is deliberately trying to tell people things they know not to be true.
00:21:02.620 And once you erode trust, that's what journalists bank on.
00:21:08.040 You need your audience to be able to trust your work and what you're saying, because otherwise, what are you doing there?
00:21:14.700 And the moment that you are on some form of government payroll, that shows, again, that is a direct conflict of interest.
00:21:24.140 OK, I'll put it this way.
00:21:25.360 It wouldn't matter if the dearly departed Rex Murphy, OK, we're delivering the news and Don Cherry, we're delivering the sports.
00:21:34.120 If they're on direct government payroll, that's the problem.
00:21:38.000 It's the perception of bias that destroys trust because it's a conflict of interest.
00:21:44.160 No matter how much they try to guard against it, it's an inherent conflict of interest, very similar to ethics.
00:21:50.760 The perception of corruption is what gets you.
00:21:53.220 And so this is where, again, I plead with every journalist who's in the field right now who can actually have some influence over their employers.
00:22:00.880 Get away from government funding.
00:22:02.580 Do it however you have to, but get away from being funded by the state.
00:22:06.860 Speaking of the state, I wanted to quickly touch on the other side of the vice grip, and that is laws about free expression.
00:22:14.260 Now, Bill, C-11 has already been put through the machine.
00:22:17.380 It's working its way through.
00:22:18.440 I sometimes get updates, you know, from the CRTC, which you were also a member of, I will point out.
00:22:24.180 Again, folks, this is why you need to go subscribe to his sub stack called The Rewrite, because he's got a lifetime of experience in this.
00:22:31.160 When it comes to the Online Harms Act, though, this is the current new law that is still in play.
00:22:37.120 Now, for folks who forget what it was, it's kind of this double-headed law.
00:22:42.880 One of them was what any normal person would want to do, was to protect young people online from being disgusting imagery being shared, all that stuff.
00:22:52.720 Any reasonable person would say, sure, tighten all of those laws.
00:22:55.980 But there's an element to it about so-called hate speech or online expression of harm or intent that was really alarming a lot of people who value free expression because it was punishing people for tweets, right, going back and forth in time.
00:23:14.300 I saw that it sounds like the minister responsible for this is going to be Frazier going forward.
00:23:21.760 Where do you see the current Online Harms Act going?
00:23:25.060 Do you think they're going to split the bill and they're going to get rid of the online censorship element?
00:23:30.680 I don't think they will because, well, it depends.
00:23:33.380 I guess it's too early to say.
00:23:34.780 The last government, Trudeau's government, was very susceptible to lobbyists.
00:23:39.520 And the Online Harms Act, and it's had two or three different efforts to get through, was pushed for, some of the groups pushing for it a lot were
00:23:53.160 religious minority groups, Muslims and Jewish groups as well, who felt they were being subjected to prejudicial statements online and wanted that to stop and that sort of thing.
00:24:07.160 There are ways, I think, to address those issues, civil actions and that sort of stuff, if you behave.
00:24:14.740 But what gets really tricky, as you say, is when you get into this area of hate speech.
00:24:19.260 So do you want to end up where, and this is where I'm concerned about the Carney's sort of connection, you know, admiration for things that are British, is that the rules in England right now,
00:24:34.840 you can get arrested or you can certainly get visited by the police if you say something that makes somebody feel uncomfortable online,
00:24:45.220 that they interpret it as racist or that.
00:24:48.640 It doesn't even have to be overtly racist.
00:24:52.780 But I am hopeful that they will be practical and they will do things like deep fakes, for instance, you know,
00:25:00.000 turning women into online porn stars like that, that all they have to do is amend section 162 of the criminal code, 1.00
00:25:07.580 which is all about sharing of intimate images without permission, to include deep fakes there.
00:25:13.800 Done.
00:25:14.640 Right.
00:25:14.980 If you want to protect kids from access to online porn,
00:25:22.960 there are ways you can go about that and work with the online industry on.
00:25:29.060 Because there have actually been coordinated efforts.
00:25:35.760 I remember this from my CRTC years between ISPs, internet service providers, the police and others,
00:25:43.460 like when it came to child pornography, for keeping a watch for it.
00:25:47.480 Most of it, most of that crap gets hidden below, you know, in the dark web.
00:25:53.700 But they find it and they, where they find it, they seek it out and destroy it sort of thing.
00:25:59.320 So if you're talking about, I guess what we would call mainstream porn,
00:26:04.000 this day and age, finding a way to protect children from that,
00:26:08.560 or at least empowering parents to protect children from it with,
00:26:13.460 I mean, my preferred solution is actually having a sort of block that you can apply at home
00:26:19.800 to your internet in terms of that, so that nobody under that age can even access it,
00:26:27.920 let alone get into it.
00:26:28.940 But those are all going to be contentious issues, which I think the government,
00:26:32.140 I think it may address it.
00:26:36.020 They may decide, and a practical decision might be to just clean it up through amendments,
00:26:41.840 as I said, and move on with their bigger economic agenda.
00:26:46.880 I think that's where I'm leaning, based on the fact they've now shifted it.
00:26:51.780 Initially, this was under heritage, which was super weird.
00:26:55.100 And now they've shifted it over to justice,
00:26:57.360 which is an indicator that they're getting more serious about it.
00:27:00.200 And I know there's been a lot of advocacy,
00:27:02.780 both from what I would describe as left-wing defenders of free expression,
00:27:06.840 and again, for the obvious stuff, not, you know, against protecting children.
00:27:10.300 Any decent person wants to do that.
00:27:12.120 So there was a big push to split the bill,
00:27:13.900 to get rid of the online censorship element and keep, you know,
00:27:17.680 tightening restrictions on people who seek to harm others,
00:27:21.740 which is already illegal, by the way.
00:27:24.560 Sharing images of child sexual abuse is already illegal.
00:27:28.660 Terror, you know, promoting terrorism online.
00:27:30.720 All of these things are already in the criminal code.
00:27:33.080 To your point, all they would need to do is just amend them
00:27:36.800 that are already in the criminal code.
00:27:38.940 And I know, for example, the Canadian Constitution Foundation
00:27:41.820 was speaking very vigorously, I guess,
00:27:43.720 against this.
00:27:44.420 So I think because it's coming from kind of a bipartisan grassroots element
00:27:47.960 from both so-called left and right,
00:27:50.220 I think there's a strong chance they will drop that element.
00:27:53.800 So to your point, they can roll on forward.
00:27:55.940 We're out of time, sir.
00:27:57.040 Is there anything else you would like to mention?
00:27:58.960 Or they could take a look at Michelle Rempel's bill
00:28:01.280 that I think she has tabled again.
00:28:03.560 Okay.
00:28:04.040 She came up with an alternative,
00:28:06.140 which addressed some of the concerns.
00:28:09.480 And it's not perfect,
00:28:12.100 but who knows, maybe they can work with that.
00:28:15.360 They might.
00:28:15.860 And it is still technically a minority.
00:28:17.940 And governments have absorbed opposition,
00:28:21.380 you know, proposed ideas
00:28:22.720 into their own legislation before.
00:28:25.380 So let's hope that wiser heads prevail.
00:28:28.640 Thank you very much for your time today, sir.
00:28:30.620 Folks, head on over to the rewrite on Substack.
00:28:33.220 Subscribe to it because, of course,
00:28:35.100 Mr. Menzies keeps up to date
00:28:36.480 with the latest on censorship and journalism.
00:28:39.040 Thank you so much.
00:28:40.260 Thank you so much.
00:28:41.620 Folks, if you want more original journalism
00:28:44.060 that is independent and thoughtful and hard-hitting,
00:28:48.000 be sure to head on over to junonews.com
00:28:50.940 and subscribe there.
00:28:52.440 Thank you so much for watching.
00:28:54.200 Candace is back tomorrow.
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