Small Victory: Liberals Split Bill C-63 in Two: The Draconian Sections Will Follow in A Later Piece of Legislation

[It’s a small victory and buys us time. Parliament is so clogged with backlog, two months of filibuster because the Liberals won’t turn over all the documents Parliament ordered in regards to the Green Technology Fund scandal, and, of course, the crisis Canada faces because President Trump may impose tariffs because of our lax border and thriving fentanyl industry, that virtually nothing is getting done as we hurtle to a federal election which can’t come soon enough. So, the Trudeau government in splitting the noxious “Online Harms” Act, Bill C-63 into two: The first bill will deal with ponderous new bodies to harass Internet Service Providers to restrict kiddie porn, revenge pron, etc., which are already restricted.. The projected cost of this new censorship apparatus is estimate to be $200-million and it may take many months to train staff. It is this bill which will have have priority.

The more police state provisions — life in prison for “hate motivated” crimes, life in prison for advocating genocide, prior restraint a judge can order if convinced a person May commit a “hate crime”, the return of Sec. 13 and the tyranny of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, where there can be anonymous complainants and astronomical fines — will be put into another Bill which has lesser priority.

The usual proponents of censorship aren’t happy. The Jewish lobby, primarily the old Canadian Jewish Congress, has been the prime instigator, beginning in the 1930s of anti-free speech laws. It’s successor is angry. “The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs expressed concern about what it said appeared to be the government backing away from the part of the bill meant to address rising acts of antisemitism. At a time of widespread antisemitism, we are very disappointed that the Liberal government is, in effect, dropping the parts of the bill which could have had an impact on the spread of Jew-hatred online,” said  Richard Marceau, vice-president of external affairs and general counsel. “It is time for the government to commit to fighting antisemitism concretely.” (National Post, December 5, 2024) “Anti-Semitism” is serious criticism of Jews or the State of Israel.

An the other side of the infernal quarrel in the Middle East also is unhappy. “”A spokeswoman for the National Council of Canadian Muslims says in a statement the organization “has been in favour of hate crime reform and balanced online harms legislation that respects civil liberties.” “We are committed to working with all parties to make sure that things move forward positively, but we are seeing more and more examples of how hate crime legislation and the Criminal Code in relation to hate isn’t being appropriately applied,” wrote Fatema Abdalla.” — Paul Fromm]

Trudeau Liberals blink on censorship bill — but the fight isn’t over!

The Liberals say they’re still committed to bringing in the worst parts of the ‘online harms bill’, but now they’ve split the legislation in two parts. It’s a win for freedom of speech and the over 75,000 Canadians who have signed our Stop The Censorship petition. But the fight isn’t over yet.

Ezra Levant

Ezra Levant   |   December 04, 2024   |   News Analysis

Breaking news: the Trudeau Liberals blinked on their censorship law, Bill C-63. They haven’t cancelled it. But they’ve decided to split it into two parts. They’re proceeding quickly on the first part, which includes things like banning revenge porn and sex trafficking.

(By the way, revenge porn was already banned by Stephen Harper 10 years ago, and child porn was banned decades ago — those were obviously added to the censorship bill as a distraction from their real purpose.)

But they say they’re going to split off the censorship provisions and go slower on those.

This is a win for freedom of speech — and the 75,267 Canadians who have signed our petition.

PETITION: Stop the Censorship!

76,108 signatures

Goal: 100,000 signatures

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Please sign this petition to demand that Justin Trudeau repeal all of his censorship legislation, including his latest “Online Harms Act.”

But as you can see in the video here, the Liberals still say they’re committed to bringing in those censorship provisions. So this could be a trick, to make us lower our guard.

I have personally heard C-63 referred to by several journalists as the “kill Rebel” bill. Of course it is: because we’re one of the few news outlets that doesn’t take money from Trudeau, so we’re one of the few news outlets that can’t be controlled by Trudeau.

If Trudeau can’t use the carrot with us, he’ll use the stick: censorship.

Even though he’s hated by his own party, Trudeau has the votes to smash this through Parliament. He supports this censorship, and he has a deep, personal hatred for Rebel News. You’ve seen his bodyguards beat up our reporter David Menzies; and Chrystia Freeland’s bodyguards beat up David, too. If they’ll commit an assault against our reporters — breaking the law — they’d obviously think nothing of changing the law to get us, either.

And both Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and the separatist Bloc Québécois have said they support the censorship provisions, too. That’s enough to ram this through.

I’m glad Trudeau blinked today. But it’s nothing more than a blink. If we’re to take the Liberals at their word, they still intend to pass this law — just under a different name.

C-63 will create three new different censorship agencies in Canada. It would give the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to investigate anyone in Canada for anything they post online — or have ever posted online in the past. It would set up $20,000 bounties for anyone who makes a complaint that’s successful; it would give the courts the power to make hate speech “restraining orders”, to stop people from saying things even before they do, even putting them under house arrest.

It’s the most draconian censorship bill ever seen in Canada.

Our motto is “telling the other side of the story”. But you can’t do that if the government tells you that you can’t even say something. We constantly challenge government censorship, and we’ve had to spend more than $500,000 this year alone on free speech lawyers.

The fact that Trudeau says he’s going to split the bill in two doesn’t mean he’s done with it. Until this bill is dead, it’s still alive. Don’t let your guard down. We won’t.

We have sued Trudeau to stop his censorship more than any other news organization. We’ve hired free speech lawyers to fight against censorship in the B.C. Supreme Court, Alberta Court of King’s Bench, the Federal Court, the Federal Court of Appeal and the Ontario Superior Court. We are even seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada itself.

There’s Big Money in Fighting Racism & Curbing Free Speech

There’s Big Money in Fighting Racism & Curbing Free Speech

  Egyptian-born, hijab wearing Amira Elghawaby is Canada’s newly minted Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. The job comes with a $6.5-million budget — no word on how much the highly critical Elghawaby will pocket. She’s no friend of free speech. She’s been a board member of the anti-free speech Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) — that’s Bernie Farber and Richard Warman, both decades-long advocates of state censorship of speech. She currently works for the Muslim Association of Canada and the National Council of Canadian Muslims. She worked in communications with the taxpayer-funded Canadian Race Relations Foundation. She’s a shrill critic of this country. Terry Glavin in the National Post (February 1, 2023) reports: “As an activist and frequent opinion-pages contributor, Elghawaby has adopted all the respectable standpoints with just the right degree of transgressive élan, rarely too strident or too squishy. She called for removing the Queen as Canada’s head of state and dismissed Canada Day as a festival of ‘Judeo-Christian storytelling.’ She’s been gushing in her praise for Trudeau and backs the Trudeau government’s extremely contentious moves to regulate commentary on the Internet. She’s argued in favour of Muslim prayer rooms in schools [of course, Christian prayers are banned in most public schools], and once blasted the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper as having done more harm to the image of Canadian Muslims than al-Qaida’s atrocities in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.” As she doesn’t like the Queen and believes Canada Day was concocted by Jews and Christians, one wonders why she doesn’t return to Egypt. She quickly ran into a firestorm of protest from across the political spectrum in Quebec for remarks suggesting that Quebec nationalists are Islamophobes. Interestingly, her appointment was endorsed by the loudly anti-free speech Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

The appointment is a shameless attempt for curry favour with the Moslem vote. What is Islamophobia? Literally, it is a fear of Moslems or the Islamic religion. Many people may have good reason to fear radical Islam or the religion itself which has often been a religion of conquest. Does the government have any role in telling people what to think or feel? Certainly not in a country that values freedom. Islamophobia like “anti-Semitism” — yes we have a Special Representative (the well-connected Irwin Cotler) to combat that too –is a vague term and all too often means any criticism of Moslems or Islam.

If any group needs a special representative, it is Christians. Not only is there barely disguised disdain and hostility from many Canadian governments to Christianity, but 2021 saw a cross-Canada terrorist campaign of arson and vandalism of Christian churches. Writing for True North (August 21, 2021) Cosmin Dzsurdza reported: “Sixty-eight Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated since the announcement last month of the apparent discovery of graves found near a residential school in Kamloops, BC. Since then, three other first nations have announced similar findings of burial sites located near former residential schools. In response to these announcements, far-left radicals have used this opportunity as an excuse to terrorize Catholic and other Christian communities by targeting churches. Twenty-five churches across the country have been lit on fire in the past two months, many of them have been completely destroyed.” Far from appointing a special representative to combat Christophobia, Trudeau said that, while he didn’t support arson and vandalism, he could understand it.

There she is, second from the left, beside the monumentally incompetent fellow Moslem Ahmed Hussen, ex-immigration minister who presided over the Roxham Road invasion, and now is Minister of Housing, Inclusion & Diversity; beside him iis Omar Alghabra, the Saudi Moslem and witless
Transportation Minister who blamed Canadian travellers last summer for airport delays, saying
had forgotten how to unpack their laptops for screening.