00:04:17.740Well, the moment you empower a government to control what citizens can and cannot see, it is necessarily, it's going to be a political decision.
00:04:27.240because there's no doubt in my mind that if somebody had put up a billboard thanking Trudeau
00:04:32.620and Jagmeet Singh and Dr. Fauci and thanking these people, you saved so many lives, we are
00:04:37.980eternally grateful, that would not have been censored. But this is what happens. We had another
00:04:44.900court victory quite recently where the court ruled against the Parliamentary Protective Service or
00:04:51.700the parliamentary police who three years ago told a pro-life group your signs are offensive and
00:04:59.360you're not allowed to display these signs on parliament hill and so we took that to court and
00:05:04.920we fortunately we got a favorable court ruling you know either we have free speech or we have
00:05:10.580a right not to be offended it's one or the other and unfortunately a lot of canadians will say well
00:05:16.140i believe in free speech as long as it's not offensive it's like no no no you you can't it
00:05:21.120doesn't work that way. Either we have free speech and all kinds of people will get offended for all
00:05:26.740kinds of reasons, or we have a right not to be offended. And if we have that right, then it's
00:05:32.400the government who's going to selectively ban a billboard like George Caterberg's, which says
00:05:39.200that lockdowns were a sham, but they're not going to ban a billboard that says that lockdowns were
00:05:45.460wonderful and saved lots of lives. It's time to modernize Canada's rules on nicotine.
00:05:50.780Alternatives to cigarettes like heated tobacco vaping products and oral smokeless products
00:05:55.580don't burn tobacco or produce smoke. Now, they aren't risk-free, but the growing body of
00:06:01.660scientific evidence shows that they have the potential to be substantially less harmful
00:06:06.660than smoking cigarettes. Now, despite this, Canadians are banned from accessing this critical
00:06:13.140information and sometimes even banned from the products. Nicotine pouches remain banned in
00:06:18.520convenience stores across the country and current laws ban communication about the risk of these
00:06:24.540products compared to cigarettes. It's absolutely ridiculous. The evidence is here. The tools exist.0.95
00:06:30.840Canadians deserve to have the freedom to know about them, to learn about them, to even just
00:06:35.520understand them. It's a free country. We should be able to have this information. So learn more
00:06:41.340about this campaign and our friends over at Unsmoke by visiting their website, unsmoke.ca.
00:06:47.860And thank you so much to Unsmoke for sponsoring this episode.
00:06:50.800Let's talk about one of the, or all of the series of bills that the government, the federal
00:06:57.300government has tabled around restricting speech, basically. I mean, let's call it what it is. I
00:07:03.400mean, it's certainly, if it looks like censorship, it probably is. Now we're talking about Bill C-34,
00:07:09.300the Safe Social Media Act, to regulate the internet, including penalizing big tech,
00:07:16.940all in the name of protecting, I guess, younger people from the big, bad, nasty internet. Can
00:07:24.240you talk about what's going on with these acts, with these bills?
00:07:30.480Yeah, so C-34 is the Safe Social Media Act, and it's now before Parliament. Parliament's in recess.
00:07:37.700They're back in session September 21st.
00:07:41.240This builds on, I'll briefly, the problem is the whole package.
00:07:45.000So we started with Bill C11, the Online Streaming Act, which gave the CRTC, the Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission, gave them authority over the internet.
00:07:55.260And they're now controlling the algorithms used by YouTube and Netflix and streaming services to put forward content that the CRTC deems to be sufficiently Canadian as they see it.
00:08:12.700Then we got the Online News Act, Bill C-18, that made it impossible for Canadians to share news links on Facebook and Instagram.
00:08:21.020Then we've got the Cybersecurity Act, Bill C-8, which gives federal cabinet ministers the power to kick individual Canadians off the internet and also to issue directives to companies to compromise their security and encryption standards.
00:08:36.800So Bill C-8, the Cybersecurity Act, gives the federal government immense power to control tech companies and tell them specifically what to do.
00:08:45.400Then we've got the Combating Hate Act, Bill C-9, which opens the door to criminal prosecutions against Orthodox Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests, Muslim imams, if they teach what their scriptures say about homosexuality and gender and transgenderism.
00:09:01.020Then we got the Lawful Access Act, Bill C-22, which forces the networks to keep data on the phone calls and texts of their subscribers and the locations for six months and also empowers the government to order companies like Signal and Windscribe to build capacity to intercept or provide access to encrypted communications.
00:09:28.620So Signal says it intends to shut down its service for Canadians, can no longer use Signal because Bill C-22 makes it impossible to have confidential end-to-end encrypted communications.
00:09:42.400So you have those five bills, and now you get C-34 creating this new, very powerful body called the Digital Safety Commission, which will have all kinds of powers that are not spelled out in Bill C-34.
00:09:54.060They get to define their own powers later on without parliamentary scrutiny.
00:10:00.900Yeah, I mean, the government had to back off on some of the things they put out there, having run into all sorts of opposition, not only from civil libertarians and other groups like yours, for instance.
00:10:12.400But the big tech just said, we're leaving if you bring about a passage of these bills.
00:10:20.320Isn't that what happened and forcing the government to back down somewhat, although not completely?
00:10:26.540Well, last year we had the government introduce Bill C-2, which they called the Strong Borders Act.
00:10:31.680I think it should have been called the Strong Surveillance Act.