Western Standard - Bill C-34 is building Canada’s digital surveillance state

00:00:00.000 good evening western standard viewers and welcome to hannaford a weekly politics show of the western

00:00:21.280 standard it is thursday june the 25th with me today is john carpe president of the justice

00:00:27.600 Center for Constitutional Freedoms. Welcome John. Glad to be with you and viewers and listeners.

00:00:33.040 Well, we have lots of those, especially for this topic. John, a few days ago the Justice

00:00:39.600 Center went to war with the federal Bill C-34. It's another one of these repressive social media

00:00:48.800 acts that the federal government seems to love. And this bill is supposed to make it hard for

00:00:54.160 kids to access the internet anybody under 16 but of course if we're going to do that everybody's

00:00:59.600 affected what tell us about this bill well it's it's a building block of the surveillance state

00:01:07.920 as they did in 2024 with the online harms act we got to protect children from online arms

00:01:13.520 therefore we got to have this digital safety commission and and so on and so forth so bill

00:01:18.960 c-34 would introduce a would create a digital safety commission with immense power to regulate

00:01:27.360 the internet most of those powers are not even defined so if bill c-34 in its current form if

00:01:33.680 it's passed into law there's a whole bunch of there's a huge volume of of issues which the

00:01:42.240 digital safety commission will have the power to decide what it wants to do what's the digital

00:01:47.040 Safety Commission. So it's a new federal body analogous to the CRTC, the Canadian Radio,

00:01:55.920 Television and Telecommunications Commission. So the CRTC, by way of legislation, federal legislation

00:02:02.880 has power to regulate, used to be just radio and television. Now they have some power over

00:02:10.880 the internet as well, the Online Streaming Act. So the Digital Safety Commission would be a new

00:02:16.320 body like the CRTC that would exercise real powers and it would have authority to control

00:02:24.940 internet service providers and platforms and what they can and cannot say.

00:02:30.940 So what does the Act say that this Digital Safety Commission can do?

00:02:35.140 Well, a lot of it's undefined. For example, if the bill passes, we would find out later

00:02:42.760 after the bill's passed which social media uh which kinds of social media the law would apply

00:02:50.560 to okay would it apply to facebook uh would it apply to twitter would it apply to we don't know

00:02:58.120 the digital safety commission gets to make those decisions after the bill has passed so

00:03:04.360 mps are kind of being asked to vote for something that's behind a curtain that we find out later on

00:03:10.520 like a blank check really it's a blank check give it give us this legislation and don't worry we'll

00:03:16.120 take it from there um and cleverly sold as a way to um reduce or eliminate access to pornography

00:03:26.920 which i think is for children for children yeah under 16. yeah now australia has tried this uh

00:03:33.480 They've had their laws been in power in place since 2025. It has thus far proven to be totally

00:03:41.320 ineffective. The kids are still accessing social media through other sources. And the danger this

00:03:48.280 creates is the only way to really make it effective is to have verification for everybody using the

00:03:56.040 internet where you've got to provide you know facial recognition scan you have to provide

00:04:04.680 perhaps banking details you have to prove who you are that's the only way that it could actually

00:04:09.880 really work and and if we go down that path then we've got a totalitarian surveillance state where

00:04:15.800 the government always knows whether you're online and what you're looking up and what you're searching

00:04:20.760 Well, now, you've looked at this legislation quite closely, and I've looked at it a bit, and it says, well, we only keep the information for, in fact, we make the service providers gather this information, and they're only allowed to keep it for long enough to establish that, you know, you are who you say you are, and you're over the age of 16.

00:04:41.860 After that, it gets done.

00:04:43.460 No problem.

00:04:43.940 how would you or i or anybody else know if our private information was in fact deleted 24 hours

00:04:52.580 later this is more of you know trust us we'll we're going to keep our promises uh don't worry

00:04:59.640 we'll delete it after 24 hours okay how could you possibly know whether i have kept my promise or not

00:05:05.620 if i promise to delete your personal information after 24 hours after receiving it and i guess

00:05:12.880 And there's been some, this has been tried, I think, in Great Britain.

00:05:17.320 Did you say Australia as well?

00:05:19.980 Is that what they do?

00:05:22.100 Australia is the first country to pass this kind of law.

00:05:26.500 And in Britain, the prime minister announced a week or two or three ago that they would follow in Australia's footsteps.

00:05:34.640 And there's a lot of countries that have announced that they intend to follow Australia's model.

00:05:40.140 but australia's model is not preventing kids from accessing social media or pornography it's not

00:05:47.640 working the only way to really make it work is to have this uh you know verification of identity

00:05:55.600 and age for every for everybody like 100 of the people using the internet would have to verify

00:06:02.240 their that they are adults and and and typically you would do that by what a face

00:06:10.460 Facial scan would be one thing.

00:06:12.380 I've traveled recently, and this seems to be the new thing, crossing different borders.

00:06:19.840 You put your passport down, and then the camera scans your face to see that it aligns with the passport.

00:06:27.980 I'm assuming it's pretty easy to use technology.

00:06:30.720 So that would be an example of what they could use for the Internet.

00:06:34.180 I guess they could also ask for personal information.

00:06:36.600 Yes, because your banking information would confirm who you are or maybe your social insurance number or your birth date. And we've had repeatedly, we've had problems with hackers. This is not news. I mean, you can find this easily where, you know, 70,000 people have their personal information.

00:06:59.940 their maybe their driver's license their address is posted on the internet because some hacker

00:07:06.260 decided to you know go on a power trip okay john this is huge stuff and it's not been much talked

00:07:12.100 about i think people might be vaguely aware that they're trying to keep 16 year olds from watching

00:07:17.780 porn and i guess most people would say well i guess that's a good thing but uh you know for

00:07:23.460 anybody who's just hearing this for the first time let me just read back to you what you have just 1.00

00:07:30.420 said that the government of canada has legislation through which in order to keep 16 year olds from

00:07:39.460 watching porn they would essentially have to gather information from everybody who intends

00:07:47.540 to access the information to ascertain that they are who they say they are and that they are older

00:07:54.340 than 16 years this could involve a face scan but if it didn't involve that it would have to be

00:08:01.300 something equally determinative such as your banking details obviously if you've been paying

00:08:06.660 visa for 10 years you're probably more than 16 years old you know that kind of information

00:08:10.900 and yet they promise to delete it as soon as they've cleared you but you you raise issues

00:08:16.900 of trust and of course the issues of uh uh of the the the hack the when somebody breaks in and gets

00:08:28.660 a hundred thousand sets of personal details in one fell swoop this is there's more but this is huge

00:08:35.460 Have I accurately summarized what this bill is going to mean for everybody in Canada who wants to access the Internet?

00:08:44.120 Yes, it is a road towards a digital surveillance state.

00:08:51.460 Now, that is a worst case scenario.

00:08:53.560 I mean, theoretically, just to be fair minded about this, I mean, theoretically, we could pass this law.

00:08:59.300 and the Digital Safety Commission would be very reasonable

00:09:03.880 and would not throw its weight around.

00:09:07.060 But you and I know, and I think our viewers and listeners know,

00:09:09.680 that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:09:14.080 People are basically incapable.

00:09:16.960 If a human being has this much power, 0.73

00:09:20.460 they're going to exercise this much power.

00:09:22.240 They're not going to say, well, I'm going to be very reasonable, and so on.

00:09:26.220 We don't go there.

00:09:27.240 Yes, we do.

00:09:28.060 Yes, we do.

00:09:28.600 yes of course well then let's talk about where else they want to go because there is a section

00:09:33.560 of this bill which provides that um well first of all uh john just talk about the this digital

00:09:40.920 safety commission before we get to the hate speech part of this um who is actually defining

00:09:50.040 what it's going to do and what its powers will be well the the core part of it is that it's it's a

00:09:57.080 government body. Its board of directors will be appointed by the government. They're likely to be

00:10:05.720 equity, diversity, inclusion, woke, you know, rainbow ideology types, because that's the type

00:10:12.120 of people that the government typically appoints. And then they're going to have their executive

00:10:18.120 director and they're going to have their officers and bureaucrats that monitor and regulate the 0.99

00:10:21.800 internet uh and they're going to have the private companies do the dirty work for them

00:10:28.840 insofar as they can establish fines and penalties that if an internet service provider

00:10:35.640 does not comply with their federal cabinet regulations that there will be a price to pay

00:10:43.000 like you know three percent three percent of your annual global revenue that provider is pretty

00:10:48.120 skittish i would think so they're going to comply much in the same way during lockdowns

00:10:53.880 the government threatened restaurants with large fines if the restaurants didn't enforce a vaccine

00:10:59.640 passport to you know treat as second-class citizens those who had not gotten injected

00:11:05.080 so the private companies do the government's dirty work because they legitimately want to avoid

00:11:11.000 a huge fine so they're going to be rather cautious something that might be acceptable actually they

00:11:15.480 So, no, you can't say that.

00:11:17.080 Yeah, it'll be the private companies that will be censoring the speech

00:11:20.300 because they don't want to get in trouble with the government.

00:11:22.800 The other aspect is that this Bill C-34 is going to give vast new regulatory powers

00:11:33.000 to the federal government to pass all kinds of regulations.

00:11:37.060 And that's, again, it's, you know, trust us that we'll do well behind the closed curtain.

00:11:43.860 this is this is back to the blank check of a few minutes ago i you know i read through this act of

00:11:48.900 good gracious as a turgid prose but there were 50 places where they said this will be done by

00:11:56.500 ordering council which means that you know if you're not federal government somebody will decide

00:12:01.580 make this decision after this thing has passed so we have no idea what we're getting into with this

00:12:07.000 really or how this is going to look do we we don't and what is scary is that many politicians

00:12:14.440 have spoken very publicly about protecting us from misinformation right yes protect you protect you

00:12:22.740 from hate and protect you from misinformation so this is another dark path you've got people

00:12:28.980 agitating for criminalizing academic and historical discussions about residential schools

00:12:36.180 such that the only legal narrative that you can say out loud or write about

00:12:41.460 is that residential schools were cultural genocide,

00:12:46.920 you know, decided to destroy Aboriginals or whatever.

00:12:51.300 That's the only thing you're allowed to say,

00:12:52.980 and it'll be a criminal offense to say otherwise.

00:12:55.500 So when you look at this Digital Safety Commission,

00:12:57.940 in a context of politicians stating publicly,

00:13:01.080 we're going to protect you from hate, protect you from misinformation,

00:13:03.760 people advocating for criminalizing so-called residential school denialism it's a pretty talk

00:13:11.180 so from what you said it sounds like they won't even get that far because the the internet service

00:13:17.340 provider is going to cut them off before they they've hit send but if they do get past that

00:13:22.740 so they get called in and said look you said this we think that so you you fight it and you

00:13:29.020 plead truth and you, you know, produce your evidence and so forth and so on, and you win,

00:13:35.160 right? It has a huge chilling effect because the people who are ready, willing, and able to

00:13:42.760 suffer that kind of persecution are pretty small in number. Well, could you actually,

00:13:50.100 is this like a human rights commission where truth doesn't matter? It would depend on,

00:13:56.140 well sorry for criminal charges okay if if residential school denialism becomes is made

00:14:02.480 into a criminal code offense the same way that currently holocaust denial minimization is

00:14:07.420 criminal willful promotion or hatred is criminal if residential school denialism is criminalized

00:14:13.160 then a defense in a criminal prosecution truth would be a defense but if it's a digital safety

00:14:20.560 commission that is uh enforcing regulations passed by federal cabinet that becomes a whole

00:14:29.440 new ball game and then and then no truth would not be a defense so it would be in a criminal

00:14:33.140 prosecution but not if um you know whoever hosts the western standards website decides that you

00:14:40.600 guys are residential school deniers you know are they going to pull your content uh off of the

00:14:49.300 internet or refuse to continue to provide you with your platform john this is uh this is a whole

00:14:56.860 no you spoke about this being part of the construction of a surveillance state

00:15:02.700 so uh you know in my mind i'm now picturing well we've got a bit over here and we've got a bit over

00:15:08.140 here and this particular this particular bit is actually about something else but they got one

00:15:13.520 line in there that actually has to do with, oh, what would be an example in Bill C-22, which was...

00:15:22.780 I have not looked at Bill C-22 in the past month, so I can't get into the details, but that's also

00:15:29.560 one of the building blocks. And then we've got Bill C-9, right?

00:15:33.620 Which is about something else, but bans quoting the Bible.

00:15:36.420 It could result in Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, Orthodox Jewish rabbis getting prosecuted for saying what their sacred scriptures say about homosexuality.

00:15:52.500 So it opens that door.

00:15:54.980 Okay, well, so can you just talk a little bit about these pieces that you're speaking of?

00:16:01.340 You mentioned Bill 9, you mentioned Bill 22.

00:16:08.120 We had Bill 63.

00:16:09.620 This latest thing, 34, seems to be a reincarnation of Bill C63.

00:16:14.340 It seems to be, all of these bills, they say they're about one thing, but there's a piece

00:16:18.500 in there that seems to be intended to control what people are actually allowed to say in

00:16:24.440 the public square.

00:16:25.740 Or am I being a little bit too, you know, am I over-reading 1984?

00:16:31.780 No, it's the legislation working together.

00:16:34.420 So you've got Bill C-8, which empowers federal cabinet ministers to kick Canadians off the internet.

00:16:41.500 There's another example, right?

00:16:42.900 You could find yourself suddenly, they could order whichever company is providing reasonable service to you.

00:16:49.200 We've got the lowering of thresholds for information.

00:16:53.380 We've got requirements.

00:16:54.360 I think the public pressure reduced it from 12 months to six months, but that the companies like Rogers, Bell and TELUS need to keep your data on file for six months and, you know, making it easier for the police to access information.

00:17:16.760 And all of these bills dealing with technology and the internet are together as a package.

00:17:23.560 It's the building blocks of a surveillance state like 1984.

00:17:28.960 Well, that's incredible.

00:17:29.920 You know, why don't we know about this?

00:17:33.040 They're not.

00:17:34.960 They're clever.

00:17:36.220 After a law is passed, you don't you don't feel a difference the following day, the following week, the following month.

00:17:43.940 Right.

00:17:44.500 But you still have to look at the laws.

00:17:46.620 What's the foundation that's being laid in place for what powers the government will have two years from now to undermine our privacy and move us towards that surveillance state?

00:18:00.720 Now, this didn't start when Mr. Carney became prime minister about 16 months ago.

00:18:07.540 Did it even start with Mr. Trudeau?

00:18:10.880 Bill C-63, Online Arms Act.

00:18:12.620 Well, and okay, so Online News Act made it, the result was that Meta and Facebook would no longer be able to, people couldn't share news stories with each other.

00:18:29.520 So it's hurt. There's been decline in people watching the news. That was the the Online News Act. The Online Streaming Act gave the CRTC legal authority over the Internet, over online streaming.

00:18:43.220 So they might not be throwing their weight around right now, but they have the legal authority to regulate the contents of what, you know, say the Western Standard or the Justice Center puts out in terms of a video.

00:18:58.020 Then you have C-63, the Online Harms Act, which also proposed a digital safety commission with an army of bureaucrats to enforce federal cabinet regulations.

00:19:09.020 So, yeah, this has been going on for years.

00:19:11.740 C-63 was particularly terrible, and it died before the 2025 election.

00:19:18.260 So, okay, it's been going on for years, and you sort of follow all the little rabbit trails back.

00:19:23.760 Where do you see the beginning of this?

00:19:28.020 Is it politicians or is it bureaucrats?

00:19:32.020 I think it's a combination of politicians, bureaucrats, academics.

00:19:39.020 You've got this political cultural stream of neo-Marxist ideology which has taken root, taken hold and has now infiltrated the government and the bureaucracy and the universities.

00:19:53.020 And this is a narrative. It's a hateful narrative of group conflict. And the old Marxism was capitalism versus capitalists versus the workers, evil capitalists, good workers. We get our utopia when the good workers crush and defeat and destroy the evil capitalists.

00:20:15.020 So now fast forward to today's neo-Marxism is still group conflict, men versus women, gays versus straights, light-skinned versus dark-skinned. And how do you get the utopia? When the oppressed crushes the oppressor.

00:20:31.980 So that's the narrative. And that is a narrative that has completely infiltrated pretty much every university in Canada. It's infiltrated the media, the bureaucracy, the politicians.

00:20:45.420 So that's the cultural stream that I think is pushing us towards this totalitarian surveillance state, because the Marxists don't respect, in fact, they hate our individual human dignity.

00:21:01.800 Where I say, well, I as a human being have certain God-given, not government-given, God-given rights to express myself, to practice my faith, to associate with other people.

00:21:12.680 And that's what the Marxism hates, is individual rights, including our legitimate privacy rights, that they're spheres of my life that are private.

00:21:23.260 And they're not your business or the government's business.

00:21:25.980 You know, that too.

00:21:27.140 They don't care for privacy rights.

00:21:28.540 The only thing here, John, is that some of the people who are actually doing this today, the government ministers, probably don't realize that they're Marxists.

00:21:38.180 I mean, I doubt very much whether Mark Miller or Sean Fraser would, you know.

00:21:41.960 I think you're right. I think you're right. They don't know that necessarily.

00:21:46.940 And if you challenge them with it, they would probably deny it and say, oh, no, Stalin and Lenin, these are mass murderers that killed, you know, and I'm a really nice guy.

00:21:56.280 you know that's probably what they would say so so this movement has been so successful

00:22:01.720 that people who take it as normal like it's as if it's normal to have a rainbow colored

00:22:09.840 crosswalk when we've previously understood that you don't do political slogans on public property

00:22:18.400 as government action right well you know i remember the days when you could say i've got

00:22:24.080 write to my own opinion and say what i think and people would just say of course you do

00:22:28.400 it certainly doesn't look that way now john i mean this is a pessimistic interview because

00:22:33.520 there's lots to be pessimistic about but can you give us anything hopeful here like what people

00:22:38.720 can do how they can resist this and certainly in respect of challenging the kind of legislation

00:22:45.840 that the government is putting forward have we had any successes recently where we can say well

00:22:50.000 well, actually, they tried to do this, but they ended up not able to.

00:22:53.560 We've had partial successes.

00:22:55.140 One example was the Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act,

00:22:59.480 which generated so much opposition from so many quarters,

00:23:04.400 on the left, on the right, in the middle,

00:23:06.360 Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Justice Centre,

00:23:09.520 just dozens and dozens of groups came out against Bill C-2.

00:23:14.000 So the government put it on the back burner

00:23:17.700 and has not moved forward with some of the more objectionable parts.

00:23:22.160 They carved out C-12, which pertained specifically

00:23:26.160 to borders, immigration, refugees, and that went through,

00:23:30.840 and I think it had the support of the conservative opposition, 0.64

00:23:33.540 but there's a lot of bad stuff they left behind

00:23:35.540 because of public opposition.

00:23:37.660 Another success was in Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act.

00:23:43.760 The initial bill had a provision that a hate speech prosecution would no longer require the approval of the justice minister, the attorney general, and it would have shifted complete authority to local police to prosecute people for hate speech.

00:24:05.460 That got taken out of Bill C-9.

00:24:08.600 So C-9 could have been worse.

00:24:10.020 so bottom line people need to contact their member of parliament uh whether he or she is

00:24:15.540 liberal conservative nbp block green and uh tell your mp oppose bill c34 or else i won't vote for

00:24:24.920 you well bill c34 has just been introduced like a week ago so do you know whatever it was um so

00:24:32.220 there's actually a long way to go on this we have time to we do to do something like that at least

00:24:38.100 as hopeful john we're out of time i'm so sorry this is a kind of discussion that could go on for

00:24:42.420 a long time and should but uh anyway god bless you for the work you're doing down

00:24:46.740 there at the justice center and thanks for coming into the studio

00:24:50.900 for the western standard i'm nigel hannaford

00:25:08.100 Thank you.

Western Standard - June 26, 2026

Bill C-34 is building Canada’s digital surveillance state

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