Juno News - Trudeau doubles down on tackling ＂online hate speech＂

00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau talking about getting tough on hate speech, getting tough on misinformation,

00:00:11.180 yet again discussing the issue once again at an international gathering. Sounds nice

00:00:17.580 at first. Who likes hate speech? Who likes misinformation? No one. Sounds rosy. Why can't

00:00:22.840 we all agree with it? Hold on a second. No, the devil is in the details, as a lot of non-partisan

00:00:28.000 experts have been warning. This is not the first time Justin Trudeau has been going on about this.

00:00:33.020 This has become something of an obsession for the liberals, obsessing over the idea that everywhere

00:00:38.180 we look in the online sphere, there's these awful things going on, and we've got to do more. We've

00:00:43.960 got to bring in new laws and new initiatives and funding for this and that to do away with all of

00:00:49.580 this. Action must happen. Something must be done. Prior to the most recent election, you had Justice

00:00:55.460 Minister David Lamedi talking about this stuff. You had former Heritage Minister Stephen Guilbeau

00:01:00.440 talking about it, saying a lot of things that shocked a lot of people, saying that public servants

00:01:05.840 cannot be criticized, and we've got to put an end to all of that. What's going on there? And he was

00:01:10.400 putting forward legislation that you had a lot of non-partisan experts stepping forward and going,

00:01:15.440 this is internet censorship laws. We don't want this. And yet they were doing it all under the guise

00:01:20.380 of, oh, we've just got to clean up that mean stuff on that internet that nobody really supports,

00:01:24.360 of course, so we've got to do away with it. You know, there's an old joke out there. What's hate

00:01:28.820 speech? Well, that's speech I hate. You know, if there's something that you dislike, there's something

00:01:33.820 that, well, you hate, you can say, well, that's hate speech, so, you know, let's do away with it.

00:01:37.800 Let's regulate it away. Uh-oh. That's a slippery slope. Now, you might say, Fury, what's the big deal?

00:01:44.020 Because there's going to be tightly defined legal parameters, technical parameters, defining

00:01:48.500 exactly what can and can't be written or said or what have you, so they'll figure it out. They'll

00:01:53.920 sort it all out. Well, we've actually been doing that in Canada over the decades, and there's been

00:01:58.040 very rigorous conversations about all of that, and there actually already are things that you cannot

00:02:03.380 actually say, or at least if you say them, be prepared to suffer the legal consequences. For

00:02:08.980 instance, you cannot make serious threats to people, and people are regularly charged for this sort of

00:02:15.080 stuff. They go through the legal system because they've made these threats. You can't libel someone.

00:02:19.260 You can't defame someone. If that has happened to you, you have legal recourse, and again, people have

00:02:24.700 faced legal repercussions for this, or if there's stuff online that is defaming them, there's orders

00:02:29.780 for it to be taken down, and so on. So, there's already a legal framework around this. What exactly

00:02:35.180 has so seized the liberals that they must obsess over this issue? People are saying mean things on the

00:02:40.840 internet that we don't like, and more must be done. Well, you've got to say what are the details,

00:02:46.760 because the devil can be in the details on these things, and as we saw with Stephen Guilbault's

00:02:50.940 legislation there, lots of concerns that it did not pass the smell test. So, there you go. The liberals

00:02:57.220 are at it again, and you've got to be very cautious, and you've got to say what exactly is in the fine print.

Juno News - November 13, 2021