Western Standard - HANNAFORD： Ottawa’s six stealth attacks on your freedom of speech

00:00:00.000 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nigel Hannaford for the Western Standard.

00:00:20.200 Hope you're having a good stampede. Ladies and gentlemen, you may not have noticed it,

00:00:25.220 but the government of Canada has planned passing new laws to do away with your freedom to say what

00:00:31.040 you believe out loud. You need to hear this, and today you will. There are in fact six new laws,

00:00:38.280 and every one of these bills promises something good, then everyone contains something you should

00:00:44.600 never see in a democracy. But of course they won't tell you that, because they don't want you to know

00:00:49.660 what they're up to. These people are clever, they appear as angels of light, but they are also

00:00:54.240 duplicitous bastards so let's take a look at what the government of been canada has been doing to 0.95

00:00:59.760 you first three years ago the trudeau liberals passed the online streaming act much discussed 0.97

00:01:07.920 at the time as bill c11 it was sold as modernizing broadcasting rules for the streaming era with u.s

00:01:15.520 companies like netflix scooping up the canadian pay-to-view market it was bound to happen

00:01:21.280 Apart from plain greed, the streamers were contributing nothing to the production of

00:01:26.000 Canadian content. Granted, not many people give Canadian content that much attention.

00:01:31.500 But that's not the point. It's about the money. It's about control. It's about nudging public

00:01:36.400 opinion in the direction the government wants it to go. So they did this as well. Slipped into the

00:01:42.680 legislation was authority for the CRTC to also impose discoverability requirements on platforms.

00:01:56.080 Now, what is discoverability? In plain English, it's what comes up first when you do a Google

00:02:03.440 search. And for governments, it means a way to promote approved content and make it harder for

00:02:11.260 you to find what you want to see if they don't want you to see it not a bad way of pushing public

00:02:19.180 opinion when so many people go with the first thing a search engine throws up under bill c11

00:02:26.540 that's how the crt's job came to be to push the button so that if you search for syrup you get

00:02:35.500 government approved maple syrup meanwhile c11's companion piece the online news act bill c18

00:02:43.180 was presented as ensuring fair compensation for canadian journalism who could argue with that

00:02:48.540 not me on a canadian journalist however its immediate consequence was that murder began

00:02:54.220 blocking news links in canada reducing incidental public access to news reporting while increasing

00:03:01.900 media dependence on mechanisms ruled by the government by through the crtc cabinet regulations

00:03:09.660 and political priorities that wasn't a free speech win was it think about that for a moment when

00:03:16.140 covid was a thing do you think you are really getting the whole truth you were certainly

00:03:21.260 getting what the government wanted you to think they even had people in the privy council office

00:03:26.780 telling everybody that vaccines were safe and effective.

00:03:30.400 True story.

00:03:31.540 It's officially called the Impact and Innovation Unit.

00:03:34.300 It's referred to as the Nudge Unit because, as behavioral scientists,

00:03:38.600 it's their job to nudge public opinion.

00:03:41.220 So, the government really cares what you think.

00:03:44.500 The Nudge Unit, two bills, two hits on freedom of information.

00:03:48.240 Other bills follow a similar logic, but in the name of national security,

00:03:52.500 provisions originally embedded in border security,

00:03:56.440 bill c22 the lawful access act lower thresholds for government access to subscriber data and

00:04:04.280 require electronic service providers to build technical capabilities to make it easier for

00:04:10.760 government to have access to your communications in plain english again this is what they have done

00:04:19.560 they have made it with those two bills they have made it easy for themselves to read your email

00:04:26.520 if they want to now of course if you're afraid of terrorists or drug lords you might want the

00:04:32.600 government to have all these powers and more however just know that it comes at the cost of

00:04:38.280 your rights to privacy and free speech with the passage in june of bill c22 and its companion bill

00:04:46.440 c8 an act respecting cyber security your internet service provider must now do two things a they

00:04:56.120 have to keep your emails and web searches for six months and b they have to tell the government

00:05:02.760 you're their customer if the government asks and c they must let the government have a look at your

00:05:09.240 files so does jimmy smith have an account with you why yes well here's our warrant we want to

00:05:15.400 know what he looks at when he goes online and what he says to his cousin let me say that slowly

00:05:22.600 if they want to read your email they now can now some service providers to their credit have

00:05:30.840 ideological issues with that and have threatened to stop providing service to canada if the bills

00:05:36.920 passed well now the bills are passed so we'll see what the providers do meanwhile if the government

00:05:43.800 really doesn't like you and deems you a threat to national security or critical infrastructure

00:05:49.880 maybe your friends drive trucks section 15-2 of bill c8 lets them do this this is over the top

00:06:01.240 under that section they can order your telecommunications service provider people

00:06:07.560 like rogers bell tell us etc to suspend service to you or as we say in the office kick you off

00:06:15.720 the internet they don't have to even tell you that they're doing it it just happens now they may not

00:06:24.200 do so for now they're still getting all the pieces in places but if they want to they can it's quite

00:06:30.680 clever really first each measure is justified by a legitimate concern fentanyl trafficking

00:06:37.640 critical infrastructure protection yet each of these bills also expands the infrastructure

00:06:44.600 through which the state can monitor or shape digital flows and permit internet access second

00:06:53.560 the government does not typically act on this legislation as soon as it is passed

00:06:59.320 it's just there on the shelf until such time as they want to send a message let's see that's four

00:07:06.600 new laws now we come to the last two bill c34 not passed yet the digital safety act it's the worst

00:07:13.960 of the lot a masterpiece of bait and switch introduced last month the government of canada

00:07:19.960 says it is to prevent children under 16 from accessing harmful content on the internet well

00:07:26.600 how can anybody be against that? Not many people, certainly not me. But at what cost?

00:07:34.200 As lawyer Michael Geist says, and we turn to Michael Geist a lot for a clear steer on

00:07:41.960 legislation of this kind, Mr. Geist says Bill C-34's most consequential element may be the

00:07:50.280 creation and powers of the government agency the bill establishes to oversee the entire system is

00:07:58.280 going to be called the digital safety commission of canada and it will be a super regulator of

00:08:05.000 the internet with greater influence over the daily lives of canadians than perhaps any other

00:08:12.040 regulator in the country end of quote well that would be your daily life we're talking about here

00:08:20.280 Yet there are no details whatsoever about the Digital Safety Commission in the legislation.

00:08:27.080 Everything is to be determined by the government after the bill is passed. It won't be debated,

00:08:33.540 therefore, by your Members of Parliament. In other words, the government is asking for a blank check

00:08:39.400 to determine how this astonishingly powerful agency will operate. Indeed, it falls to the

00:08:48.060 Digital Safety Commission to set the very rules by which all of us will prove we are over 16

00:08:54.940 to log on to social media services. Now, this is going on in other parts of the world. And what

00:09:02.220 they're finding in Australia, for example, resourceful Australian teens have already shown

00:09:07.080 that anything less than facial technology recognition or submitting personal information,

00:09:13.600 you know bank card that sort of thing is unlikely to work so you can see where this takes you

00:09:20.720 the government also gets to define hate speech this is the other line mine in c34

00:09:28.000 now you may think you know what hate speech is virulent anti-jewish propaganda perhaps or 0.97

00:09:35.040 somebody advocating violence against a marginalized minority and you'd be right that is hate speech

00:09:40.800 speech but bill c34 gives them the power to administratively declare anything they don't

00:09:47.640 like to be hate speech to favor a constituency perhaps or just a ministerial whim there are

00:09:54.840 people in government now who would like to make it illegal to question the narrative

00:10:01.800 that priests and nuns murdered indigenous children at residential schools

00:10:07.380 Would that be hate? So far, no proof of that narrative has been established and no bodies

00:10:16.640 have been found. But should the Digital Safety Commissioner declare it to be hateful, the topic

00:10:23.560 is moved off the internet, beyond discussion, and whatever the truth of it, there becomes something

00:10:29.640 you just don't talk about. Same for anything. Bill C-34 may be marketed as keeping kids away

00:10:36.620 from internet porn. However, it gives a government that can look at your emails and fiddle with your

00:10:43.480 internet searches and has a department in the Privy Council office explicitly dedicated to

00:10:49.460 moving public opinion can even throw you off the internet. That government is going to get

00:10:55.740 the discretion to put a lot of things beyond discussion. And to that point, let's not forget

00:11:02.580 forget bill c9 that just passed which makes it dangerous for pastors to preach the bible

00:11:10.340 there you go six bills six squeezes on your free speech rights many canadians want to trust the

00:11:17.780 government that's good but we want a government that we can trust the concern lies in the recurring

00:11:24.580 design choices embedded in expensive regulatory powers inside bills whose primary beneficial

00:11:31.300 purpose masks their secondary damaging effects on freedom or perhaps it was always intended to be

00:11:39.060 the primary effect who knows definitions and operational rules are frequently left for later

00:11:45.060 executive action the onus is shifted onto private actors the companies providing internet access

00:11:52.340 who have every incentive to anticipate and accommodate government preferences

00:11:57.220 rather than test the boundaries of expression. The cumulative results is not a dramatic overnight

00:12:05.980 seizure of the public square. It is a steady narrowing of the space in which dissenting

00:12:12.300 inconvenient or simply unfashionable information and opinion can circulate freely. Canadians still

00:12:21.580 possess formal charter protections for freedom of expression what is being constructed bill by bill

00:12:29.920 is a practical environment in which exercising those protections carries increasing friction

00:12:36.900 and risk not primarily from the state directly but from the platforms that have been made

00:12:43.480 responsible for policing the categories the state has defined you know perhaps we should

00:12:52.480 count our blessings somewhat this is not new for most of history most of humanity

00:12:59.180 has not enjoyed the luxury of guaranteed constitutional free expression kings and

00:13:05.580 emperors have seldom tolerated dissent in the bible they routinely killed the prophets the

00:13:10.940 Roman orator Cicero paid with his head for his relentless criticism of Mark Antony.

00:13:16.760 So did Nero's tutor Seneca, no surprise there, and so down the ages into our own times. Smart

00:13:23.540 people didn't point out the errors of communism to Stalin either, nor of national socialism to

00:13:29.800 Hitler. Democracies were no better. It was the democratic state of Athens that couldn't stand

00:13:35.360 the criticisms of Socrates, so they made him commit suicide. But in Canada, we have not lived

00:13:40.540 this way. We have been co-inheritors of the Anglo-American free speech tradition, and we

00:13:46.040 have built a country where even poor men can have the same right to their opinions as the rich and

00:13:51.940 the powerful. We are then something of an island in history and geography, and we like to keep it

00:13:57.900 that way. To torture that island metaphor a little, the waters are rising around us. Obviously,

00:14:03.380 Canada is nothing like ancient Rome or present-day Iran or North Korea, but it is still getting

00:14:09.520 harder than ever to pretend that our Liberal government doesn't have a plan to manage our

00:14:15.840 opinions for its own benefit. I could be wrong, of course, but there is the evidence from six

00:14:22.560 Acts of Parliament over the last three years. You be the judge.

00:14:26.880 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - July 14, 2026

HANNAFORD： Ottawa’s six stealth attacks on your freedom of speech

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