Bill C-9 wasn’t about fighting hate.
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
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Toxicity
1
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Hate speech
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Summary
On today's show, we are talking about C9, the government's so-called Combating Hate Act. To give us the details and a bit more into it, we bring on Robin Baber, the Member of Parliament for York Centre, to talk about the bill.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprint. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your
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host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton-Caworthalakes, with new content for
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you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe,
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and share this program, because on today's show, we are talking about C9, the Government's so-called
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Combating Hate Act. To give us the details and a bit more into it, we bring on Robin Baber,
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the Member of Parliament for York Centre. Thanks for coming on the show.
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All right. C9 has become law. So maybe you can tell us what C9 is and we'll get into some of
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For sure. Government brought that as its first piece of justice legislation. So it tells you
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where their priorities are. Instead of fixing bail, instead of fixing sentencing and the revolving
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door we have in in canada's courts and jails uh they bring this anti-hate bill where basically
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they do the following number one they create a new hate motivated offense so if an offense is
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motivated by hatred then that would be an additional standalone criminal offense the
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concern is the offense would apply not just to criminal offenses but to any statute prescribed
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by parliament so if you have a civil offense like an offense against a labor relations offense
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or an elections canada offense and it is motivated by hate then that otherwise civil conduct could
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It was the Supreme Court in a decision 40 years ago
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You need an emotion that is intense and extreme,
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of an identifiable individual or group of people.
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but they came up with a much diluted definition.
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They removed the requirement for an intense and extreme emotion
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So either extreme, sorry, either vilification or detestation.
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And thankfully, the liberals accepted my amendment to return to the original language of hatred.
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And the standard articulated by the Supreme Court still remains.
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Very quickly, they codified, they clarified two additional offenses.
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In response to concerns from the Jewish community, supposedly, I'm a member of the Jewish community.
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I don't support the bill, nor do I believe that it actually does anything meaningful.
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they have added additional offenses for obstruction and intimidation of entry to places.
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So sometimes people protest around synagogues or Jewish schools.
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It's already an offense to obstruct me from entering a synagogue.
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And it's already an offense to intimidate someone from doing something that they have a lawful right to do.
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Contrary to Section 453, and that's basically, there was, they wanted to eliminate the requirement for the consent of the Attorney General to bring hate-related prosecutions.
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You need consent of the Attorney General so people don't sparingly exercise that.
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And just when it seemed that it's not going to pass, because it's a bad bill and not required,
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they did a deal with the Bloc Québécois to give the Bloc what they wanted,
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which is probably what some of our viewers want to focus the most.
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And that's the repeal of what is known as the religious speech defense.
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Yeah, no, that's great. Actually, that's exactly where I wanted you to go,
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because we have a clip here. Let's keep up one.
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This is Liberal MP Leslie Church kind of talking about what you just ended on.
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National Council of Canadian Muslims were deeply concerned that the bill could undermine civil liberties
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and disproportionately impact already marginalized communities.
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The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops writing in a letter to the Prime Minister,
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removal of this provision risk creating uncertainty for faith communities, clergy, educators,
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and others who may fear that the expression of traditional moral or doctrinal teachings
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These aren't just conservatives who are saying this.
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Again, if it has never successfully been used, why do what you did?
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Well, I hope that the message that we are sending to all groups and all Canadians right now
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is captured by an amendment that we put in for greater certainty.
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Religious teachings, texts, prayers, scripture are protected.
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I mean, the whole heart of this bill is about ensuring that Canadians can pray safely and in peace and proudly at the synagogue, temple, church of their choice.
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So when the Supreme Court considered hatred, the ability to charge and convict someone of hate speech, they looked at the proposed legislation at the time and they said, look, you need some sort of a democratic safeguard in order to not criminalize what should otherwise be free speech.
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So the criminal code codifies various defenses to hate speech.
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Truth, if something's said in the public interest or in an academic discussion, and it's in good faith.
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And the other one is quoting a religious text or expressing a religious opinion if it's done in good faith.
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And it's because these safeguards explicitly exist in the criminal code that the Supreme Court said certain forms of speech, hate speech, might be criminal because we have these safeguards.
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The Bloc Québécois insisted that the religious defense should be eliminated.
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they've done that by citing an islamic cleric who wished death upon all the enemies of gaza
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and they said because he's an islamic cleric essentially
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that he wasn't charged on the basis of the fact that he could avail himself defend himself with
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this religious exemption. Nonsense. The religious defense only applies if the religious opinion
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or the text is communicated in good faith. And that means that you don't genuinely mean any harm.
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So if you wish for someone to be extinct or death, then you don't say that in good faith.
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And the other element is the religious defense does not apply to incitement to violence.
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If you meet the intent requirement and you genuinely incite people to violence, then you cannot cloak yourself, defend yourself with a religious defense.
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And a lot of this already exists in the criminal code now.
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And so, yeah, the police decided not to charge this cleric, Cherkawi, because in order for you to be charged with incitement, the incitement has to be against an identifiable group of people.
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And the court said enemies of Gaza, sorry, and the prosecution thought that enemies of Gaza is not identifiable enough.
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The fear is that, look, we still have charter protection to religious speech, thankfully.
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But the question is how this is going to be, the elimination of the defense, how is this going to be interpreted?
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And all of this came into focus because the chair of the Justice Committee at the time, Mark Miller, who is now the Heritage Minister,
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he basically said well how can you have a situation that you have some verses in the
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bible that are not hateful they in and of themselves have to be hateful
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presumably referring to people's lifestyles presumably referring to certain ancient
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understandings of how life used to be and this is where we the conservatives raised the flag
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and said, wait a minute, you can't tell me that if I just quote a religious text,
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that that would result in a criminal proceeding or a criminal offense,
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And that's, I think, where a lot of this confusion and issue came from,
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if you just quote a text that we believe isn't in itself helpful,
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uh hateful then that would amount to a criminal offense that is not how hate speech works
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you have a fundamental right to refer to religious text and if you don't incite to violence
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and if you don't intend to utter hate speech then any suggestion that quoting a religious text
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would be criminal, is wrong at law, deeply offensive, and dangerous.
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Isn't it dangerous too in this country what the government tends to do with C9 is to take away
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a defense? Like that is so extremely rare that I can think of when the last time a government said
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no no you can't use this at defense if this goes to trial. Right on and it's not just because it's
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both wrong vis-a-vis our democracy. We should strive towards greater free speech rights,
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more right for speech, not less rights to speech. But it's also very dangerous vis-a-vis the law,
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because as I mentioned, part of the reason for the existence of the defense is so hate speech
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remains criminal. The offense of hate speech is only constitutional because you have these
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to get senators aware of what they were about to do. But what we'll say in this clip, those pieces
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of mail did not make it to those senators. This is our friend and colleague Andrew Lawton here
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exposing that play cut to. Over 240,000 people from across the country sent postcards to their
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senators telling them how much they oppose Bill C-9. You can see the scale of them here. I believe
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there are 133 boxes of these postcards in here. Each one has about 1,600 sent by Canadians across
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the country. But here's the thing, they haven't actually been sorted to the senators that they're
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supposed to go to. So far, they haven't made their way to the senators, and I don't know if they will.
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That means they're trying to look away. They don't want to understand how many Canadians
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are vehemently opposed to Bill C-9 and what the government is trying to do.
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So was the government that desperate for this to pass that they needed the help of the bloc,
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which proposed this amendment that got us to this point we're at now,
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Were we not working with the Liberals to try to make that bill, C-9,
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in its original form better so that we could get multi-party support?
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We were able to come to consensus that we'll fix the definition of hatred,
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they actually entertained a prospect of including my private member's bill 257 to criminalize the
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willful promotion of terrorism. If you're promoting Hamas or Hezbollah, then that would
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be a criminal offense because that in and of itself is incitement to violence.
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There was an option to fix this, but instead they decided to ram it unilaterally. And the
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block was going to give it to them provided they gave the block the elimination of the religious
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defense and they actually u-turned on it they flip-flopped on it three times initially when
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the justice minister came out with it the prime minister's office said he did this without our
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approval and then they try to say well maybe we will rethink it because they heard from a lot of
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communities but i want to talk about the clip we just saw this is astonishing because we are served
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by Canada Post and the bureaucracy inside the House of Commons,
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and they're supposed to be neutral, not partisan.
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clearly, intentionally, the postcards opposing C9
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and the mail did not make its way to its destination?
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It might be a violation of our privileges, parliamentarians.
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senators have privilege, can't withhold their mail. It's not even legal for you to detain someone
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else's mail if it belongs to someone else. How is it that something like that has happened
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in the Senate is unthinkable. I hope there is a serious investigation into this.
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So now that it's made its way through, what's the next step? What can Canadians do?
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You and the team are doing a fantastic job pushing back. And the Liberals have given
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you lots to work with. It's unbelievable some of the pieces of legislation that they are pushing
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through that encroach, infringe on civil liberties. It's absolutely incredible. So what's the next
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steps in regards to C9? I know it's law, but what can they do? We'll see. We'll see if you'll have
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an ambitious prosecutor who's very liberally minded who thinks that certain passages of the Bible
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bill should be criminal. I don't suspect that we're going to see some sort of a fundamental
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landscape in terms of religious speech in Canada. But I do anticipate that there is a possibility
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that a very motivated, very left-wing prosecutor will decide a test case. And of course, there
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will be litigation. All of these bills, thankfully, we still have the courts. I believe in the rule
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of law i know that there's been some questions in the judiciary especially in the last few years
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as um we do get a lot of decisions that seem to be more on the political side than
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on the legal side i say this with respect to all courts but there will be litigation
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to work this through hopefully we will not need to defend folks that articulate religious texts
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or a religious opinion, or quote, a religious text in good faith.
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It feels like sometimes for those on the opposing side, for conservatives especially,
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or even just the kind of the libertarians as well,
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it just seems that Canada seems to be, with this liberal government over the last 10 years,
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Censorship legislation after censorship legislation,
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controlling what you can see, watch, hear on the internet.
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Like one, you know, the media not being able to put their, especially local news on certain platforms.
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The Liberals started with C11, which allows the CRTC to appoint folks to not necessarily regulate, but figure out the algorithms of what you see online.
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Then they went to C18, which compels social media companies to pay media and news companies for their content.
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What that resulted in is the elimination of news from Facebook and Instagram, from Meta, and de facto censorship.
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and then they tried online harms the initial version of justin trudeau's online harms where
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they bring they brought back old section 13 that basically if someone's offended at something you
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said online they can take you to the human rights tribunal thankfully that didn't pass
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and then comes along mark carney he campaigns on building canada on on energy on restoring
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normal trade with the u.s today is the last day of our spring session and a year later
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he accomplished none of what he promised and the only thing he did try and partially accomplished
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and an erosion of speech typically you only have to look at history to know that the guys that try
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to police police speech and censor are typically the bad guys they don't need to be afraid of truth
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i have a unique perspective on this jamie as someone who was born in the soviet union
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where policing speech was the government's most important commandment so you don't speak out
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against the government or understand that there is an alternative to communism to to communist
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hell um here in the west we're blessed with rights and we're blessed with the charter even
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though some folks might disagree as to where it's going or how it is applied but the right to free
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speech is the holiest right of them all because through free speech we defend all other rights
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and all other people and if a government is intent on seizing rights on limiting or usurping rights
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And you're right, the solution to a tough topic
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And I love what you're doing for civil liberties,
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not just for the party, but for your country as well.
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As you may know, the guests always get the last word
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on making Canada the freest country in the world.
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Roman Boehmer, Member of Parliament for York Centre.
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