Justin Trudeau continues to embarrass Canada on an international level.
The Trudeau government’s new hate speech bill, dubbed the Online Harms Bill, is raising eyebrows from people as far away as England.
The bill could see offenders face life in prison for “hateful” words posted on the internet, leading many to describe the bill as “Orwellian.”
However, British columnist Toby Young accused the Trudeau government in a recent article of going farther than anything the late author George Orwell envisioned:
The Canadian proposal is, by some distance, the worst. It’s so dystopian, even George Orwell and Philip K. Dick failed to anticipate it. Discrimination is already banned under the Canadian Human Rights Act, but the new law will expand the definition of ‘discrimination’ to include online speech ‘likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group’. To those worrywarts who are anxious about the risk that this new law might be weaponised by woke activists, the government has said that ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’ are not the same as ‘disdain’ or ’dislike’, which will still be permitted (thank you, Mr Trudeau), or speech that ‘discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends’.
In Canada the authorities will be able to place people under house arrest for ‘hateful’ things they haven’t said
Which raises the question: who gets to decide what speech falls foul of this new standard? And what qualifies them to make these Solomon-like judgments, parsing the difference between ‘dislike’ (acceptable) and ‘detest’ (verboten)? That job will fall to a new national agency called the Digital Safety Commission, comprised of five commissioners and an army of bureaucratic busybodies, which will have the same powers as a federal court, save for the fact that it won’t be bound by ‘any technical or legal rules of evidence’. (Points to Kafka for anticipating that.)
Under the bill, anyone can accuse you of the ‘communication of hate speech’ and if the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal finds you guilty it can order you to pay up to $20,000 to ‘any victim’ and $50,000 to the state (on pain of imprisonment). No limit on how many times a malefactor can be ordered to pay these fines, obviously, so bankruptcy looms for Jordan Peterson. And it isn’t just stuff you’ve posted after the new law comes into force you can get into trouble for – oh, no – but anything you’ve posted, ever, dating back to the dawn of the internet. In other words, it’s a gold-embossed invitation to offence archaeologists to do their worst, with the prospect of a $20,000 reward if they hit paydirt. The only way to protect yourself is to go through all your social media accounts and painstakingly delete anything remotely controversial you’ve ever said.
Read the full article by Toby Young at the Spectator here.
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