Juno News - December 14, 2022


The Liberals are waging war on internet free speech

Topics
Elon Musk tweet response C11 censorship stakes C-11 regulation debate online censorship debate
Mentioned
Elon Musk Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Show Matt Hatfield Steven Guilbeault Bill C-63 Miville Deschene Andrew Lawton Michael Geist Areva Martin Money Heist Celine Dion Simons
Elon Musk needs to stand up to Trudeau's internet censorship They couldn't care less

Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

181.78

Word count

5,651

Sentence count

232

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, host Andrew Lawton takes a victory lap after a tweet he sent to Elon Musk about the liberal government in Canada's attempt to regulate the internet and force social media companies to remove so-called hate speech.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:13 Hello and welcome to you all. This is Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show, here on True North on this Wednesday, December 14th, 2022.
00:00:25 to 11 days until Christmas.
00:00:28 I know I am infuriating you with the Christmas countdown.
00:00:31 I feel like I'm going to be accused of a hate crime,
00:00:33 not because I am supporting the Christian holiday
00:00:37 more than any other faith's holiday,
00:00:39 but just because everyone is so stressed out
00:00:41 that the reminder of how quickly approaching Christmas is
00:00:44 will likely be the kind to induce vast levels of hatred in society.
00:00:48 But I take no responsibility for that.
00:00:50 This is a free speech zone, a safe space for all opinions,
00:00:53 and I thank you so very much for tuning in.
00:00:57 So this is one of those moments where before I get into the thick of it,
00:01:01 I have to do a little bit of a victory lap here
00:01:04 because I feel like this is one of those programs
00:01:07 where I can say that the Andrew Lawton Show got action.
00:01:11 Yesterday, I had an idea which wasn't really prompted by anything specific
00:01:15 except for some of the general news that had been emerging
00:01:18 with the muskification of Twitter.
00:01:21 And I was talking about how I think Elon Musk really needs to take a stand against the liberal government in Canada and its efforts to regulate the internet and specifically to force social media companies to pay mainstream media outlets, to force social media companies to remove content that fits the liberal government's definition of so-called hate speech.
00:01:42 And I did a very impassioned show about this, spoke about it in a number of different contexts.
00:01:49 And then I had also tweeted at Elon Musk, kind of calling on him, trying to bring attention to this.
00:01:55 Anyway, I don't really think anything of it.
00:01:57 A lot of people respond to the tweet, and I don't know if Elon's going to see it or not.
00:02:01 I think an hour went by, and I figured out, okay, I guess he's busy doing other things like running his many companies.
00:02:07 And then I wake up this morning.
00:02:09 And I think I got up a little bit later than I usually did, maybe six o'clock or so.
00:02:14 And my phone is just like lighting up every few seconds.
00:02:17 And I'm like, what on earth is happening?
00:02:19 And I look over at it and realize that this tweet to Elon Musk has blown up.
00:02:25 And then I realized the reason it's blown up is because Elon Musk has replied to my
00:02:30 tweet to him, calling on him to act in the sense about what Canada is doing.
00:02:36 So my tweet, just to give you a little bit of a refresher, was this.
00:02:41 Canada's liberal government wants to regulate internet content and deputize social media companies to enforce hate speech bans with a low and murky threshold for what hate speech is.
00:02:52 I hope Elon Musk takes a stand against this.
00:02:55 And then Elon replies, sounds like an attempt to muzzle the voice of the people of Canada.
00:03:03 and that is quite an astute observation i think more astute than most of the members of the legacy
00:03:09 media in canada have been able to come up with about what's happening and i wanted to expand a
00:03:15 little bit on the themes we started talking about yesterday and explain why there is a an all-out
00:03:20 war on internet freedom taking place right now that is not just about c11 and i just if you
00:03:27 subscribe to my substack newsletter i just a few minutes before going on air had published my latest
00:03:32 edition which is on this topic and i say that c11 is the tip of the censorship iceberg and the
00:03:38 reason i bring that up is because there's been a very sustained backlash to c11 and i think
00:03:43 justifiably so it's a terrible bill that does a lot of bad stuff to the internet by manipulating
00:03:49 algorithms to force more canadian content to appear so you want to go and see the latest clip
00:03:55 from i don't know joe rogan or my little pony or perhaps both maybe it's my little rogan you never
00:04:02 know and instead you get the highlight clip from little mosque on the prairie because you haven't
00:04:08 hit your canadian content quota for the day and justin trudeau says you need to see more of it
00:04:13 now the amusing part of it is that technically the andrew lawton show is canadian not technically i
00:04:18 mean technically logistically de facto to jury this is canadian content but i don't think this
00:04:24 is the type of canadian content that the government wants to serve up on your algorithm or one of my
00:04:30 absolute favorite shows of all time is Money Heist on Netflix, a Spanish show that I only have access
00:04:37 to because Netflix decided there might have been a global audience for it, but maybe I log in and
00:04:44 I don't actually get Netflix to recommend Money Heist to me because instead there's some, oh I
00:04:49 don't know, Quebec drama that has to be served up as a measure to comply with Bill C-11. So all of
00:04:57 this is an example of why the and again you can take issue with big tech company algorithms and
00:05:03 I would encourage you to do it but the only thing worse than tech companies manipulating these
00:05:07 algorithms is government manipulating these algorithms like has Justin Trudeau ever done
00:05:14 anything to suggest that he should be the one to tell you what you see on YouTube or Netflix what
00:05:20 you listen to on Spotify you go on and you're like oh wow I hear Rihanna has a hot new album
00:05:25 minutes oh my goodness this is just every Celine Dion track ever made now nothing against Celine
00:05:30 Dion I quite like Celine Dion but I don't want Celine Dion like forced into my ears like the
00:05:35 oral equivalent of the clockwork orange scene where the guy said that the eyes are being pried
00:05:42 open instead the ears are pried open and it's just all Celine Dion all the time because C11 says
00:05:47 more Canadian content on the internet not realizing that the internet is where we go to escape
00:05:53 the regulations that affect TV and radio in several ways.
00:05:58 So all of this is to say that C-11 is a big deal,
00:06:02 but it's so much more than that.
00:06:06 And this is what I was getting at in that tweet to Elon Musk,
00:06:09 which he replied to and said it was an attempt to muzzle
00:06:12 the voice of the people of Canada, which I wholeheartedly agree with
00:06:16 because the Liberals put Bill C-36 forward in the previous parliament.
00:06:21 And this is a bill that would reinstate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which allows for the prosecution, effectively, by the Canadian Human Rights Commission of so-called hate speech.
00:06:35 And it isn't hate speech that meets the threshold for criminal hate speech.
00:06:40 It's hate speech that instead meets a threshold that has been set out by the government that is lower than the criminal threshold.
00:06:48 That is, speech that maybe falls within the bounds of political debate, or speech that is contentious, controversial, maybe icky, but certainly not speech that is or should be illegal.
00:07:02 And one of the big problems, and I'm going to be talking about this a little bit later on in the program, is the conflation by those predisposed to online censorship, by people like Justin Trudeau and Stephen Gilbeau.
00:07:13 with social accept of social acceptability of speech with legality of speech and i think that
00:07:22 is a big challenge that comes up here there is lots of speech that is objectionable perhaps
00:07:28 offensive controversial but that doesn't mean it's illegal and freedom of expression freedom
00:07:33 of speech i i use those terms interchangeably now if you talk to some canadian legal scholars
00:07:38 there are a lot more distinctions than uh you may agree with and certainly than i agree with but
00:07:43 nevertheless they're all part of this same debate and I think when we talk about the regulation of
00:07:48 the internet we can't look at C11 in isolation but I do want to focus in a little bit more on it
00:07:54 because a lot of people have certainly heard about it and they understand some of the issues with it
00:07:59 but I don't know if people realize what the stakes of this are and I think part of this is because
00:08:04 the government has couched C11 in very benign sounding terms like oh it's just Canadian content
00:08:10 Oh, it's just modernizing. It's doing all these things. There's something wrong. We're not against modernization, are we?
00:08:16 Well, that's not exactly what's happening here.
00:08:20 Joining me on the line now from Open Media is the Campaigns Director, Matt Hatfield.
00:08:25 Matt, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:08:28 Hi there. Thanks for having me.
00:08:30 So let's start. Why is this an issue for your organization, first off, C11?
00:08:34 So I think C11 was drawn so broadly that it did pose a real expression risk to ordinary Canadians.
00:08:43 So there's been a lot of debate since it was first introduced to C10 last year about our ordinary audiovisual posts,
00:08:50 you know, the videos and podcasts and such that we as users put on the Internet.
00:08:54 Are they being treated as broadcasting content? And could the CRTC be regulating our individual expression?
00:08:59 And in the version of C-11 passed through the House, I think that was still a very real consideration, a very real concern.
00:09:06 We're lucky that there's been an amendment during the Senate process that could fix that.
00:09:11 But we'll have to see if the House ends up accepting that.
00:09:15 Now, what was that amendment specifically?
00:09:18 Yeah, so this comes from Senator Simons and Miville Deschene.
00:09:21 And together, they essentially narrowed the scope of the bill.
00:09:25 So previously, under C10, it just very clearly included all user expression,
00:09:30 and people were very alarmed about that, understandably.
00:09:33 Now, in C11, they tried to exclude some user speech,
00:09:37 but they did it on such broad terms that they were saying, like,
00:09:40 well, if you're earning any revenue, if anyone is earning revenue alongside this content,
00:09:44 then we're going to treat it as broadcasting, and the CRTC can regulate it.
00:09:47 Well, as you know, most things on the internet make revenue, right?
00:09:50 ...monetization on YouTube and make, like, five bucks a month.
00:09:52 you're now a commercial publisher like, you know, Global News is or some giant YouTube streamer.
00:09:58 Exactly. And so the House didn't fix that. That was still a huge risk there. This amendment
00:10:03 restricts the being treated as broadcasting to professional sound recording. And just does a
00:10:10 much tighter job of making sure most of our posts should no longer be subject to the bill
00:10:14 if this amendment is accepted. Now, I know open media has a petition calling on the government
00:10:20 to fix this. So I just want to kind of drill down here. Is this just your view that this is
00:10:25 inevitable and we have to try to make the best of it? Or do you actually think that at its core,
00:10:31 it's trying to achieve a good thing, but going about it the wrong way?
00:10:35 Well, I think a part of what it's trying to achieve isn't a bad thing. We don't think
00:10:40 fundamentally treating the internet like broadcasting doesn't make sense. Like the
00:10:43 internet is not broadcasting. All of us are making a million choices a day that we never got to make
00:10:48 in in the tv broadcasting world and so some of the things the government has proposed here
00:10:54 don't respect our choices don't respect our individual right to you know opt into things
00:10:59 and opt out of other things and that's a huge concern the idea of finding some financial
00:11:04 support for canadian creators we're not necessarily against that but unfortunately there's the question
00:11:09 of is it going to be fair is it going to be open to all canadian creators or is it again going to
00:11:14 to be a situation where some people are picked as favorites and others aren't. And the CanCon
00:11:18 system hasn't been updated since the 1980s. It won't be updated yet under this bill. We're still
00:11:23 going to see who's included and who isn't, and that's a huge question. Well, that's another thing
00:11:27 that I think you raised that's quite important here. I mean, the content, the types of content,
00:11:31 the genres of content that are on the internet are a lot more varied than music, where you have,
00:11:37 you know, sure, different genres of music, but, you know, within the parameters of what a country
00:11:41 station is playing there's canadian artists and non-canadian artists for the purposes of canadian
00:11:46 content on the internet we're talking about political content and i mentioned sort of jokingly
00:11:50 earlier on that you know my show is canadian content but i don't think it's the type that you
00:11:54 know the canadian government might want to promote but there's a serious point in that which is that
00:11:59 not all content is equal just because of its country of origin yeah that's right i mean of
00:12:06 course you and i are both canadians but probably neither of our content would be counted as cancon
00:12:10 under the current system. It's got quite an arcane points-based system where there's all kinds of
00:12:14 different benchmarks you need to hit to be qualified. And some things that are very clearly
00:12:18 Canadian stories don't end up qualified, whereas some things that really ought not to, you know,
00:12:23 things like a documentary about the British tutors, that will qualify as CanCon. So something
00:12:29 that I said in testimony, I don't think that C11 is necessarily intended to be a censorship bill,
00:12:34 but it's so broad it could very easily be used as one. That's why we've been calling to tie it down,
00:12:39 restrict it, make it very clear what it's actually about, because there's a real risk that a future
00:12:43 government in a year or two or three years could pick this up and say, well, now that we have these
00:12:47 powers, let's see what we can do with it. And we don't want to see that. One of the issues, too,
00:12:51 and I don't know if this has been resolved in the Senate process, but is that so much of how this
00:12:57 would actually unfold and how this would manifest really comes down to regulations which aren't in
00:13:01 the bill, which would be developed after the fact by the CRTC. That's right. And so one of the things
00:13:07 I'd like to encourage listeners is to stay engaged with this process. You know, people pay a lot of
00:13:11 attention to bills. They don't pay nearly as much attention to what the CRTC does in CRTC
00:13:16 proceedings, but those matter a lot. So we're going to be there throughout in interpreting any
00:13:21 part of this bill. We're going to be fighting to have the choices and content of ordinary people
00:13:26 respected in that process. And I really hope that lots of people who've been alarmed by C-11 will
00:13:31 also participate in that because it will determine the reality of a lot of this.
00:13:36 Now, has the government, to your knowledge, given any indication of whether it's willing
00:13:40 to accept that Senate amendment?
00:13:42 They said that they're studying it, so we don't know which way they'll go.
00:13:46 I should actually flag as well, there was a really negative Senate amendment as well.
00:13:50 They added an age verification requirement for internet platforms that I think was a
00:13:55 huge error to introduce at this late stage, and we're hoping the government will remove
00:13:58 that as well as accepting this new one.
00:14:00 Yeah, so since you bring this up, this is an interesting one because I understood that
00:14:05 what they were trying to do was try to help as far as like accessing online pornography was
00:14:10 concerned. Like that was the thrust behind it, wasn't it? Yeah, it's about, in their view,
00:14:14 it's about protecting kids. And of course, who wants to be against protecting kids? But the
00:14:18 Senate didn't hear from a single witness about this idea about what the consequences could be
00:14:22 about how it would work. And I mean, right, rightfully so, I think, some representatives
00:14:28 of the government said during the consideration of the amendment, this really doesn't belong here.
00:14:31 and we should consider this separately if we're going to do it. It needs a full consideration
00:14:36 because like the worst version of this is that you need a government issued ID and you need to
00:14:41 provide it to Reddit or to Twitter to log on and to post your content. And again, it might not be
00:14:45 intended for political content, but it could sure affect political content if they do it in a
00:14:49 detrimental way. Yeah. And then you throw privacy issues into the mix. You throw equity issues into
00:14:56 the mix. Not everyone has that, has the means to publish it or to upload that. One other dimension
00:15:03 of this that I think is important is that you are right that this can't be done in an omnibus way
00:15:07 where just everything that's remotely connected to the internet gets thrown into one thing. I mean,
00:15:12 my issue with another proposed set of reforms on online harms is that, you know, that you have
00:15:19 people that are wanting to view terrorist content the same way as hate speech, which I don't
00:15:25 actually think can be done in the same way because there are so many varied definitions of hate
00:15:30 speech. And I think there is this tendency, you're right, to just try to, well, they've opened this
00:15:34 box, just put everything they can into it. That's exactly right. So we haven't had harmful content
00:15:40 legislation yet. We had a paper that sort of outlined what they were thinking last year.
00:15:45 And it was a giant mess. It was amongst the worst ideas we've seen from any democratic government,
00:15:50 actually around these issues. They were very, very heavily critiqued. They have pulled back
00:15:55 from that initial proposal, but we don't yet have a sign of what their follow-up legislation will be
00:15:59 on that. And as you said, like terrorism content or content that's abusive of children is actually
00:16:05 quite a different matter than hate speech, which is very subjective, very contextual. There's no
00:16:11 way we can apply the same legal considerations to the two situations. And so we're hoping to see-
00:16:16 there were also some members of the panel that wanted to add unrealistic body image into the
00:16:21 category as well, like further complicating things. Sure. Misinformation comes up a lot,
00:16:25 right? And we all hate misinformation and we all disagree about who's putting it out. So
00:16:29 there's a lot of things that we might not like on the internet that can't be well treated by the
00:16:33 same law. So I don't want to kind of speak, put words in your mouth here. I mean, I've gotten the
00:16:39 sense that you've probably had, or your organization have probably had criticisms
00:16:42 against conservatives in the past,
00:16:44 but this has also kind of become
00:16:46 somewhat of a left-right issue, it seems like.
00:16:49 I don't think it should be.
00:16:51 I mean, we're a nonpartisan organization.
00:16:54 We're here for people's fundamental rights.
00:16:56 I do think you're right that in the last,
00:16:59 say, five to seven years, for various reasons,
00:17:02 people on the right side of the spectrum
00:17:03 have felt more motivated to speak up
00:17:06 for fundamental liberties.
00:17:07 But at the end of the day,
00:17:08 it all depends upon which end of the stick you're on, right?
00:17:12 And one of the points that we try to make when we're talking to the government, or to even the NDP, is that a lot of very marginalized groups can be very, very harmed by these very aggressive record story approaches, where it all sounds good on paper, but in reality, when you're an RCMP officer administrating some of this, you might victimize, you know, some of your traditional targets, folks like indigenous groups or other marginalized communities.
00:17:38 Yeah, I think you always have to, and I would hope people do, but I find often they don't, is look at how would my political opponents use this?
00:17:46 And if you'd be uncomfortable with giving the power to them, you shouldn't give the power to your political allies.
00:17:52 Well, hopefully we can see some progress on this, although I think we're past the point where minor tweaks are going to be the thing that fixes this here.
00:18:01 Where can people sign your petition?
00:18:04 Over at openmedia.org, we've got a new petition calling on the government to support the user content defending amendments and strike down the age verification one.
00:18:14 It's going to get a third vote at the Senate soon, and then it will go back to the House.
00:18:17 So we are hopeful that both of those changes can be made.
00:18:20 And although it's still going to be a pretty imperfect bill, it'll at least be less of a mess than it started as.
00:18:24 And I think your point earlier about following it even beyond that as the regulations are developed is an important one.
00:18:30 That is openmedia.org campaign's director, Matt Hatfield.
00:18:34 Thanks very much for your time, Matt.
00:18:36 Really appreciate it.
00:18:37 Thanks so much.
00:18:38 Yeah, this shouldn't be a left-right issue.
00:18:40 And I think that's actually a good evergreen position to take on most things,
00:18:45 which is if you're talking about giving the government a power or an authority in some way,
00:18:50 you have to say, how would I feel if someone who hated my very existence had that power?
00:18:57 I mean, we've talked about the Emergencies Act a lot on this show.
00:18:59 you have to look at the longer term implications of this. How would I feel if this were used against
00:19:04 someone like me? You have to look at censorship provisions through this sense. How would I like it
00:19:08 if someone had this power and could use it against me? And I think we're long past the point of being
00:19:15 able to say, just trust us, which is what the government says about a lot of its internet
00:19:21 regulations. And Stephen Gilbeau has probably been the worst messenger imaginable on C11,
00:19:28 because every time he speaks, he gives what is basically a different definition of what C11
00:19:35 actually does and who it affects and who it targets and user generated content. He's saying,
00:19:40 no, it's not going after what you post online. And then, okay, well, maybe it's going after. And now
00:19:45 if you make any money of it, you're an online publisher and it's, but it doesn't matter how
00:19:49 much. So all of a sudden you could have a multimillion dollar online publishing operation
00:19:53 like, oh, I don't know, Netflix, being treated the same way as some guy who just tries to make
00:19:59 a hundred bucks a year just by running some ads on his silly YouTube videos. And what the 0.81
00:20:05 government is claiming is happening here is that they're just trying to promote Canadian content.
00:20:12 They're just trying to give the guy from Toronto a little bit of a leg up over the guy from
00:20:16 Bucharest. Not to pick on YouTube streamers from Bucharest. I don't know if there are any
00:20:21 particularly good YouTube streamers from Bucharest I need to be following but now to be honest I'll
00:20:26 never know about them if C11 passes I'll never find out who the hottest guy not not the hottest
00:20:31 guy I mean like the trendiest guy in Bucharest but take from that what you will and all of this
00:20:37 is going to be harmful to Canadians because it takes away Canadians ability to navigate this
00:20:44 stuff for themselves and I go back to the stuff I started off the show talking about when we look
00:20:51 at the broader package of reforms here it's not just c11 it's also to some extent i mean it may
00:20:56 not be the biggest deal but c6 c18 which is the bill that forces twitter and facebook and google
00:21:04 to pay the toronto star and the globe and mail and perhaps global news to pay them
00:21:10 why because global news the toronto star and the globe and mail post their content voluntarily
00:21:16 on Facebook and upload it to YouTube and tweet about it.
00:21:20 Like, this is the most absurd thing ever.
00:21:23 So what the government is doing is trying to orchestrate
00:21:25 yet another bailout of legacy media.
00:21:28 But instead of actually using taxpayer money,
00:21:31 they're just looking to big tech companies
00:21:33 and extorting them, basically.
00:21:36 Extorting big tech companies to pay for a bailout
00:21:39 so that the liberals get to claim credit for saving journalism
00:21:43 without having to do the heavy lifting
00:21:45 because they don't have enough money to, I guess, indefinitely keep these things afloat.
00:21:50 But then it's the speech regulations.
00:21:53 And I've said numerous times that free speech is the hill to die on
00:21:56 because if you don't have free speech,
00:21:58 you can't actually debate anything of consequence in society
00:22:00 and deal with any of the other big challenges facing society.
00:22:04 If you look at the COVID era,
00:22:06 one of the biggest challenges to being able to push back
00:22:09 against the government's COVID restrictions
00:22:11 were actually attacks on free speech.
00:22:14 you couldn't debate vaccines you couldn't debate vaccine mandates without being accused of violating
00:22:20 medical misinformation and just imagine if all of these youtube bans and twitter bans and facebook
00:22:27 bans that were in place on so-called misinformation were actually state bans were actually coming from
00:22:35 government because that's what the government wants to do now as matt said they have not
00:22:40 proposed this in legislation, but they've talked about wanting to put forward takedown notices
00:22:46 so that if a YouTube or a Twitter or a Facebook or any of these companies has content that violates
00:22:54 the government's determination of what harmful content is, they have to zap it within 24 hours
00:23:01 or be fined up to like some ridiculous amount, like $25 million. That's what they're going to
00:23:08 have to deal with. So what's happened here is the government has tried to and may well succeed
00:23:15 in what I said in my tweet to Elon Musk is deputizing social media companies, deputizing
00:23:21 tech companies to do the government's dirty work. And this is not something that we should just
00:23:27 brush off and think, oh, well, it doesn't affect me. No, it affects everyone. It affects everyone.
00:23:33 And I'm so sick and tired whenever you talk about free speech and the importance of free speech and
00:23:38 the issues with governments arbitrarily redefining what hate speech is. You get people that say
00:23:43 the same tired criticism, which is, oh, well, I don't need to worry about being censored by hate
00:23:49 speech laws. What are you saying? And people that start conflating, as I said earlier, social
00:23:53 acceptability with legality. People that have no issue saying, because I don't like this form of
00:24:00 speech, I don't really care if it gets censored. And I'm so long past caring about that. You know,
00:24:08 it's very difficult to defend free speech in the abstract because you're going to be confronted
00:24:12 with individual examples and people are going to say, well, do you support that? Do you support
00:24:17 that? And I made a decision long ago that I wouldn't care about the substance of this speech
00:24:24 to care about whether it should be free or not. One example of this, and I may have told this
00:24:30 story before, years ago on my old radio show, I was talking about the Holocaust. Well, actually,
00:24:35 no, I was talking about campus free speech. And I said that universities are places where
00:24:40 academic debate, even if contentious ideas should be allowed. And I said, universities should
00:24:45 welcome that. They should relish that. And I gave just an obviously extreme example of Holocaust 0.99
00:24:51 denial. And I said, Holocaust denial is something that you should be legally allowed to debate.
00:24:56 I know the Holocaust happened. I know 6 million Jews were killed. I know it is one of the most 1.00
00:25:01 heinous displays, the most heinous display of anti-Semitism that we've ever seen in the world.
00:25:06 The answer to Holocaust denial is not censorship. The answer to Holocaust denial is exposing the 0.67
00:25:13 truth, exposing the truth, confronting Holocaust deniers with the truth. But I said, I do not
00:25:21 support censorship. So I believe that legally people should be allowed to debate the Holocaust. 0.92
00:25:26 And there was this hackish left-wing outlet called Press Progress that ran a story,
00:25:32 Andrew Lawton thinks the Holocaust is debatable, which is a gross misrepresentation because of
00:25:38 how people read that word debatable of what I was actually saying. But this is the era we live in.
00:25:45 This is the culture we live in.
00:25:47 You cannot defend someone's right to say something
00:25:51 without censors accusing you of defending
00:25:54 or agreeing with the thing itself.
00:25:58 And this is actually something that is so despicable.
00:26:04 So despicable.
00:26:05 And it's an inevitable byproduct, in my view,
00:26:08 of a culture in which we feel the need
00:26:10 to cancel those we disagree with
00:26:12 instead of just disagreeing with people we disagree with?
00:26:16 Like, why do we all need to agree?
00:26:18 Why does it need to be my position or censorship?
00:26:21 Why can we not just accept that there are some people
00:26:24 that say things that I want nothing to do with,
00:26:26 but they get to occupy their little corner of the world
00:26:28 and I get to live in the mainstream of civil discourse?
00:26:33 And a lot of these issues would be so much easier to manage
00:26:37 if people just had a fundamental human appreciation
00:26:41 for free speech, a fundamental human respect for free speech. Forget about law. It's not that the
00:26:47 law doesn't matter. It's not that constitutional rights don't matter. It's that that human desire
00:26:52 to be free and to have freedom and to respect freedom in others is more fundamental than
00:26:58 whatever the law says or whatever Justin Trudeau says. And I don't have an answer to this because
00:27:05 right now we have a government that clearly wants censorship that clearly supports online censorship
00:27:11 that clearly supports the ability for their government and for future governments to draw
00:27:17 this line and say that content on that side of the line is not allowed and must be removed from
00:27:24 the internet and content on this side of the line is fine and you can't look at what the government
00:27:30 has proposed without understanding that when the liberals and others that are predisposed
00:27:37 to online censorship use terms like hate speech, what they're actually talking about is not
00:27:41 what most Canadians think of when they hear hate speech, which is, you know, really vile,
00:27:47 violent rhetoric.
00:27:48 What they mean is content that they hate, speech that they hate.
00:27:54 Just remember, I know the clip has gotten a lot of play, but Justin Trudeau has oftentimes,
00:27:59 Well, let me take a step back here. He denied ever calling the unvaccinated names. When everyone saw that same clip, we played it on the show from the election campaign, where in French he said that the people protesting him were unvaccinated, they were misogynist, they were racist, they were extremists.
00:28:16 If Justin Trudeau views being unvaccinated as being extremist and racist and misogynistic,
00:28:25 if he believes that is extremist, what on earth would he support censoring
00:28:32 when it comes time to determining what hate speech is in the context of the Canadian Human Rights Act?
00:28:39 And the government can write whatever guidelines it wants to in law.
00:28:43 And they've tried to do this.
00:28:44 They've said, well, it's it's speech that is likely to foment detestation and vilification and to try to neutralize from the free speech concerns that I and others raise.
00:28:55 They say it's not just about offensive speech.
00:28:57 It's not just about humiliating speech.
00:28:59 And there are a few other examples there.
00:29:01 It's just this really extreme stuff.
00:29:04 But somehow they've still had to come up with a new definition that has a lower threshold than the hate speech definition that exists in the criminal code.
00:29:13 and why would they do that if not because they plan to shrink the bounds of what is legally
00:29:20 possible to debate what is legally possible to say and i don't know if you can look at this at all
00:29:26 and come away with the conclusion that there is not a war underway by the government
00:29:31 against online free speech and yes oppose c11 talk about c11 talk about how you reject this
00:29:39 idea that we need to mandate Canadian content absolutely have that discussion but you have to
00:29:44 look at the whole suite of things that the government is trying to do right now about
00:29:48 the internet and they're trying to dramatically expand regulation of the internet beyond I mean
00:29:54 Michael Geist who's one of the most foremost thinkers on this issue and scholars on this issue
00:29:59 has said this is the most anti-internet government in the world and I'd be hard-pressed to come up
00:30:05 with an example certainly among liberal western democracies we've got to end things there we will
00:30:10 be back next week with more of canada's most irreverent talk show but back on friday with
00:30:16 fake news friday alongside sue ann levy i believe is on deck this week so you won't want to miss
00:30:20 that we will talk to you soon folks thank you god bless and good day to you all listening to
00:30:26 the andrew martin show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
00:30:35 Thank you.