The Critical Compass Podcast - November 16, 2025


＂Canada Will Be a POLICE STATE By Christmas＂ - John Carpay on the Risks of Bill C-2, C-8, & C-9

Topics
bill-c2-c8-c9-cyber-security-act
Mentioned
Bill C-63 David Suzuki Bill C9 Charlie Angus Britons
Bruce Pardy： No Matter the Obstacles on the Road to Alberta Independence - Carry On! Alberta's Constitutional Path to Independence w⧸John Carpay of the JCCF

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

146.02

Word count

1,954

Sentence count

91


Summary

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

Bill C2, C8, C9, C11, C12, C15, C16, C17, C19, C20, C21, and C21 are all pieces of legislation that have been introduced in Canada over the past few years. They were originally introduced in order to counter the growing problem of anti-Canadian online hate speech, but they ve taken a turn for the worst.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Canada will be a police state by Christmas if Parliament passes bills C2, C8, and C9 in current form, along with the reintroduction of the Online Harms Act and the prior passage of the Online Streaming Act.
00:00:17.340 You get those five pieces of legislation together, and we're going to be locking up or arresting thousands of people like what's happening now in the United Kingdom, where if you have a salty or vociferously worded tweet denouncing immigration policies or something politically incorrect, you can get arrested, or almost as bad as you can get a policeman knocking on your door to give you a warning.
00:00:44.700 So yeah, that seems like that's the direction that we're going, especially if there's examples of how this kind of legislation can be overused in the UK. Could you maybe break down what does each of these bills focus on, and then what's the problematic sections that we're actually concerned about?
00:01:03.080 Sure. Well, just do the tip of the iceberg. So the earlier piece passed about two years ago was the Online Streaming Act, and it gives the CRTC authority over the internet in Canada to dictate Canadian content, to define what Canadian content is, and to monitor and regulate every podcast, every website for Canadian content.
00:01:27.060 They haven't started. They haven't started to exercise that power yet, but the law is in place, and they can do so. So that was a problem from two years ago. The problem was the passage of a bad law. Again, it hasn't yet been abused as far as I know.
00:01:41.060 Then we have C2, which is the Strong Borders Act. I call it the Strong Surveillance Act. And while it does contain provisions to change our immigration and refugee policies and things pertaining to the border, it also has provisions to authorize Canada Post to search letter mail without a warrant.
00:02:02.140 It bans the use of cash in amounts greater than $10,000 for donations to charity and for paying bills. It creates an Authorized Access to Information Act, which gives federal officials the power to search our computers and cell phones without a warrant.
00:02:21.760 So that's really bad news. It's been denounced across the spectrum. There's so many different groups, academics, professors have denounced it that the government's actually put it on the back burner, which is good. And it shows that activism does achieve some results.
00:02:38.160 Again, just the tip of the iceberg, Bill C8 is the Cyber Security Act, and it empowers the federal cabinet to kick individual Canadians off the internet, without warning, without due process, if the cabinet minister decides that the individual constitutes a threat to Canada's telecommunication system.
00:03:04.340 Now, in theory, that should only apply to hackers and fraudsters and foreign terrorists, domestic terrorists, but there's nothing in there to prevent a cabinet minister from kicking a Canadian off the internet because he doesn't like her social media posts, podcasts, website, etc.
00:03:25.760 And if you are kicked off the internet, theoretically, you can go to court, but most Canadians don't have an extra $100,000 sitting around to use for litigation, a process that's going to take two or three years at the end of which you might not even win.
00:03:40.440 So, the C8 Cyber Security Act is very dangerous. It also gives the federal cabinet powers to search companies, to declare a company, to be vital, to impose conditions on the company, to collect subscriber data and personal information about Canadians, etc., etc.
00:03:59.280 Very, very, very, very broad-based, similar to the Bill C2, the Strong Borders Act, with this new Authorized Access to Information Act.
00:04:09.480 It's all about warrantless searches. I can get into details on that.
00:04:15.080 Bill C9 is the Combating Hate Act, and it authorizes judges to vastly increase punishments imposed on people convicted of crimes if the judge feels that the crime was motivated by hatred.
00:04:31.500 It also removes a current sober second thought process whereby when local police, local Crown prosecutors in, you know, Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa, Halifax, Montreal, local Crown prosecutors have to get the permission of the Attorney General of the province, the Justice Minister, to prosecute the Canadian for hate speech.
00:04:57.980 And that kind of puts the brakes on it. That's why we haven't seen too many hate speech prosecutions in Canada. There might be two, three, four per decade.
00:05:08.900 Maybe there's a bunch that don't get into the news, but they're so rare that they often do hit the news.
00:05:15.220 They're going to get rid of that requirement that local police and local Crown prosecutors have to get the approval of the Justice Minister.
00:05:22.840 They're scrapping that. And so it gives much more leeway. If a policeman feels that something is hateful, he can lay criminal charges.
00:05:31.680 And even if the judge disagrees with a police officer and acquits you at the end of the day, you've now had criminal proceedings against you for the past nine months or 18 months or two and a half years.
00:05:43.320 And so that's very menacing. If Bill C-9 passes, we're going to see a lot of a lot more Canadians. I couldn't tell you what number being prosecuted for hate speech and hate cannot be defined because it's an emotion.
00:05:56.680 Bill C-9 tries to define hatred by saying that to ridicule someone, discredit, offend, hurt the feelings of somebody is not hate speech. Dislike and disdain are not hate speech. However, detestation and vilification are hate speech. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
00:06:18.040 You need a thesaurus to understand that.
00:06:19.840 Yeah, you know, a good law, a just law by definition is clear. So when the criminal code says essentially thou shalt not kill, you know, it's pretty clear you unless you're insane, you know that you are killing somebody intending to kill somebody. There's there's nothing there's nothing gray about it. But how do you how do you avoid a hate speech prosecution?
00:06:44.680 And it's going to have a chilling effect whereby Canadians self-censor Bill C-9, the combating hate act is also very political because it bans the Nazi swastika, but does not ban the communist hammer and sickle, which many people, including many immigrants to Canada would see that as a symbol of hatred towards business owners and aristocrats and all kinds of people.
00:07:08.700 But you could wave around the communist, but you could wave around the communist hammer and sickle, the banner under which tens of millions of people were murdered by communist regimes in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc.
00:07:18.920 You could wave that around, but not the Nazi swastika.
00:07:23.200 So, you know, maybe not a big deal, but I just I see the politics in it.
00:07:28.200 And, you know, if we're going to start if we're going to start banning one hateful symbol, we should ban more of them.
00:07:34.780 And then fifth, last but not least, is the Online Harms Act, which died on the order paper when we had our election in April 2025.
00:07:44.140 That bill would give new powers to the Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute Canadians for non-criminal, offensive or discriminatory, another vague word, discriminatory speech.
00:07:58.240 And people who support that love to say, oh, it's not criminal, you know, therefore chill, relax.
00:08:04.940 It's not a big deal.
00:08:05.700 But if you're found guilty by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal of discriminatory speech, you can be fined up to $50,000 plus having to pay an additional up to $20,000 to the complainant whose feelings were hurt.
00:08:20.580 But the Online Harms Act also empowers judges to place you under house arrest, curfew, ankle bracelet.
00:08:29.700 If your neighbor fears that you might commit a hate speech crime in future, then without having been charged, without having been found guilty, you can actually have a judge restrict your freedom with house arrest or an ankle bracelet based on what you might do in future.
00:08:49.100 So it's like minority report.
00:08:50.640 It also empowers, this is the Online Streaming Act still, it empowers the federal cabinet to write all kinds of regulations governing the content of the internet without any parliamentary scrutiny.
00:09:03.280 And then there'll be this brand new digital safety commission, which will enforce those federal regulations, and there'll be massive fines and penalties for companies that don't themselves start to remove content that they think is discriminatory.
00:09:19.760 And so the government can essentially get all the private companies to do their dirty work for them, because if you're a private company and you don't want to face, you know, million dollar fines, you're going to hire your own censor to kick anybody off your social media platform or other platform.
00:09:37.100 So Online Streaming Act already passed two years ago, C2, C8, C9, and then the potential return of the Online Streaming Act.
00:09:46.600 You put those five things together and you've got a police state.
00:09:50.700 This summer in the UK, we saw a lot of Britons being arrested and actually face significant jail time for posts made on social media about comments related to the problem that the UK has right now with grooming gangs.
00:10:06.680 Do you see this as like Canada's kind of follow-up attempt to enact similar legislation that allowed the UK to perform those acts this summer?
00:10:19.020 Sadly, yes.
00:10:19.860 And to give you two examples of where Canada is at culturally, politically, legally, we've had Charlie Angus, I think he's now retired, but he's an NDP member of parliament, put forward a proposal to make it illegal to speak positively about the oil and gas industry.
00:10:35.540 Now, it didn't get passed by the House of Commons and it was not adopted by the government.
00:10:40.700 But the very fact that somebody would put this forward as a serious proposal.
00:10:44.260 We had another NDP member of parliament from Winnipeg said that residential school denialism, which could include saying that the residential school's experience was not necessarily bad for everybody,
00:11:02.080 or challenging the unproven claim that there's 215 children buried at the Kamloops Indian residential school.
00:11:13.580 So, she would actually, if it was within her power, she would criminalize the opinions, the incorrect opinions about Aboriginal residential schools.
00:11:26.980 David Suzuki is another example, he's not a member of parliament, but he said that people who deny the forthcoming impending climate holocaust and who are not on board with him,
00:11:37.840 that we need to move ourselves into poverty by getting rid of oil and gas, that they should be jailed.
00:11:46.780 They should be locked up and jailed for disagreeing with David Suzuki.
00:11:51.440 So, it's, you know, again, those are private members bills, but there's a lot of Canadians that think that you should be locked up for saying the wrong thing.
00:12:03.940 Just a lot, one more thing, some good news, there was so much outcry against bill C2 and it came from across the political spectrum and the justice center and all of our supporters.
00:12:15.440 We, uh, there's so much outcry against bill C2 that the federal government still wants to push it through, but they've actually taken out the immigration and refugee and border parts of bill C2.
00:12:29.380 Put it into a separate bill C12 for fast-tracking and I think they're hoping to get the support of the conservatives and, and they probably will.
00:12:38.560 So they're, they're fast-tracking C12 and then that still leaves C2 as a bad piece of legislation, but they've put it on the back burner, uh, because there's been so much opposition and, and MPs of all parties have heard that.
00:12:50.880 And liberal MPs have heard from their own constituents that, uh, C2 is bad news for freedom and for privacy.
00:12:58.380 And so, yeah, contact your MP and, uh, that's, what's going to make a difference.
00:13:20.880 Thank you.
00:13:21.880 Thank you.
00:13:22.380 Thank you.
00:13:22.480 Thank you.