Juno News - Trudeau’s censorship crackdown could get a lot worse

00:00:00.000 I want to bring things back home a bit more though, not that what we were talking about

00:00:13.720 doesn't have a very significant Canadian context, but you've heard me for weeks now talking about

00:00:19.160 Bill C-63, which is the Liberal government's so-called Online Harms Act, a bill that among

00:00:24.720 other things will introduce a new category of so-called hate speech and crack down on anyone

00:00:30.600 who dares to utter it online, which effectively means the government is going to be the arbiter

00:00:35.420 of what you can and can't say. And as we've seen, they are wildly inconsistent in when and how

00:00:41.300 they flex this power. Now, I've often said that to understand how bad things are here, we need to

00:00:46.980 take a look around the world and see where things are worse. And the UK has been one of the worst

00:00:53.240 examples of this. You have police knocking on people's doors. If they misgender someone on

00:00:58.520 Twitter, they have this pervasive non-crime hate incident reporting system where you can

00:01:04.080 do nothing illegal, but you still have a police record because you've perpetrated a non-crime

00:01:09.360 hate incident. And I thought things were pretty bad in the UK, but I believe Ireland has come 1.00

00:01:15.040 out with the Trump card. I'm not sure if you followed this or not, but Ireland has a new

00:01:19.480 law purporting to rein in hate speech online. You have a couple of politicians that say Ireland's

00:01:25.200 approach should actually be a model for all of Europe. And if that happens, I actually don't

00:01:30.360 think it's going to be all that long before we see that brought to Canada. So I wanted to actually

00:01:36.980 delve into what's happening in Ireland in a little bit of detail here, because this bill is called

00:01:42.820 the incitement to violence or hatred and hate offenses bill. And it is one of the most Orwellian

00:01:50.660 and draconian attempts at this so-called hate speech discussion I've ever seen. Ben Scallon has

00:01:56.340 been on top of this. He is a senior or the senior political correspondent at GRIPT, which is a fantastic

00:02:02.340 independent media organization in Ireland. And he joins me now. Ben, it's good to talk to you. Thanks

00:02:06.760 for coming on today. Very good to talk to you today, Andrew. How are things? Good. Very well,

00:02:11.400 thank you. Although in both of our countries, not exactly great on the free speech front. So

00:02:15.700 for Canadians who have not paid attention to this at all, what's like the basic primer on what this

00:02:22.340 bill is and why it's been raising so many alarms? So in essence, if I had to describe why the Irish 0.94

00:02:29.600 hate speech bill is so controversial is it's the incredible vagueness of the text of the legislation

00:02:37.360 to the point where the very serious crime of, you know, convicting somebody of a hate offense can be

00:02:44.960 defined as almost anything. So I'll give you an example. For example, the text doesn't refer to hatred

00:02:52.000 with any kind of specific definition. It says that hatred means hatred on the basis of X, Y, and Z

00:02:59.240 characteristics, which is obviously a circular definition. So how is that to be defined? I guess

00:03:05.000 it's up to the courts or the police or whoever happens to be offended by your remarks at the time.

00:03:12.760 So people have been saying this is so open ended, it could potentially catch anyone and everyone in

00:03:18.440 its dragnet if we're making a very benign statement. Another example would be the fact that

00:03:23.880 according to the legislation, it's seeking to protect genders other than that of male or

00:03:29.120 female. But it doesn't enumerate what those are. And when I asked our Taoiseach, which is like the

00:03:34.240 Irish Prime Minister, how many genders are there in your view? Because previously, the leader of our 1.00

00:03:39.360 Senate said that there were about nine genders. So that could be about nine. They don't even have the 1.00

00:03:44.720 definitive list. Exactly. It's a ballpark figure, you know, thereabouts. And so I asked how many genders

00:03:50.800 are there and what is covered by this legislation. And he said, well, we don't have an official position on

00:03:56.240 that. And I'm sure that'll all be figured out during the debates. And they haven't been still

00:03:59.520 that was months ago. So that should kind of give you just a sense of why people are so concerned

00:04:05.360 about this kind of thing. They're trying to protect genders they can't even define against hatred that 1.00

00:04:10.080 they can't define. And it seems like the entire implementation of this legislation would just be

00:04:16.400 totally up in the air. And how do you stay on the right side of a law that is so vague and nebulous?

00:04:21.520 That's effectively the main concern that people have with it. There are a lot of people that are

00:04:26.400 not familiar with the evolution of Irish politics over the last, I don't know, half a century that are

00:04:31.840 probably perplexed by Ireland's descent into wokeness when this used to be this, you know, traditional

00:04:37.280 Catholic society and country. I mean, where did things all go so wrong? Because I mean, even like you

00:04:42.560 look at refugee policy in Ireland, for example, and this has been a very, very strange decline in a lovely country.

00:04:51.760 I think there's a few factors going on. I mean, of course, as you say, Ireland has always been a

00:04:56.240 very historically deeply Catholic conservative country. There's the kind of old trope of Catholic

00:05:01.840 families with, you know, 50 kids running around and an icon of the Virgin Mary on the wall. And

00:05:08.000 that's sort of the image that most people have had of Ireland for most of this country's existence.

00:05:13.760 But I think obviously things like the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church did enormous damage and hurt

00:05:21.760 trust with a lot of people. And so that hurt religiosity and mass attendance. And so I think

00:05:28.720 in our haste to escape the church and to try and bury that part of our past because of all the scandals and

00:05:37.920 controversies that came out of that, I think people have overcompensated and gone too much the other

00:05:42.880 way. I think also NGOs have played a big role in the liberalization of society. I don't know how

00:05:50.160 many people know this, but Ireland is a country of only about five million people, the Republic of

00:05:55.680 Ireland anyway. And yet we have about 30,000 different NGO organizations, not even employees, but

00:06:03.440 different groups. And these groups are heavily state funded, most of them. In fact, some of them,

00:06:09.200 they receive 96% of their funding from the government. So it's a strange kind of non-governmental

00:06:15.440 organization that's almost entirely reliant on state funding, but there you go. So these groups are

00:06:21.600 there mainly to promote LGBT rights or immigrant rights or women's rights or whatever it might be.

00:06:31.120 But in many cases, that leads to problems because if you're an organization that's set up to fight

00:06:38.400 the boogeyman of racism, let's say, for example, the problem is Ireland isn't that racist of a country.

00:06:43.840 We're actually a very tolerant country. And so you're out of the job in this, in the same way,

00:06:48.480 if you don't have leaky pipes, then you don't need a plumber. If you don't have a racist society,

00:06:52.480 then you don't need professional anti-racist campaigners. And so these groups have had to

00:06:57.600 try and manufacture the idea that Ireland is this horrendous place where women are treated as 0.69

00:07:04.160 second-class citizens and gay people are seriously oppressed and everyone's a racist when that's not

00:07:10.400 the case, but they have to do that in order to perpetuate their existence. And so we have this

00:07:14.880 kind of multi-billion euro NGO board conglomerate that exercises a lot of power over our discourse

00:07:22.560 and our politics. And I think that also has played a big role in the liberalization of this country.

00:07:27.440 Well, and to bring it back to the hate speech bill, those groups you just mentioned are the ones

00:07:31.280 that have skin in the game under these sorts of regimes, because they're the ones that typically

00:07:36.880 will systematize and weaponize these complaints processes where you're going to have one of these

00:07:41.360 NGOs just trolling Twitter for hours and hours every day finding, oh, this person misgendered someone.

00:07:47.200 And from what I've read, that could actually be a violation of this law.

00:07:50.720 Well, the justice minister has said that it won't. I asked her, can she guarantee that nobody will be

00:07:57.120 convicted for misgendering? And she says, oh, absolutely. That'll never happen. That's not

00:08:01.200 what the bill is intending to do. Whether she's correct or not, whether people believe her is

00:08:05.840 up to them. I won't, I won't weigh in on that. That's what she's claimed. We've seen how these

00:08:09.360 laws have been implemented in other jurisdictions, but she would probably say, oh, those are different

00:08:13.680 pieces of legislation and we're going to do it properly and yada, yada.

00:08:16.800 But the defense is basically just trust us. You just have to trust that the government won't abuse

00:08:20.960 this power. Effectively. Yeah. And, and I think as well, um, you know, one of the interesting things

00:08:27.680 about it, you said that it's in these NGOs interest to try and promote this. The government did a public

00:08:34.480 consultation. I think in North America, you guys might call it a comment period where this was

00:08:39.760 several years ago. They floated the idea of hate speech laws and they said, hey, you know, Joe public,

00:08:44.880 we want to know what you think, weigh in with your thoughts. And they received thousands of responses

00:08:50.560 from individuals and from groups. And then very shortly afterwards, they came out and they said,

00:08:55.600 you know, we we've received the feedback and now we're going to be going ahead with this legislation.

00:09:00.000 Well, I actually, in a journalistic capacity, read through every single one of the responses,

00:09:06.640 thousands of them. It took me hours and hours to do. And at the end of this research, I found that

00:09:11.680 73% of individuals had said that they didn't want it. It was, they were negative responses saying,

00:09:18.320 don't do this. Uh, the, the overwhelming consensus was mostly, of course, if somebody is engaging in

00:09:24.640 violent rhetoric where they're calling for the public to attack an individual or a group

00:09:29.600 or race or something like that, of course, that should be illegal. And that already is illegal. 0.92

00:09:33.520 You know, in Simon, the violence has never been covered under free speech. That's clearly not

00:09:37.840 what we mean when we say free speech. And so that's already done. But other than that,

00:09:43.280 if somebody is just merely expressing an offensive opinion that hurts somebody's feelings,

00:09:47.440 tough luck, we all get offended. Sometimes that's not something that the government should be

00:09:50.640 legislating in. That was the general sentiment of the responses. And yes, the government went ahead

00:09:55.920 with it anyway, despite the fact that one of the groups they cited, they said, oh, we got some

00:10:00.880 positive responses. It was from these state funded NGOs. So effectively, the people that you pay,

00:10:07.200 that's like me saying, I'm the most handsome man in Ireland, because that's what my granny says,

00:10:11.440 you know, it's not really the most persuasive of sources you're using there, that you're appealing to

00:10:17.040 people who you pay their salaries and fund them and keep them in existence. And lo and behold,

00:10:22.560 they just so happen to agree with you and your policy agenda. Amazing how that works.

00:10:26.800 I mentioned in the intro, Sinead Gibney, who I think is the she's running as the MEP, I think it's 0.90

00:10:33.120 the Social Democrats. And she is saying that she wants to basically export this to all of Europe.

00:10:38.800 And I think it would probably be an easy sell to do that.

00:10:41.840 Sinead Gibney, Ph.D.: Yeah, I think I think that's she said when I was interviewing her earlier

00:10:47.280 in the week that she would be willing to support any legislation similar to the hate speech bill at

00:10:53.360 a European wide level. And we already have something like that the Digital Services Act,

00:10:57.600 which many people will be familiar with.

00:10:59.360 Sinead Gibney, Ph.D.: Well, and that was the model of what Canadian government

00:11:02.080 officials were kind of using, which when I heard them say they were going to look to Europe for best

00:11:06.000 practices, I was like, Oh, please don't.

00:11:07.440 Sinead Gibney, Ph.D.: Yeah, that's that's not what you want to hear. Definitely with

00:11:11.520 the current state of European politics, where the amount of people who are willing to argue against

00:11:18.560 some of these policies on principle are few and far between. That's a big thing that I think is

00:11:23.520 missing from this debate as well, is that even some of the politicians who will speak out against

00:11:28.720 the legislation will speak out against its practicalities. They'll say that, you know,

00:11:34.160 it'll be very hard to implement. And logistically, I don't think it'll work. So on that basis,

00:11:40.320 I'm opposing it. And I'm thinking how about it's bad because it's wrong to censor people in general.

00:11:44.560 You know, maybe maybe we should start talking about even if you can get the wording exactly right and

00:11:50.000 hammer out this beautiful piece of legislation that covered all your bases. Maybe maybe we still

00:11:56.240 shouldn't do it even under those circumstances, because it's actually wrong to put people in jail for

00:12:01.200 their opinions, even when their opinions are not views that you or I would necessarily find palatable.

00:12:07.360 But that doesn't seem to come up during any of this discussion.

00:12:10.400 So obviously, Irish people, as you mentioned, were against this when it was floated to them,

00:12:16.080 but I haven't seen mass outrage in the more recent months. There have been there were some protests,

00:12:22.720 but have people just generally gone along with it? Or do they just not care enough? Why has there not

00:12:27.280 been or has there been maybe I'm wrong? Why has there not been a major pushback to this?

00:12:31.040 There has been a major pushback. And the reason we know that is because several government politicians,

00:12:37.200 some of them who are veterans who have been around for years have said in our Senate, basically that

00:12:42.720 they've received more correspondence about the hate speech bill than any other issue or piece of

00:12:47.760 legislation in their political career. So it's obviously something that people are really

00:12:51.760 incensed and energized about. And it hasn't been mentioned so much in the last couple of months,

00:12:57.120 only because it's being supplanted by other controversies like immigration. We have a huge

00:13:02.400 immigration crisis at the minute in this country and a massive influx of asylum seekers. We have 10 1.00

00:13:07.920 cities popping up in the capital city because there's nowhere to put some of these individuals

00:13:12.960 who are arriving and there's more arriving every day. We had a couple of progressive referendums there a

00:13:18.560 couple of weeks ago, which were defeated. The government side of that debate was defeated

00:13:23.280 comprehensively. So there's been other chaotic things happening that may have taken the attention

00:13:29.840 away from the hate speech bill, but the government have not pursued it, which I think is sort of an

00:13:35.920 indication that they know they're losing momentum on it. They meant to pass it last summer. They didn't

00:13:41.120 do that. Then they said, oh, we'll pass it after the summer. They didn't do that. And then they said,

00:13:44.800 oh, we'll pass it by the end of the year. And we're now in March and still no sign of it. So

00:13:49.040 they keep kicking the can down the road, hoping the pressure will alleviate. But I think if they

00:13:53.520 tried to sneak it through, people might have something to say about that, especially with

00:13:57.280 upcoming elections later in the year. Well, let's hope they will keep

00:14:01.280 kicking and kicking and kicking and eventually it'll just be lost forever. Ben Scallon with

00:14:06.320 Gript. Great to have you on and demystifying this for those of us across the Atlantic. Thank you so much.

00:14:10.960 Thank you so much. Great to be here. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:14:15.760 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - March 23, 2024

Trudeau’s censorship crackdown could get a lot worse

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