Rebel News Podcast - Scheer is letting Trudeau bring back Canada’s internet “hate speech” law — but we're fighting back!

00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. Today I talk about Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:00:03.720 I have a bit of experience in this, as you may know.

00:00:05.860 I was prosecuted on the Alberta equivalent of this law for 900 days

00:00:09.720 for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed a dozen years ago.

00:00:13.360 Well, Stephen Harper repealed that bill in the federal parliament in 2013, a great achievement.

00:00:19.460 Now Justin Trudeau wants to bring it back.

00:00:21.580 I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop Trudeau,

00:00:24.260 but Andrew Scheer seems to be going along with it.

00:00:28.100 That can't stand.

00:00:30.000 We have a show today. It's 100% on censorship. I hope you'll watch it.

00:00:33.480 Hey, before I get out of the way, can you please go to the rebel.media slash shows

00:00:38.460 and think about becoming a premium subscriber.

00:00:41.640 It's $8 a month, $80 for the whole year.

00:00:45.080 You get access to the TV version of this podcast. I think it's worth watching.

00:00:49.140 You get access to Sheila Gunn-Reed's show, David Menzies' show,

00:00:51.560 and your $8 a month. That helps keep the lights on here, folks.

00:00:55.640 All right, here's the podcast.

00:00:56.780 You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.

00:01:00.820 Tonight, Stephen Harper repealed the Section 13 Internet censorship law.

00:01:05.280 So why is Andrew Scheer letting Justin Trudeau revive it?

00:01:09.100 It's June 11th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:11.660 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:01:17.580 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:21.660 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it

00:01:25.160 is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:01:27.520 In 2013, Stephen Harper's Conservatives voted to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:01:40.380 That's the censorship provision that made it an offense to hurt someone's feelings.

00:01:44.980 Or actually, even worse, it made it an offense to potentially cause one person

00:01:49.660 to have hard feelings about another person.

00:01:51.440 The language really is that vague.

00:01:53.700 It really was a feelings crime, a thought crime, not even a word crime.

00:01:58.420 Here's the text of the now repealed Section 13.

00:02:01.780 It was illegal to publish anything, including on the Internet, that, quote,

00:02:06.840 is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.

00:02:10.660 So that created the counterfeit human right not to be offended,

00:02:15.560 which, of course, that's not a real thing.

00:02:18.180 What that really was was government power, the power to silence you,

00:02:22.680 masquerading as a human right.

00:02:24.920 That odious law was finally repealed in 2013,

00:02:28.680 but now Justin Trudeau's liberals are looking to bring it back.

00:02:32.040 They're studying this at Parliament's Justice Committee right now.

00:02:35.100 And to my horror, Andrew Scheer's conservatives haven't lifted a finger against it.

00:02:41.560 They just haven't.

00:02:43.260 They're not actively cheering it on, that I can see.

00:02:47.040 But they have made a team decision, a party-wide decision,

00:02:50.480 specifically not to champion freedom of speech.

00:02:54.820 I can't name a more important issue for conservatives, actually.

00:02:57.640 It's more important than taxes or immigration or fighting terrorism

00:03:02.300 or respecting our military.

00:03:03.660 It's more important than any trade deal, more important than criminal justice,

00:03:07.060 because if you don't have free speech,

00:03:09.620 you can't talk meaningfully about any of those other issues.

00:03:13.340 So it's so clear to me.

00:03:15.980 The liberal government, really, any government, it's not just liberals,

00:03:18.820 all politicians, they don't like their critics,

00:03:21.200 but the liberals in particular are seeking to shut down criticism of them

00:03:25.600 on key political issues, especially immigration, by the way.

00:03:28.860 They're looking to silence speech that isn't governed by our criminal code.

00:03:34.080 I'm fine with our criminal code, generally.

00:03:36.720 But they're looking to silence legitimate political criticism

00:03:39.940 under this hurt feelings law,

00:03:41.520 because it's easier to shut someone up than debating them.

00:03:44.420 Here's a mashup of Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan,

00:03:47.440 the immigration minister,

00:03:48.500 both of them personally attacking us here at The Rebel, for example,

00:03:53.060 reading word for word the same talking points,

00:03:54.800 claiming that we're fake news that ought to be condemned.

00:03:58.280 It is disappointing to see the conservatives

00:04:00.600 and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.

00:04:09.060 It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.

00:04:15.060 It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.

00:04:21.360 Now, normally, I'd be flattered by that.

00:04:23.100 But I have no problem with politicians bad-mouthing me, feelings mutual.

00:04:27.000 It's a sign that we at The Rebel are not bought and paid for,

00:04:30.960 like, say, the CBC, who seem to specialize in sending female reporters 0.97

00:04:35.660 on first-date-style walk-and-talks with Trudeau,

00:04:39.160 where they ask really tough questions like this.

00:04:41.700 Last book you've read or the book you're reading?

00:04:43.660 I just finished The Patch, which was Chris Turner's history of The Oil Patch.

00:04:56.300 But I'm also about to start the new Ken Fawlin,

00:05:01.020 the third book that is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth.

00:05:07.180 That's your nerdy side?

00:05:08.560 No, that's my...

00:05:11.060 Your sci-fi nerdy side.

00:05:12.080 No, no, it's not sci-fi.

00:05:13.540 It's just a sweeping historical epic, I'm sure, but I haven't started it yet.

00:05:18.240 What kind of music are you listening to right now, if you have time?

00:05:22.060 Or podcasts?

00:05:23.160 No, I don't.

00:05:24.320 I've tried.

00:05:25.040 I run regularly, and I've tried to do the podcast thing,

00:05:29.560 but it doesn't really say.

00:05:31.380 I don't like people talking in my ears when I'm trying to run.

00:05:33.800 I like to sort of vibe out.

00:05:35.960 Yeah, I'd rather be hated by Justin Trudeau than to be his concubine.

00:05:39.340 But the problem is that Trudeau isn't just arguing with us here.

00:05:44.140 He's not just condemning us here.

00:05:46.060 He wants to ban us.

00:05:48.140 He and his point person on the job, Karina Gould, have made it crystal clear they want to silence Trudeau's enemies.

00:05:54.780 Not to debate us.

00:05:56.020 This was first told to Facebook directly by Trudeau, to their chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg,

00:06:01.140 that if Facebook didn't silence critics like us in the run-up to the election, Trudeau would force them to.

00:06:07.240 Remember, he used that phrase, fake news.

00:06:10.080 That's what he calls anyone who disagrees with him.

00:06:11.820 And he's now demanding that social media companies comply with him.

00:06:15.140 Trudeau met with other censors in Paris recently.

00:06:17.860 Emmanuel Macron, the hated president of France, who's really at war with his own people.

00:06:22.380 And Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, who has been revealed recently to be beholden to Chinese interests

00:06:29.480 and is pursuing a very Chinese-style policy of government censorship.

00:06:33.860 So Trudeau and Macron and Ardern met behind closed doors in Paris with social media companies

00:06:40.360 to announce that they have persuaded most social media companies to crack down on their critics in the next election.

00:06:45.960 Now, that's deeply troubling.

00:06:47.200 We see purges of conservatives already from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.

00:06:50.300 But if you're purged from those companies, you're silenced, but you're still free.

00:06:57.340 You don't go to jail.

00:06:58.420 You're not fined.

00:06:59.620 You're not dragged through a court system for years.

00:07:01.960 And that extra edge, though, that punitive side, that embarrassing, time-consuming, grinding,

00:07:09.500 psychological warfare side of Section 13, the prosecutions, that is what appeals to Trudeau and his liberal party.

00:07:19.160 They don't deserve the name liberal anymore.

00:07:20.860 By the way, it comes from the Latin word for freedom.

00:07:22.880 That's where Section 13 comes in.

00:07:24.580 The left is generally happy when a conservative voice is silenced online.

00:07:31.240 Sometimes leftists go the extra mile.

00:07:33.280 They want them out of a job, or they boycott a company, or they harass someone's employer.

00:07:37.760 But Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act would go further than any of this.

00:07:42.260 It would expose any conservative voice to tens of thousands of dollars in fines and legal costs.

00:07:49.060 And the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, it's a kangaroo court run not by real judges, but by non-judge activists.

00:07:56.700 They have tremendous power to do weird and strange things that a normal court couldn't.

00:08:01.840 I remember when I was prosecuted by the Alberta version of the Canadian Human Rights Commission,

00:08:07.220 that Alberta version literally demanded, in writing, that I not only pay cash to a radical Muslim activist who was offended by me,

00:08:16.140 but the Human Rights Commission actually demanded that I give him two full pages in the magazine that I published back then,

00:08:23.680 unedited, for him to say literally whatever he wanted to say about me.

00:08:27.960 I'm serious. That's actually what the Human Rights Commission demanded from me,

00:08:31.360 that I give up two pages of my magazine to some Sharia law thug from Pakistan. 1.00

00:08:35.960 No normal court would even think of that. It's so weird.

00:08:39.560 But Human Rights Commissions aren't real courts.

00:08:42.600 That's what this is about. It's not even about censoring people now.

00:08:45.100 The social media companies do a pretty good job of censoring for Trudeau already.

00:08:49.220 This is about humiliating conservatives, deterring conservatives, demonizing them, costing them money.

00:08:56.280 It's really about vengeance for Trudeau.

00:08:58.240 I won't get into all the procedural reasons. It's built that way.

00:09:01.720 But a few examples include the fact that, unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court,

00:09:06.700 in a human rights kangaroo court, the complainer doesn't have to pay for his own lawyer.

00:09:11.100 Unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court, if you're wrongfully sued and you win,

00:09:16.840 you don't get your costs paid by the false accuser.

00:09:19.880 Unlike in a criminal lawsuit in a real court, you don't have to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:09:24.280 Unlike a criminal lawsuit in a real court, you have no legal aid help if you're poor.

00:09:29.060 It's the worst of all worlds, these kangaroo courts. 0.75

00:09:31.440 It's exactly what Justin Trudeau would love.

00:09:33.780 I mean, think about it.

00:09:34.520 He tried to let his criminal friends like SNC-Lavalin off the hook.

00:09:38.720 And he tried to convict innocent people like Vice Admiral Mark Norman.

00:09:42.260 He couldn't get away with that in a real court.

00:09:44.520 That's why I call these human rights commissions a kangaroo court.

00:09:47.920 That's one reason why Harper shut down Section 13.

00:09:51.380 And it's a big reason why hucksters like Trudeau like him.

00:09:55.200 And the very offense itself, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.

00:09:59.860 Give me one more reason on that.

00:10:01.440 Likely to.

00:10:02.200 So maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't.

00:10:04.520 But it's all in the future, so you can't even say, I didn't do it.

00:10:07.240 No one said you did.

00:10:08.180 You don't actually have to have done anything wrong to be guilty of it.

00:10:12.180 Just maybe something in the future could happen, but you could be charged.

00:10:15.800 Now, expose a person to hatred or contempt.

00:10:18.120 So by writing something on the internet, or making a video, or drawing a cartoon, or sharing

00:10:22.540 something on Facebook, you could expose someone to the human feeling of hate.

00:10:27.440 Oh, that minute, when I was young and I saw the movie Schindler's List about the Holocaust,

00:10:32.100 it gave me hard feelings towards Germany, or at least some Germans, or at least the Nazis,

00:10:37.280 does that make Schindler's List hate speech?

00:10:40.280 Of course not.

00:10:42.180 But is that movie likely to, as in maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, expose a person

00:10:49.760 to hatred or contempt?

00:10:50.880 Well, of course.

00:10:51.780 Of course it could.

00:10:52.860 That's an old example.

00:10:54.720 How about a new example?

00:10:55.680 There's a new movie out there right now called The Hate You Give.

00:10:58.840 The title sort of gives it away, doesn't it?

00:11:01.060 If you watch that movie and have some hard feelings, whoever made the movie is guilty

00:11:05.380 of section 13.

00:11:06.720 Emotions are a natural part of the human personality.

00:11:10.280 We're all a little bit different in that.

00:11:11.920 As in, in fact, I think that's the point of art and all communications, fiction, nonfiction,

00:11:17.940 to cause an emotional response as part of being human.

00:11:20.240 And not all emotions are comedies and laughter.

00:11:23.280 Sometimes there are tragedies.

00:11:24.480 Sometimes there are calls to action.

00:11:26.380 Sometimes there are memorials.

00:11:27.920 Watch the movie Killing Fields.

00:11:29.360 Watch Apocalypse Now.

00:11:30.460 Watch American Sniper.

00:11:31.780 I watched that and I hated Al-Qaeda even more.

00:11:34.060 How about you?

00:11:36.020 Could a powerful piece of art or political commentary or even just a joke expose a person

00:11:42.140 to feelings of hatred or contempt by another person?

00:11:44.700 Of course it could.

00:11:45.720 In fact, without a doubt, since there's no way to measure hurt feelings or being offended,

00:11:50.240 I should point out that truth is not a defense to section 13.

00:11:54.380 You can say something true that makes a person have hard feelings.

00:11:57.580 In fact, the truth is much more enraging than fiction, isn't it?

00:12:00.680 Fair comment is irrelevant.

00:12:02.480 Religious belief is irrelevant. 1.00

00:12:04.040 Simply being mistaken is irrelevant.

00:12:05.860 The only test is did you or didn't you say something that might in the future cause

00:12:09.860 someone to have hard feelings about someone else?

00:12:12.680 So of course this law had a 100% conviction rate for a quarter of a century on the books.

00:12:17.320 There literally is no defense to it.

00:12:19.080 Every one of us is guilty of this law every single day unless we literally talk to no

00:12:25.420 other human being ever.

00:12:26.880 Every one of us does something that could maybe cause offense in the future.

00:12:30.440 Of course, we're all guilty.

00:12:31.640 It's just who's charged.

00:12:33.360 So of course the liberals want this back.

00:12:35.240 And of course the lawyers and the bureaucrats want it back.

00:12:38.080 Free money, free bureaucracy building, lots of power, free way to stick it to their enemies list.

00:12:43.060 But what about Andrew Scheer?

00:12:44.380 You know, when he ran for the leadership of the conservatives and he eked out that razor

00:12:49.400 thin win on the final ballot.

00:12:52.340 Back then, Scheer promised to fight for free speech, especially on campus, by the way.

00:12:55.940 He sounded really good back then.

00:12:57.220 But, you know, since then he's literally deleted that policy from his website.

00:13:01.100 You can't find it.

00:13:02.340 And he's gone wobbly out of fear of the media mob.

00:13:06.120 Fear that he'll be demonized too.

00:13:08.000 During recent hearings on hate speech at the Liberal-run Justice Committee, Michael Cooper,

00:13:13.960 a conservative MP from St. Albert, dared to push back at the hateful assertion by a Muslim

00:13:18.700 lobbyist that conservatives were to blame for a mass murder in New Zealand.

00:13:23.780 Now, Cooper pushed back saying the terrorist in New Zealand himself denied that he was a

00:13:28.280 conservative, in fact said he admired communist China.

00:13:30.980 That's true.

00:13:31.640 And it was a rebuttal to a false accusation.

00:13:33.560 Mr. Suri, I take great umbrage with your defamatory comments to try to link conservatism

00:13:43.100 with violent and extremist attacks.

00:13:47.840 They have no foundation, they're defamatory, and they diminish your credibility as a witness.

00:13:54.440 But after the Liberals all claimed that they were offended, it's easy to say, isn't it?

00:13:59.880 Andrew Scheer literally fired Cooper from the committee, saying it was inappropriate.

00:14:05.120 Well, just say it, Andrew.

00:14:08.800 Michael Cooper's words were likely to cause hatred or contempt.

00:14:11.960 I mean, could be, right?

00:14:14.640 And worse, and weirdly, Andrew Scheer ordered the remaining conservatives on the committee

00:14:20.960 to vote to turn off the video cameras when Mark Stein, Lindsay Shepard, and John Robson

00:14:28.160 testified at that committee.

00:14:30.360 Understand how nuts that is.

00:14:31.620 The conservatives invited those public figures to testify.

00:14:35.220 They invited them to come to Parliament, presumably to testify for free speech, and they showed up.

00:14:40.500 They took time out of their days.

00:14:41.520 And then, when they were all sitting in Parliament about to give their testimony,

00:14:46.600 the conservative MPs literally voted to turn off the cameras on them.

00:14:51.600 So the world could not see them arguing for free speech.

00:14:55.780 According to Andrew Lawton, our friend who was right there,

00:14:59.100 the order to have these conservatives vote against the cameras came from Scheer himself,

00:15:04.020 to literally vote to turn off the cameras on their own witnesses they had invited.

00:15:09.320 What is going on here?

00:15:11.520 Why did Scheer's point person on the free speech battle

00:15:14.640 literally cheer for Karina Gould in committee earlier this year,

00:15:19.220 complimenting her on how sharp she looked,

00:15:22.040 and telling her she should go harder and faster on the censorship?

00:15:26.100 Minister, always lovely to see you.

00:15:27.380 I love that necklace, by the way.

00:15:28.460 That's just beautiful.

00:15:29.460 So I'm asking you, please, if you are ready in regards to the social media platform,

00:15:35.240 willing to make the hard decisions, to take the hard actions,

00:15:38.300 and not six months from now, but now, please.

00:15:41.520 What is going on here?

00:15:42.780 Why is not a single conservative MP allowed to even talk about this issue?

00:15:48.420 Why have they all been whipped?

00:15:50.640 Why are they not just being passive, but actually voting to suppress free speech witnesses

00:15:56.640 and calling for Karina Gould to go faster and harder on censorship?

00:16:00.820 What is going on here?

00:16:01.720 How is this possibly conservative?

00:16:05.460 How does this possibly help the party politically?

00:16:08.020 Forget about doing right and wrong.

00:16:09.520 How does this help them win?

00:16:11.900 Don't they have any sense of self-preservation, even knowing that all the people censored will be conservatives, of course?

00:16:17.660 Does Andrew Scheer think that if he is very, very quiet, the censorship tiger will devour him last?

00:16:23.620 What is going on?

00:16:24.740 How did the party of Stephen Harper, which voted to repeal Section 13, unanimously they voted to repeal Section 13,

00:16:34.260 how is that party now cheering or at least standing quietly for Trudeau to revive Section 13?

00:16:40.660 Well, I guess because there was one man who did not vote to repeal Section 13.

00:16:47.120 Andrew Scheer himself, who was Speaker of the House that day and thus didn't vote.

00:16:51.640 What an irony.

00:16:52.660 He was the man who, as Speaker, controls everyone else's freedom of speech in Parliament.

00:16:57.660 The man who was effectively the judge of the Court of Parliament, who could rule a word unparliamentary,

00:17:03.580 who could demand an MP retract a statement.

00:17:05.840 Maybe he fell in love with the power to regulate speech.

00:17:09.420 He was called the speaker, after all.

00:17:12.060 If he himself could tell a prime minister or a cabinet minister to sit down and shut up and retract a word,

00:17:16.940 I can imagine that would feel pretty powerful.

00:17:20.520 I don't know.

00:17:21.100 That's a theory.

00:17:21.860 Can you come up with a better explanation?

00:17:23.780 Maybe there's a simple theory.

00:17:26.480 That defending free speech isn't cool now like it was back in 2013.

00:17:33.160 With the mean girls in the media party, that is the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, 1.00

00:17:37.900 the new junk websites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and Vice, they all hate free speech now for some reason.

00:17:44.920 Well, I know the reason.

00:17:46.060 Because they know conservatives use free speech to get around the leftist mainstream media.

00:17:50.760 So if Andrew Scheer were to stand up for free speech today, all those media reporters would attack him hard.

00:17:57.860 Much harder than Stephen Harper had to deal with back in 2013.

00:18:01.420 In fact, back then, most media, at least grudgingly, supported Harper's move for free speech.

00:18:06.860 Today, the same media party would love to censor any conservative because the media had become politically radicalized.

00:18:14.520 But also out of their own business interests, they would love to silence online competitors, even us.

00:18:22.920 So what about you?

00:18:23.900 What about you, dear viewer?

00:18:25.060 I know that most people who watch my shows are conservative party members.

00:18:29.160 Some are Maxime Bernier supporters.

00:18:31.380 I would ask you to sign a petition to Justin Trudeau to have him stop Section 13.

00:18:37.820 But I know that, of course, Trudeau wouldn't listen.

00:18:40.340 He'd throw it in the garbage.

00:18:40.960 He doesn't listen to anyone.

00:18:41.780 He loves censorship.

00:18:43.240 He will bring it to law if he can.

00:18:45.340 But what if I asked you to sign a petition not to the prime minister or to Karina Gould,

00:18:51.140 but to Andrew Scheer himself, to ask him to take off the whip from his own MPs,

00:18:58.820 to ask him to let his own MPs be true conservatives, or at least to speak their conscience,

00:19:04.700 to allow them to stand up for freedom of speech.

00:19:06.700 I'm not going to ask Andrew Scheer to let Michael Cooper back in.

00:19:09.960 We know he won't.

00:19:11.100 He has too much pride invested in that weird firing.

00:19:15.240 But to stop Section 13 itself, a great effort by countless grassroots conservatives for years

00:19:21.500 finally convinced Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party to repeal it.

00:19:25.820 It took years.

00:19:27.820 And that repeal has stood for six years, and we're all the better for it.

00:19:31.480 Don't let Stephen Harper's achievement be undone.

00:19:35.520 Don't go quietly along with Justin Trudeau and Karina Gould.

00:19:38.760 And don't, for God's sake, be an active participant in it by voting to turn off the cameras on Mark Stein and Lindsay Shepard and John Robson.

00:19:47.220 So I've drafted a petition, but it's to Andrew Scheer.

00:19:51.960 Look, I know he can't stop Section 13 on his own.

00:19:54.000 He lacks the tools to do that.

00:19:55.100 But if he and his MPs make a proper fuss about it and engage the remaining true journalists left in this country,

00:20:01.780 and perhaps engage the larger civil society and use all the tools in their toolbox,

00:20:06.080 like the remaining conservatives in the Senate, and use whatever rules of Parliament,

00:20:09.680 maybe, just maybe, this awful decision by Trudeau to ram through censorship on the eve of the election could be stopped

00:20:16.100 or even slowed down just to delay it till after the election, it could be done.

00:20:22.180 I mean, Trudeau could still force it through for sure.

00:20:24.020 He's got an absolute majority.

00:20:24.960 But if Andrew Scheer made a big enough fuss, I think he could make this too costly for Trudeau.

00:20:31.200 And Trudeau would abandon it, as he abandons many things that get tough to do.

00:20:34.920 I think Trudeau could back down.

00:20:36.460 I really believe that.

00:20:37.300 But it won't happen if Andrew Scheer won't do it, and he's not doing it.

00:20:42.060 The NDP loves Section 13.

00:20:43.800 This is an emergency now.

00:20:45.660 All of those freedoms will be washed away.

00:20:48.520 Stephen Harper's achievement will be wiped out.

00:20:51.260 So please sign our petition right now to Andrew Scheer.

00:20:54.700 It's simple.

00:20:55.360 You can see it at StopSection13.com.

00:20:58.320 It simply says,

00:21:00.840 We call upon Andrew Scheer to stand up for freedom of speech

00:21:04.100 by opposing the revival of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:21:09.120 He promised he'd be for free speech when he ran for conservative leader.

00:21:14.560 The Conservative Party was unanimously for free speech under Stephen Harper.

00:21:19.140 The country needs free speech.

00:21:21.060 We need an opposition to oppose censorship.

00:21:23.080 It's easy for him to do.

00:21:25.680 If he's worried about what the country thinks, he'll be in good stead.

00:21:30.280 Canadians like free speech.

00:21:31.240 But these days, I'm worried that Andrew Scheer cares more about what the media party thinks

00:21:36.960 than what Canadians think.

00:21:39.040 Please sign our petition at StopSection13.com.

00:21:41.760 And I will personally deliver it to Andrew Scheer myself.

00:21:46.260 Go to StopSection13.com.

00:22:02.140 Welcome back, my friends.

00:22:03.200 I want to show you a clip spoken by Karina Gould,

00:22:06.320 the extremist democratic institutions minister.

00:22:09.840 I call her extremist, although looking at her, she seems young and charming,

00:22:13.620 and she doesn't raise her voice or shout or swear.

00:22:16.180 She's not like old yeller, Catherine McKenna, the global warming minister.

00:22:21.880 She's very calm on the outside, and that may be boring even.

00:22:26.300 And that may be one reason why she gets away with things that few other politicians could. 1.00

00:22:31.300 I find it deeply disturbing.

00:22:32.860 I'm going to show you a Q&A by a reporter in Parliament, en français,

00:22:37.260 but we've translated it.

00:22:38.520 We've got a translation that will play for you.

00:22:42.400 I want to ask you a question.

00:22:43.720 If this had been spoken by Doug Ford at the provincial level, Jason Kenney at the provincial level,

00:22:50.740 or by Stephen Harper at the federal level,

00:22:53.700 a conservative cabinet minister saying they would consider turning off Twitter or Facebook

00:23:02.860 or any other social media if they didn't censor the enemies of the government,

00:23:07.380 I put it to you, you would have heard this clip before now hundreds of times.

00:23:12.900 This clip is actually almost a week old.

00:23:14.980 Here, without further ado, here is Justin Trudeau's cabinet minister, Karina Gould,

00:23:19.620 musing about literally turning off Twitter like North Korea and China have done.

00:23:25.880 Take a look.

00:23:26.860 There was an expert that said in a committee last week,

00:23:29.400 I don't know about cutting the signal, but he said, well, do we have to shut the tap

00:23:37.020 and cut off these large organizations as long as they're not responding to requests?

00:23:45.260 Is this possible?

00:23:46.460 Well, that's an interesting example.

00:23:48.600 The government is looking at all the different possibilities.

00:23:52.960 As I said, on many different occasions, we're taking a whole-of-government approach

00:23:59.700 with regards to digital platforms in general.

00:24:03.520 You heard the question.

00:24:05.420 There were witnesses who suggested cutting the signal, cutting them off.

00:24:09.480 Would you consider that?

00:24:10.440 We are considering all the different possibilities.

00:24:13.440 Could you imagine that?

00:24:15.180 The arrogance, the chutzpah.

00:24:17.660 Yes, you can imagine that because she's a Trudeau cabinet minister.

00:24:20.600 But can you imagine the docility and the passivity and more than that,

00:24:26.080 the just sheer lack of curiosity from the media party that greeted that?

00:24:30.860 That was not some secret recording.

00:24:33.060 That was in the foyer of the House of Commons.

00:24:35.660 Yet the only other journalist I know who has dug into this matter

00:24:39.420 is our friend Andrew Lawton of TNC.news, who joins us now via Skype.

00:24:45.400 Andrew, it's great to see you again.

00:24:46.940 Whenever we talk, it's about bad news, though.

00:24:49.520 Yes, it is.

00:24:50.600 And, you know, there's a really shameful part of this, Ezra.

00:24:53.700 There's, I think, a two-pronged tragedy here.

00:24:56.220 Number one is that a minister of the crown would dare to say that.

00:24:59.780 And there's another clip from the same press conference

00:25:02.380 where she says it's something to think about.

00:25:05.040 And the other tragedy here is that, as you mentioned, that's almost a week old.

00:25:09.420 And there has been effectively no English-language mainstream media coverage of this.

00:25:15.140 There was one story in Le Journal de Montréal, which is where I learned about it.

00:25:19.760 There's been a column in the National Post.

00:25:22.140 But as far as actual reporting, I have not seen anything from the mainstream press on what is,

00:25:27.140 in effect, the democratic institutions minister, with the emphasis on the institutions and not the democratic,

00:25:33.860 saying quite literally that her government would consider shutting down private companies

00:25:39.100 that aren't even Canadian companies if they don't comply with what the federal government's doing.

00:25:44.260 And that a minister would say that is reprehensible and that the media would not hold her feet to the fire for it

00:25:49.700 is all the more shameful.

00:25:51.380 Andrew, I'm so glad that you corrected me to point out the Journal de Montréal,

00:25:54.920 which is a very large newspaper in Quebec owned by Pierre-Carl Pelletot, actually,

00:25:59.920 the former boss of the Sun News Network.

00:26:01.360 I'm so glad that you corrected me because, of course, they did break the news.

00:26:05.660 That's also how I learned about it.

00:26:07.520 So it's not completely dead.

00:26:09.980 But the fact that you and I and French is not either of our mother's tongues,

00:26:15.400 the fact that we had to learn about it from a French tabloid in Montreal is embarrassing to the media party.

00:26:23.500 What do you think of my question that I posed earlier, Andrew, that if, I don't know,

00:26:30.000 if Stephen Harper were prime minister and a Jason Kenney, a Pierre Polyev, a John Baird,

00:26:37.380 or some cabinet minister of the day would have said,

00:26:40.200 yeah, I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Twitter.

00:26:42.340 Yeah, I'm thinking of going full North Korean and shutting them down if they don't do my... 1.00

00:26:46.080 They're already following the criminal code.

00:26:48.280 They're already liable for, you know, other crimes on the books.

00:26:53.180 The fact that Karina Gould is demanding they censor politics and she's threatening to pull the plug,

00:27:00.140 I swear that is Iran stuff, North Korea stuff. 0.89

00:27:04.260 And like you say, just the slightest murmur in English Canada, nothing more.

00:27:10.340 No, and I think that there's an important point here.

00:27:12.920 And, you know, one observation I've made in the past is that what the media accuses Donald Trump of doing,

00:27:18.960 Justin Trudeau's government has actually been doing.

00:27:21.280 When you look at the SNC-Lavalin affair, firing the attorney general,

00:27:25.640 I mean, these things that really the media is in hysterics and has been for years about Trump doing,

00:27:30.940 the Trudeau government does with relative impunity.

00:27:33.900 And here we have, and I don't use this word lightly,

00:27:36.960 and I want to make very clear that I say this word because of the gravity of the word,

00:27:42.380 but this is a fascist proposition for the government to threaten to shut down private enterprise

00:27:48.820 for noncompliance with a government restriction on speech.

00:27:53.040 And again, I know the media calls everyone fascist and, you know, Nazis and the new Hitlers and all of that.

00:27:58.980 And I'm not using this with the same level of looseness that they do.

00:28:03.700 I am talking about what is at its core a fascist principle for government to want to shut down social media companies.

00:28:11.440 And by the way, Ezra, this is not, for my part anyway, a defense of social media companies.

00:28:16.460 I find that they themselves are quite reprehensible in the way they engage with free speech.

00:28:21.900 But I have to stand up for that freedom here.

00:28:24.640 So it's not that I'm sympathizing broadly with social media companies.

00:28:29.120 It's that the Canadians who use those platforms to communicate are the ones that are actually being punished here,

00:28:35.420 not the companies themselves.

00:28:37.160 If government shuts down Twitter, it's not just taking away Twitter's speech.

00:28:41.300 It's taking away the speech of anyone who uses Twitter.

00:28:44.100 Yeah, you're so right.

00:28:45.520 And also the right of people to hear someone.

00:28:48.660 There's the right to speak, but there's also the right to hear.

00:28:51.560 I mean, for example, here at The Rebel, we have almost 200,000 followers on our Rebel Twitter account.

00:28:57.820 I have almost the same.

00:28:59.660 So I feel like I have a freedom of speech.

00:29:02.040 But those, I don't know, 180,000 people or whatever it is, surely they have the right to hear from us.

00:29:08.520 It's a mutually consenting adults point of view.

00:29:13.660 Normally, liberals are all for pro-choice for consenting adults.

00:29:17.460 And yet, Karina Gould, you know what?

00:29:19.940 She made me think of something.

00:29:20.900 I just had a flashback.

00:29:22.560 Andrew, I remember a dozen years ago when I was interrogated by a bureaucrat in the province of Alberta.

00:29:29.260 I had just forgotten her name, thank goodness.

00:29:32.940 On behalf of the Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

00:29:36.640 And what struck me about my meeting with her, which I put on YouTube a decade ago,

00:29:42.180 was how banal it was, how boring it was, how bureaucratic it was.

00:29:46.100 In fact, I think that the top thing on her mind was it was a Friday afternoon and she just wanted to get out of the office.

00:29:53.180 It was not in a police dungeon with one light bulb hanging and someone shouting at me.

00:29:59.560 It was so banal.

00:30:02.560 And I think you look at Karina Gould and she's nice enough and boring and doesn't raise her voice. 0.92

00:30:10.240 Because that's how censorship comes in, not with a jackboot.

00:30:15.080 But in the year 2019, it comes in friendly, bureaucratic buzzwords and, quote, in partnership with social media companies.

00:30:23.340 So she's pressing Twitter behind the scenes.

00:30:25.500 They're not yielding to her, so she's getting mad.

00:30:29.140 But imagine what YouTube, Facebook, Google have already agreed to behind the scenes all politely.

00:30:36.900 Yes, and the core of that is the Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity Online.

00:30:43.100 And I don't want to make your team work here, but I would love if they could put this up in post.

00:30:47.760 Because there's one line of this that I think is very important in the preamble.

00:30:52.260 And the preamble talks about how social media plays a valuable role in healthy and resilient democracy.

00:30:57.900 But it also says this.

00:30:59.520 However, these platforms have also been used to spread disinformation in an attempt to undermine free and fair elections and core democratic institutions and aggravate existing societal tensions.

00:31:12.780 And of those three things here, to undermine free and fair elections, to undermine core democratic institutions, and then that third, to aggravate existing societal tensions.

00:31:23.940 This is one of these terms that, like Islamophobia in M103, is entirely defined by its lack of definition here.

00:31:32.780 Because what the media will call a societal tension, what the government will call a societal attention, we have no idea.

00:31:40.280 It could be a spirited debate about immigration.

00:31:43.400 It could be a spirited debate about free speech.

00:31:46.300 It could be a spirited debate about anything that I view as part of a democracy that the government views as aggravating a societal tension.

00:31:55.420 And the challenge is that the very premise of this exercise in wanting to get social media companies to be partners, as you say,

00:32:03.620 is not just to prevent Russia from buying a million dollars of Facebook ads.

00:32:09.220 It is in the very text the government is putting forward to social media companies to try to deal with what is effectively summarized as simply disagreement,

00:32:19.740 which is the very cornerstone of elections.

00:32:22.460 Because I'd say that liberal versus conservative versus NDP, that's an existing societal tension.

00:32:27.780 So why are we trying to pretend those are things that social media companies should be not fostering, but shutting down?

00:32:35.680 Yeah, and that's exactly right.

00:32:37.760 I mean, the other day I saw some NDP member of parliament saying that there should no longer be any divisive witnesses called to parliament.

00:32:46.120 You know, the word division, that's actually a technical way of calling for a vote in parliament.

00:32:51.060 I call for a division.

00:32:52.420 I mean, in the olden days, MPs would stand up and go exit the parliament to different lobbies and literally be counted.

00:33:02.280 They would divide like the Red Sea before Moses. 0.73

00:33:05.640 Now the votes are done electronically or by voice vote.

00:33:09.340 We call it calling for a division.

00:33:11.240 We accept that there are societal tensions.

00:33:13.620 We accept that there are divisions.

00:33:15.560 And that the best way of dealing with them is through free speech and a democracy.

00:33:19.680 If they're trying to make it so you can't have societal tension, you can't change human nature.

00:33:25.980 You can't change group nature.

00:33:27.840 And if you're driving it underground, if you're banning it, it will express itself in non-peaceful ways.

00:33:33.780 I think this is deeply, deeply anti, anti, well, it misunderstands human nature and democratic nature.

00:33:42.880 Divisions are okay.

00:33:44.240 They're natural and you have to let them express themselves peacefully and orderly or they'll express themselves violently as they do in places around the world where free speech is banned.

00:33:53.860 I don't know.

00:33:54.200 This just seems like a misunderstanding of what democracy is all about.

00:33:57.660 Well, and even if we can all say that there have been problems from polarization, which I agree, I think society is very polarized, I would take polarization 100 times out of 100 if the alternative is state-mandated, state-enforced unanimity.

00:34:14.080 And this is the challenge here is that you have to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.

00:34:20.340 And in this case, it's far, far better to have the disease if the disease is polarization and the cure is censorship.

00:34:28.220 Well, polarization implies that we have a deeply divided public.

00:34:31.920 There are some issues that's going to be polar.

00:34:33.460 I mean, yes, no, on, off.

00:34:35.600 Abortion, I suppose there is a middle ground on that, but that's an example of an issue that by nature will be polarizing.

00:34:41.400 You know, you read the word societal tensions, and we've done a show on that digital charter before, but we will certainly come back to it.

00:34:48.860 You and I have been in the United Kingdom together, reporting together on the, you were one of the real reporters, and I know you're coming back again with us on Tommy Robinson's trial.

00:34:57.240 They use something there called an antisocial behavior or an antisocial order.

00:35:03.880 Police can give you a ticket.

00:35:05.360 It's basically a dispersal order.

00:35:07.240 They just say, here's a piece of paper.

00:35:09.260 It deems you to be engaging in any sort of antisocial behavior, even if you're by yourself.

00:35:15.280 And if you don't immediately leave, you will be arrested for not leaving.

00:35:20.900 And this was originally brought in to deal with football or soccer riots decades ago, but now they're used for any politics.

00:35:28.720 I saw them used in Tommy Robinson's political campaign last month.

00:35:32.640 That antisocial behavior, antisocial order is such a catch-all.

00:35:37.900 You could say the same thing on Twitter.

00:35:39.520 Oh, he's being antisocial.

00:35:40.980 Delete him.

00:35:41.600 What does that mean?

00:35:42.580 Criticizing the government?

00:35:43.780 We have the right to do that.

00:35:45.340 I'm worried about the vagueness of the language here, Andrew.

00:35:48.080 Yes, I'm worried about the vagueness of the language, but at its core, I also think that there is no amendment to the language that would make it justifiable for what Karina Gould is saying is on the table to shut down social media companies to happen.

00:36:04.300 And, I mean, there's a practical issue here in that these companies do not exist in Canada in many ways.

00:36:11.000 I mean, Google has offices here.

00:36:13.020 Twitter and Facebook have very small teams here.

00:36:15.340 But, really, they exist outside of the country's borders.

00:36:18.220 So, what she's actually talking about, I would presume, is not just going to Twitter and flipping a switch, but going to Rogers, to Telus, to Bell, to all of these other companies and say, you need to flip the switch so that Twitter is not accessible on your ISPs.

00:36:34.640 And now, all of a sudden, we're not just talking about slapping one company on the wrist.

00:36:38.840 We're talking about an entire approach where government is the gatekeeper of the Internet, which is supposed to be the exact opposite of what the Internet is to Canadians.

00:36:49.220 Isn't that interesting?

00:36:50.620 You know, I should tell you, just yesterday, I received an email from Twitter that there had been a complaint about one of my tweets criticizing a terrorist group called Hamas.

00:37:02.560 It was a very quick tweet.

00:37:03.520 Twitter had an investigation and cleared me.

00:37:07.860 But that's not the first time it's happened.

00:37:09.720 I have been notified in the past by Twitter that Pakistan, the government of Pakistan, has objected to some of my tweets.

00:37:18.480 Now, some of them were so old, I didn't even care.

00:37:20.980 Like, obviously, someone's looking through almost 10 years of my tweets.

00:37:25.440 But, I mean, that's the kind of company we'll be in.

00:37:29.460 Pakistan is literally blocking some of my tweets from their country.

00:37:33.520 Pakistan tried to, I presume it was Pakistan, or maybe it was Hamas itself, tried to get me to delete a tweet.

00:37:39.500 That really is the company that Karina Gould would have us keep.

00:37:44.900 And that's not a place I think most Canadians would go to.

00:37:48.240 Last question for you, Andrew.

00:37:49.560 Is there a reason why the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, who would go absolutely ape if these words had been said by a Harper cabinet minister?

00:38:03.880 Why are they being so quiet here?

00:38:07.680 Where's the Canadian Civil Liberties Association?

00:38:10.040 Where's Penn Canada?

00:38:11.900 Where's the Canadian Association of Journalists?

00:38:13.960 Where's the Canadian Journalists for Freedom of Expression?

00:38:16.340 Why are they all like they have a laryngectomy or something?

00:38:20.800 You know, I'm sympathetic to some of those third party groups because the media has not actually done its part in making Canadians aware that this issue is going on.

00:38:32.020 So I think that some of these groups where I agree there have been some tenuous relationships with free speech, they can't comment on something they don't know about.

00:38:43.120 So I give them the benefit of the doubt for a period of time.

00:38:46.280 Now we're talking about it.

00:38:47.740 New media has exploded with it.

00:38:49.420 I think people need to either wake up or be accepting of a willful disregard here.

00:38:55.280 Look, you and I both know there's $600 million on the line to mainstream media.

00:38:59.620 And we've talked about the possibility that that will influence coverage.

00:39:03.760 This may be a practical example of that in action.

00:39:06.840 I mean, when you mentioned your experience with having the Pakistani government reporting tweets, I mean, everyone in Canada has been for years talking about the threat of outsourcing Canadian jobs to Pakistan.

00:39:19.840 And now we have Pakistan outsourcing its job of censorship to the Canadian government.

00:39:24.740 So apparently this is now we're finally on the receiving end of outsourcing, but not the type of job we should want any part of.

00:39:30.740 The media needs to realize that it is the one that's going to suffer, because if the government is licensing itself to be able to shut down social media companies because it doesn't like what is on those companies in election times, it's not a big jump to get to the government being able to shut down the National Post website, shut down the rebel, shut down TNC.news.

00:39:54.800 And that is not what we want of Canada.

00:39:57.280 So you have to look 20 yards, 40 yards, 80 yards down the line here.

00:40:02.100 You can't just look at what's right in front of you.

00:40:04.140 Yeah.

00:40:04.460 You know, you've been very generous with your time today, Andrew.

00:40:06.840 I just want to show something that happened over the weekend.

00:40:09.440 The New York Times did a huge story.

00:40:13.060 And this is the online version, but it's actually on the front page of the print edition on websites they hate.

00:40:19.720 And you can see some of our alumni there.

00:40:22.420 You can see Lauren Southern there, Gavin McInnes, Faith Goldie.

00:40:26.420 In the top right, second from the right, you can see Candace Malcolm of TNC.news.

00:40:32.460 You can see Jordan Peterson on there.

00:40:36.600 Basically, every way is Tommy Robinson on there.

00:40:39.940 Everyone the New York Times doesn't like politically.

00:40:43.380 They're trying to demonize for being on YouTube.

00:40:47.000 So you've got this strange mixture of legacy media like the New York Times hating their online competitors.

00:40:54.100 You've got politicians like Karina Gould hating their critics. 0.92

00:40:58.460 And you've got Silicon Valley tech companies that, on the one hand, want to control their media.

00:41:04.180 But on the other hand, there's a lot of social justice warriors within them.

00:41:07.640 I think we're in for a perfect storm.

00:41:09.600 And in the next six months, we're going to see if Canada can withstand that.

00:41:13.240 Because those are three forces that would censor people like you and me.

00:41:16.560 I just wanted to show that story in the New York Times.

00:41:20.100 I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, other than we just all got to keep doing what we're doing.

00:41:24.680 Yeah, so just jealousy that I wasn't on the grid.

00:41:27.520 That's another discussion for another day.

00:41:30.040 Yeah.

00:41:30.440 All right, Andrew, great to see you.

00:41:31.760 Thanks so much.

00:41:32.380 And we'll keep watching TNC.news for your good work over there.

00:41:35.920 Thanks a lot.

00:41:36.540 All right.

00:41:37.580 Well, that's our friend Andrew Lawton.

00:41:38.980 And he's going to be going back to the U.K. with me on July 4th and 5th to cover Tommy Robinson's contempt trial.

00:41:44.740 Yeah, it's going back to court again.

00:41:46.340 Stay with us.

00:41:46.980 More ahead on The Rebel.

00:41:47.620 Hey, welcome back.

00:41:59.840 What did you think of the show today?

00:42:02.320 I don't understand why Andrew Scheer isn't grabbing on to this Section 13 fight.

00:42:06.860 I think it's an easy win for him.

00:42:08.340 I think Stephen Harper showed that the opposition to free speech is a lot weaker than it looks if you just listen to the media party.

00:42:16.360 There's a few self-interested lawyers and extremist identity groups that'll squawk, but they always do.

00:42:21.820 Ordinary people say, yeah, free speech, that's Canadian.

00:42:24.300 A lot of newcomers to Canada from different backgrounds who Trudeau might say, oh, well, they don't want free speech. 0.97

00:42:29.620 No, they came to Canada, they want free speech.

00:42:31.700 We just went through this six years ago.

00:42:33.260 It shouldn't be hard.

00:42:34.560 The conservative base is unanimously for free speech.

00:42:37.000 The targets of censorship are overwhelmingly conservative.

00:42:40.280 This should be a winner.

00:42:41.820 But I think Andrew Scheer is too terrified of the media party.

00:42:44.420 In other words, he's more afraid of the media party than he's afraid of you.

00:42:47.780 And that's why I'd ask you to go to stopsection13.com.

00:42:51.740 Sign the petition.

00:42:52.400 I'll deliver it to him.

00:42:53.680 Or else the kind of censorship you saw Karina Gould say, I can't believe no conservative's gone after Karina Gould.

00:43:00.320 Come on.

00:43:01.060 That is such easy shooting.

00:43:02.960 And if you're trying to shoot down government ideas that are cockamamie, it's good morally, it's good politically.

00:43:10.740 I don't understand what's going on here.

00:43:12.240 We've got to give Andrew Scheer proof that Canadians care about it.

00:43:17.160 Go to stopsection13.com.

00:43:19.100 All right.

00:43:19.880 That's our show for today.

00:43:20.800 Until tomorrow.

00:43:21.820 On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.

00:43:25.240 Keep fighting for freedom while you still can.

00:43:27.040 Keep fighting for freedom while you're talking.

00:43:48.320 For more on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.

Rebel News Podcast - June 12, 2019

Scheer is letting Trudeau bring back Canada’s internet “hate speech” law — but we're fighting back!

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