Renowned psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson lost his court challenge against Ontario’s college of psychologists today. The college sought to force Peterson into training on how to conduct himself on social media as a condition of remaining a licensed psychologist. Peterson took the matter to an Ontario court, which ruled today that the condition doesn’t actually hinder his right to freedom of expression. Canadian Constitution Foundation lawyer Josh Dehaas joins the Andrew Lawton Show to discuss.
Also, Catherine McKenna thinks Conservative politicians need their own mandatory education on climate change. True North’s Andrew Lawton weighs in.
Plus, is artificial intelligence leading to the end of thought? Christopher Snook tackles that question in an essay for C2C Journal titled “AI, the Destruction of Thought and the End of the Humanities.” He joins the show to explain.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at a gaming convention in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 13, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters) Canada
Musk Says Federal Internet Regulation Bill ‘An Attempt to Muzzle’ Canadians
By Peter Wilson December 14, 2022 Updated: December 14, 2022 biggersmallerPrint 0:003:08
Elon Musk recently commented once again on the Liberal government’s pending internet regulation legislation, this time saying it sounds like “an attempt to muzzle” Canadians.
Musk was responding to a Twitter post by Canadian journalist Andrew Lawton, who wrote on Dec. 13 that the federal government “wants to regulate internet content and deputize social media companies to enforce ‘hate speech’ bans.”
“I hope [Elon Musk] takes a stand against this,” Lawton wrote.
“Sounds like an attempt to muzzle the voice of the people of Canada,” Musk responded on Dec. 14.
Musk earlier responded to a comment regarding Bill C-11 in late October when a Twitter post asked if he would help Canadians “fight back” against the legislation.
“Now that you own Twitter, will you help fight back against Trudeau’s online censorship bill C-11?” said a post by Canada Proud on Oct. 28.
Musk replied, “First I’ve heard.”
Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, is currently pending in the Senate and, if passed and given royal assent, will grant the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulating power over streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube.
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who sponsored the bill, has reiterated in the past that the legislation will not give the CRTC power to regulate the content of individual social media content creators.
However, CRTC chair Ian Scott told a parliamentary committee in May that, within the legislation, “there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.”
Amendments
Senators on the transport and communications committee amended Bill C-11 earlier this week by adding a clause that will prohibit the CBC from publishing or broadcasting sponsored content in the future.
Sen. Percy Downe, who introduced the amendment on Dec. 8, said sponsored content leads to the “cheapening of journalism.”
The government’s Senate representative, Sen. Marc Gold, opposed the amendment.
“The government is of the view that this amendment is not appropriate in the context of this bill,” he said.
A week prior, the same Senate committee voted down an amendment that would’ve limited the CRTC’s scope of regulation under the legislation.
The amendment proposed that only digital content creators with a yearly revenue of $150 million or more be subject to the CRTC’s regulating authority, but was voted down 10-4.
“Many [online content creators] have testified that a financial threshold would be important to help give guidelines to the CRTC on who they can regulate,” said Sen. Pamela Wallin during a Senate transport committee meeting on Nov. 29.
“The government opposes this amendment and thinks it’s not necessary for reasons that it set out,” said Gold.
Two days later, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told Canada’s International Trade Minister Mary Ng that the U.S. is concerned that Bill C-11 could lead to discrimination against American businesses.
“Legislation in the Canadian Parliament … could impact digital streaming services and online news sharing and discriminate against U.S. businesses,” said a U.S. government news release on Nov. 30.
Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground
Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most. His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.
This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff. It is how he actually thinks. It is not like we had no warning.
The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment. This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted. It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead. It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.
In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest. The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite. His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates. The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated. Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on. Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA. There was no reasonable justification for this. It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick. The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.
Remember that. The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest. That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist. Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years. Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet. The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw. Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom. Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced. In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.
The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest. The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer. The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd. This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.
Note that I said “until this week”. There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them. This time it was violence by the state. On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will. Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them. Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police. Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas. No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.
The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked, The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC. Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses. The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet. It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments. The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.
His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well. The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.
Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.
None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone. Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership. Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”. Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars. When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy. He did so with a straight face. The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free. The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea. A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out. Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few private media companies who continue to do this. He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him. Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views. Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.
When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other. It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship. This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like. Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.
By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before. Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will. Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all. —
Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most. His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.
This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff. It is how he actually thinks. It is not like we had no warning.
The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment. This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted. It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead. It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.
In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest. The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite. His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates. The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated. Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on. Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA. There was no reasonable justification for this. It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick. The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.
Remember that. The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest. That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist. Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years. Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet. The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw. Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom. Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced. In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.
The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest. The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer. The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd. This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.
Note that I said “until this week”. There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them. This time it was violence by the state. On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will. Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them. Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police. Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas. No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.
The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked, The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC. Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses. The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet. It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments. The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.
His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well. The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.
Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.
None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone. Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership. Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”. Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars. When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy. He did so with a straight face. The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free. The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea. A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out. Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few private media companies who continue to do this. He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him. Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views. Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.
When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other. It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship. This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like. Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.
Ezra Levant is the president of The Rebel News Network Ltd.
JEFF MCINTOSH/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Ezra Levant is the president of The Rebel News Network Ltd.
It’s become standard practice for the Liberal government to refuse to accredit me or other reporters from my company, Rebel News, at press conferences. Other right-leaning reporters are banned, too. But, at a recent press conference at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, there I was, smiling at Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland from the front row.
I had been smuggled into the room by the former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Okay – that sounds more dramatic than it really was. The former director of the CIA is Mr. Pompeo himself. And he didn’t really smuggle me in. But he did let me walk into the news conference as part of his own delegation, which included U.S. journalists. And I doubt he told Ms. Freeland about it.
That’s just as shocking as if it had really been a CIA operation: The only way I was able to attend a news conference by my own government was with the assistance of a foreign government.
It happened in the summer, too, when Ms. Freeland co-hosted a media freedom conference in London along with her then-British counterpart, Jeremy Hunt.
There, Ms. Freeland gave a speech and invited journalists to a question-and-answer session. But her staff singled out two of the seven reporters who showed up and told them they would not be welcome.
There just wasn’t enough room for all seven, they said. The Globe and Mail, CTV, CBC, Global TV and Al Jazeera could come. But the two conservative reporters could not – Andrew Lawton, the former Sun newspaper columnist who now writes for True North Canada; and Sheila Gunn Reid, a reporter for my company, Rebel News.
Mr. Lawton and Ms. Gunn Reid had been accredited by the British government, which organized the conference. Both had crowdfunded their travel from Canada. It was literally a conference about media freedom. But not for journalists with the wrong politics.
The other journalists waiting to talk with Ms. Freeland – including the Al Jazeera reporter – were stunned by her attempt to de-platform Mr. Lawton and Ms. Gunn Reid. And to their credit, they refused to attend the news conference without them.
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Faced with a boycott, Ms. Freeland blinked and grudgingly allowed some media freedom at the media freedom conference. Ms. Gunn Reid got to ask her questions. Why had Ms. Freeland asked the UN to ban Ms. Gunn Reid from their conferences? Why had the Liberals refused to respond to her Access to Information requests?
Ms. Freeland’s answer was shocking, especially in juxtaposition to what she had just said in her official speech: “We all need to defend our independent press – even, and perhaps especially, when it criticizes us.”
That’s the script she read when she was onstage with celebrities such as Amal Clooney. But when it was just Canadian reporters, Ms. Freeland let the mask slip.
“You are here asking me a question, and that’s my choice and my decision,” she said. In fact, her choice had been to exclude Ms. Gunn Reid. But do press freedoms really require her permission?
“I do also think that it is important for governments, for countries, for multilateral organizations to be thoughtful about media organizations that are truly independent and truly impartial,” she continued.
Ms. Freeland didn’t explain that accusation. She had no problem inviting Al Jazeera, the state broadcaster of Qatar. Later that day, she privately welcomed the Foreign Minister of Pakistan to the conference – one of the most brutal censors in the world.
Ms. Freeland did not reject censoring journalists. She justified it, if it was “thoughtful.” She ended by accusing Rebel News of being white supremacists.
It’s standard now.
Indeed, the Parliamentary Press Gallery – the reporters’ guild that controls access to many media conferences – has banned us without notice, explanation or any appeal. China’s state broadcaster, Xinhua, is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. But we’re banned.
Not everyone appreciates our point of view. But we clearly speak to many Canadians. Our reporters have been accredited by governments around the world, in places such as Sweden, the Netherlands and India, and even in partly free countries such as Iraq and Morocco. Only Canada has banned us.
I’m not surprised the Liberals don’t like us. We ask prickly questions. But that’s part of our democratic system. If you need help understanding the problem, imagine if former prime minister Stephen Harper had banned liberal journalists from his government events.
Ms. Freeland’s conduct is remarkable given her former career as a journalist.
Liberals need to know how freedom of the press works – it’s a gift you have to give to your opponents, if you want it for yourself.
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