A recent blog post from Google Canada tells the story. The internet giant has stated that “there areaspects of the government’s proposal that could be vulnerable to abuse and lead to over removal of legitimate content.”
In what has to be the most hated piece of proposed legislation in modern times, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he has had enough. Tired of the tedium of freedom of speech, Mr. Trudeau is calling for the implementation of an internet censorship program within 100 days of return to Parliament.
In reaction, former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies stated that “granting a government agency authority over legal user generated content constitutes an assault on the foundations of democracy.”
Canada is currently on a path to regulating online harms that internet authorities such as Global Network Initiative, Ranking Digital Rights, internet scholar Daphne Keller and legal scholar Michael Geist have decried as among the worst in the world.
“Canadians won’t notice the strong arm of government controlling their internet posting and browsing right away. This is going to be creeping censorship – death by a thousand bureaucratic edicts.”
“The million little affronts to free speech will begin two to five years from now when the big targets have been mostly subdued.”
In other words, the stifling of diversity of opinion on the internet will unfold in the fashion of all Trudeau-led social transformations: incrementally, for the purpose of seducing Canadians into passivity and acceptance.
Another method of seduction reeks of Trudeau-brand neo-liberalism: a fusing together of draconian measures with human rights-based altruism.
The online harms bill would target online posts in five categories — terrorist content, content that incites violence, hate speech, intimate images shared non-consensually, and child sexual exploitation content.
What sensible person doesn’t want child abuse to be curtailed? On this basis, censorship Bill C-10 and Bill C-36 can be perceived as wholly benevolent– meanwhile, the devil remains in the details.
According to a National Post article from July, 2021, the Liberal government’s online harms bill would create a new regulator for illegal content with sweeping powers that critics say raise concerns about secret proceedings and Canadians’ Charter Rights:
Meaning authorities would maintain the right to walk into the homes of Canadians to investigate hate crime allegations. Memories of George Orwell’s “1984?” Or rather, the creeping phenomenon of neo-totalitarianism comes to Canada.
According to Daphne Keller, Director of Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, Canada’s proposal “is like a list of the worst ideas around the world– – the ones human rights groups have been fighting in the EU, India, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and elsewhere.”
Guess who agrees?
– Arab Canadian Lawyers Association – British Columbia Civil Liberties Association – Canada Palestine Association – Canada Palestine Support Network – Canadian BDS Coalition – Canadian Arab Federation – Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) – Canadian Foreign Policy Institute – Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) – Canadians for Peace and Justice in Kashmir (CPJK) – Canadians United Against Hate – Catholics for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land – Community Coalition Against Racism – Continuing Education Students’ Association – Independent Jewish Voices Canada – International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group – Islamic Social Services Association – Jewish Liberation Theology Institute – Niagara Movement for Justice in Palestine-Israel, ON Canada – Oakville Palestinian Rights Association – PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity) – Palestinian Canadian Congress – Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario – Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project
That’s right–all these multicultural organizations have signed a petition that opposes Trudeau’s Canadian Internet Firewall Proposal.
Catching our collective breath, we ponder the ramifications of a comprehensive rejection of the Trudeau government’s proposal. To what extent will this affect internet censorship?
Cultural Action Party has an opinion– the answer is tono extent at all. In this dynamic we discover an axiomatic truth regarding contemporary Canada: what government wants, government gets.
Democracy, or neo-communism? Time and again, Team Trudeau utilize the same methodology. Position the agenda as one of social benevolence. It is in the best interests of society.
According to a poll from Blacklock’s Reporter, 80% of Canadians believe the online content they consume is factual and truthful. 66% feel confident in their ability to tell if online content is fair and balanced.
Let CAP deliver a conclusion in our typically candid manner: no one wants what the ruling Liberal government is proposing. Except perhaps Canadian media organizations. After all, if Bill C-10 and Bill C-36 pass, it will re-route revenues lost to them resulting from the rise of alternate media– aka the internet
We arrive at the crux of the matter. In a pattern which encapsulates post-modern Canadian society, what we have here is a battle of government/media versus the people.
Arjun Singh: Left wing values have invaded Canada’s legal system and diminished our charter rights
Why Canada should abolish Section 1 Author of the article: Arjun Singh, Special to National Post Publishing date: Sep 23, 2021 • September 23, 2021 • 4 minute read • 370 Comments
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Photo by The Canadian Press
By all accounts, vaccine passports are here. Quebec, with the most provincial chutzpah, first introduced them, and B.C. followed suit. As have Ontario and Alberta, after Doug Ford’s U-turn from his “Hard no” earlier this year and Jason Kenney’s similar opposition . Outside government, scores of businesses are mandating vaccinations for employees, with proof being required — else, they be terminated.
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One would think, in governments’ cases, that the law would safeguard citizens’ freedoms. Indeed, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that Canadians have the “freedom of conscience and religion” (Section 2a), freedom of movement within Canada (Section 6) and “equal protection … before the law” (Section 15). At the very least, this would prevent the imposition of vaccine passport requirements on citizens — vaccinated or otherwise — for travelling, let alone while accessing basic services: for most charter rights are fundamental. Quebec’s programme and the Trudeau Liberals’ recent federal vaccine mandate for flights and trains, thus, ought to be dismissed.
But this is Canada: where, for years, left-wing Liberal values have slowly invaded our legal system. This was true for Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliot, as it is now. Hence, in 1982, when the charter was introduced, its first section included the following proviso: “The Canadian Charter … guarantees the rights and freedoms set out subject only to reasonable limits … as can be justified in a free and democratic society.” In essence, the charter rights of anyone may be limited for what the state considers “reasonable.”
By itself, this clause is only partly dangerous. Absolute freedom, in any context — especially if causing physical harm — is undesirable; as the ever-pithy Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “the right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” But, as most would agree, allowing the government to judge whether its own acts are “reasonable” is, itself, an invitation for power to abuse such privilege. From Quebec’s strict curfews to Ontario’s police crackdowns, the pandemic and its oppressive responses in the name of “science” have laid that truth bare.
In response, one would expect the courts, upon petition, to step in and stop government overreach, being the constitution’s supposedly “non-partisan” referees. Until 1986, in Canada, that was true — until left-wing jurists, after rewriting the law, captured the judiciary that interpreted them. That year the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision by Trudeau appointees, established the Oakes Test in R. v. Oakes to determine what restrictions on charter rights were “reasonable.” Among others, it allowed the curbing of charter freedoms in the name of “a commitment to social justice and equality” and “respect for cultural and group identity.”
With this decision, a faction of activist judges — seeing the constitution as a ‘living tree’ to be pruned without the people’s consent — reset the foundations of freedom overnight, bending them towards progressive politics. Instead of having minimal restraints for public order, all charter freedoms could now be legally impeded in the name of contested left-wing concepts like “social justice” and protecting “group identity.”
Worse, neither did the court define what these terms meant, enabling the left — via its dominance of social science academia — to influence their meanings, suiting the moment’s political objectives. As its late Chief Justice, Antonio Lamer, himself said, Section 1 empowered judges to “make essentially … a political call.” In effect, the constitutional “referees” changed the rules mid-game, to ensure their side would always win.
Thus, with Oakes, the dangers of Section 1 were fully unleashed, and have since beat a toll on Canadians’ civil liberties — capturing our constitution for the supremacy of “woke” social mores. “Whoever would overthrow a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech,” said Benjamin Franklin; and, true to form, it was one of the first casualties. In the Keegstra and Andrews decisions, the Supreme Court used Section 1 to allow the criminalization of speech “inciting hatred” — an ambiguous offence, at best, which effectively curbs free speech for the sake of hurt feelings. Once more, in the Little Sisters case, Section 1 rubber-stamped the Chretien Liberals’ banning of LGBTQ books’ import for their “obscenity.” This spate has continued, with governments and courts in concert over the years using Section 1 to curb the presumption of innocence until proven guilty (R. v. Stone), conservatives’ participation in elections (Harper v. Canada) and, most recently, to ban travel by citizens during COVID-19 (Taylor v. The Queen).
In defending such overreach on the charter, the progressive establishment has often asserted the notion of “collective rights” as the reason for restraining individuals, e.g., “safe spaces” precluding free speech to avoid public offence. There are few greater absurdities than this; “rights” exist to protect individuals and minorities from tyranny of the majority, which — with strength in numbers — needs no further safety in a democracy. By claiming a “collective right” of any kind, the Canadian left turns the very notion of rights on its head. It is legal fiction at best, and a neo-Marxist praxis at worst — a desperate attempt to stir up “class conflict” between the majority and minority where none ought to exist.
In the future, it’s highly likely that Section 1 will be used again to uphold encroachments upon citizens’ rights — from vaccine passports to online censorship (e.g., Bill C-10) and others. Canadians must, hence, stand on guard for thee and expunge this threat — regardless of the high bar for constitutional change. If Section 1 is the end of charter rights, we must end it, first.
Arjun Singh is a recent graduate of political science from the University of Toronto.
The “experts” that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus. They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.
Think about what they are now claiming. If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is – and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic – belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the “flatten the curve” strategy. Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone’s most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations. It was the public health orders themselves – not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others’ rights and freedoms – that gave us the variants. It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available. Natural immunity, as even the “experts” now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases. When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio. When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it. When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.
For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern. The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring. With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021. It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021. Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer. How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?
The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable. The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights. The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.
It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.
Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures. There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”. This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical. Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections. The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors. That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.
With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination. At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment. This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.
Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing. While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown. The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature. The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister. In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the Jews to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.
What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon. When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community. This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms. In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not. In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis. Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices. Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.
Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon. While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject. Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence. He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation. While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this: the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice. By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature. When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment. The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice. As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people. The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice. It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system. In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim. That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.
What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices. This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works. One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind. If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26), and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases. This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance. Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.
I alluded earlier to one such example, the scapegoating of the Jews by the Third Reich, of which it is unlikely that there is anyone living who is not familiar with the tremendous violent actions it produced. Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today. In Hitler’s case, the group designated as the scapegoat was a real religious/ethnic group the identity of which had been well-established millennia prior to the Nazi regime. When, however, the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, led by V. I. Lenin and committed to his interpretation of Marxist ideology, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat.
Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers. Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted. The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin sought to unify the other peasants in support of his regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land. After Stalin succeeded Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy. In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class. The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).
“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people. The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak. Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust. Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust. In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily. Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports. While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed. So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance. So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine. There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice. It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights. Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.
The Nazi scapegoating of the Jews, the Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation. If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies. In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens). These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims. The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.
The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer. They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open. Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel. Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time. — Gerry T. NealAdolf Hitler, Atonement, COVID-19, Joseph Stalin, Justin Trudeau, kulaks, pharmakos, René Girard, Robert Conquest, scapegoat, Stephen King, Thargelia, V. I. Lenin
Maxime Bernier Sets Penticton Audience on Fire: “When Tyranny Takes Control, Revolution is a Necessity!”
Penticton, British Columbia, September 5, 2021.A confident Maxime Bernier wowed an enthusiastic rally of over 300 people today at Penticton’s Gyro Park. The People’s Party of Canada founder and leader called for a freedom revolution by Canada’s Dispossessed Majority: ” “When Tyranny Takes Control, Revolution is a Necessity! … Our goal is to unite all Canadians under the freedom banner,” he added. I want to live in a country described by former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. “I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. “ Mr. Bernier, the first federal leader to visit the Okanagan this election cycle took aim at Prime Minister Justin Tudeau: “Justin Trudeau is the most divisive prime minister in Canadian history. “He has divided us by race, by religion and now by vaccination status,” he said to enthusiastic applause. Many of his supporters held anti-forced vaccination signs and were veterans of END THE LOCKDOWN rallies over the past 18 months in Kelowna and Penticton. Mr. Bernier is the only federal leader dissenting from the COVID-hysteria and freedom sapping policies many politicians have imposed. “This virus only endangers those elderly people with several co-morbidities,” he argued. There should be no forced masking, no imposed vaccines and no more lockdowns, he said to prolonged applause. It’s time to develop and made-in-Canada health policy, to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) and fire “that Theresa”(Tam) woman.
“The People’s Party of Canada will fight for Canadians regardless of their race or sex or vaccination status,” he promised.”We want our country back. It’s all about government control versus individual freedom.” He said that last week, the mainstream media, which usually ignores him and the People’s Party, called to see if he would condemn protesters, many from the END THE LOCKDOWN movement, which picked Justin Trudeau’s meetings in Bolton and Cambridge, Ontario. “I told them, no. I am the only leader not condemning them. I am encouraging them to speak out for freedom.”
Mr. Bernier noted the bias of much of the media and the discriminatory exclusion from this week’s leadership debates. He urged supporters to spread the word about the party and its platform on the social media: “Be active on the social media,” he urged, “as most of the mainstream media will not be covering us.”
Maxime Bernier assailed promises by both Justin Trudeau and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole to balance the budget in the distant future, without cuts by magic. This is impossible, he scoffed. The People’sParty is not afraid to cut programmes, he said, for instance: “cut foreign aid by $5-billion and keep the money in Canada; cut corporate welfare — no more handouts to Bombardier and General Motors — by $10-billion; cut the $1.5-billion that funds the CBC.” The crowd exploded with cheers at these proposed cuts.
The People’s Party of Canada local candidates — Sean Taylor for South Okanagan-West Kootenay and Kathryn McDonald for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola — were introduced and distributed literature and lawn signs to eager volunteers.Maxime Bernier stayed for almost an hour afterwards posing for photos with well wishers and answering questions. He then headed up the road to Kelowna for a mid-afternoon rally that attracted about 400 people.
Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression, commented: “I’ve been attending political rallies since 1965 and this is the first one that ever started on time. Kudos to Maxime Bernier and the local organizers. ” — Paul Fromm
A Coptic Christian church was recently burned to the ground—not in Egypt, where the torching of Coptic churches is not an uncommon occurrence, but in Canada, also known as “the church-burning centre of the Western world.”
In the early morning hours of July 19, St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in Surrey, which served 500 families and provided food for the homeless, was set aflame and completely destroyed. Only one charred wall remains standing.
According to the report, “The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but Surrey RCMP [police] said it is being treated as ‘suspicious.’ The St. George Coptic Orthodox Church was also the target of an attempted arson just last Wednesday, although authorities do not know if the two incidents are connected.”
What, exactly, do Canadian mounted police find “suspicious”? The church was clearly targeted for arson, as evidenced by the fact that it was targeted for arson a few days earlier, and at the very same time (between 2:30-4:00 a.m.). On July 14, surveillance video captured a woman lighting a fire, one that failed to catch, at the church door. That the “authorities do not know if the two incidents are connected” seems like wishful thinking.
What is deserving of the term “suspicious” is that, days after the church reported the first failed arson attempt to police—which should have led to better awareness and security for the church—another successful arson attempt took place.
After expressing its “immense sadness and pain” at the loss of the church, a statement from the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Mississauga called on Premier John Horgan and the authorities to expedite the investigation, correctly observing that “The timing of this fire … raises many questions about what the authorities did to protect our church, especially considering the attempt on the same church this past Wednesday.”
Similarly, congregant Nancy Khalil, whose family helped build the now destroyed sanctuary, as well as dozens of “priceless” hand-painted icons, also expressed disappointment that “neither provincial nor federal leaders had yet spoken out about the fire.” “It hurts,” she said, “to see no word from the government. I’m very, very much hoping for at least a statement from the premier to condemn what is happening.”
She shouldn’t hold her breath. Canada’s leaders couldn’t care less about yet another church burning to the ground. Before this Coptic church was burned, at least 50 other churches, mostly Catholic, a few Anglican, were also vandalized or torched in Canada. Here’s how Canada’s leading voices responded:
Harsha Walia, the head of British Columbia’s Civil Liberties Association—which claims to “promote, defend, sustain, and extend civil liberties and human rights”—tweeted: “Burn it all down.”
Prominent Newfoundland lawyer, Caitlin Urquhart, feels the same way—“Burn it all down.”
Heidi Mathews of Harvard Law School bizarrely described the vandalization and torching of churches as “the right of resistance to extreme and systemic injustice.”
As for the prime minister himself, Justin Trudeau, after offering the usual lip service and saying that ongoing church attacks are “unacceptable,” said: “I understand the anger that’s out there … against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real, and it is fully understandable given the shameful history that we’re all becoming more and more aware of.”
So attacks on Christian churches are “unacceptable”—but they’re also “understandable.” Considering that these two words neutralize each other, Trudeau’s stance is impotent, his words meaningless.
But why are they “understandable” in the first place? According to Canadian “mainstream” media—all of which are left of Left—unmarked graves of Natives were recently discovered by boarding schools, and the Catholic Church is being accused of killing them and trying to cover it up. The problem, however, is that this widely shared narrative appears to be inherently false (see here and here): These graves were once marked and therefore known, and most of those buried in them died of natural causes.
More specifically, the deaths mostly took place in the early 1800s. Apparently, some plague—epidemics were especially common back then—broke out in these church-sponsored boarding schools for natives, in part due to the prevailing hygiene and lack of proper medical treatment (in comparison to modern standards and technology).
At any rate, that the current accusation against the Catholic Church was always a pretext to justify anti-Christianism in general is amply demonstrated by this most recent torching of a Coptic Orthodox church: What on earth do the Copts, Egypt’s native Christians, who began migrating to Canada over a century after these graves were first dug, have to do with this issue?
Nothing, they just happen to be Christian—and that’s apparently all that matters, all that warrants hate crimes and indifference to them in Leftist Canada. Evil, after all, never needs an excuse to manifest itself, though a pretext always offers good cover.
Paul Fromm on the Great Reset & Trudeau’s Plans to Stifle the Internet — Talk Given at Vancouver, July 17, 2021
The Post COVID Totalitarian Agenda — Mark Carney’s “Great Reset Dream” for Our Grim Future & Trudeau’s Anti-Free Speech Plans for the Future
* The Great Reset, the conspiratorial architects, Mark Carney and Karl Schwab
* A future of poverty, limited travel, few cars, little heat & less meat
*Trudeau’s imposed silence — Bill C-10(gagging the Internet) & Bill C-36 (preventing serious criticism of privileged minorities online) https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZUEeqRICKSO2/
Support Derek Sloan’s Fight for Personal Freedom & Democracy
Over the past 15 months, it has sometimes been difficult to fathom whether a Public Health COVID-19 policy has come about from rank ineptitude or abject tyranny.
In the case of COVID vaccines now being pushed on children as young as 12 who do not require parental consent to get one, it may be one, or it may be both, but it’s definitely utter madness and it must be stopped! Canadian children who have already had their lives ruined by lockdowns and restrictions are now having their health put at risk through coercion to take an experimental vaccine for a disease that poses virtually no threat to them at all. Many adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, in both adults and children, are now being registered in Canada and around the world.
Please sign my e-petitionto suspend these injections for children under the age of 18 until adequate, peer-reviewed, published studies featuring long-term data can establish that these injections are safe.
The health of the Canadian people isn’t the only thing that’s threatened by the reaction of the political class to COVID-19. Anyone who’s paying attention has to be concerned about the health of the country itself, as its one hundred and fifty-fourth birthday approaches.
On Tuesday, the House of Commons voted on whether or not to adopt a Bloc motion declaring it irresponsible to hold a federal election during COVID-19.The final vote was 330 to 1, in favour of the motion. I was the only one who cast a vote against it. Click here. I was also the only one to vote against Bill C-19 put forward by the Liberals to amend the Canada Elections Act, allowing for the use of mail in ballots. They don’t call me an independent MP for nothing.
I believe that the right thing is the right thing, no matter how many or how few people are doing it. I did the right thing in voting against that motion. Democracy is stronger than any virus, and any suspension of democracy, no matter how “temporary”, is the surest road to ensuring its permanent demise.
As real and frightening as the authoritarian threat to Canada’s traditions of democracy and freedom have been during this crisis, the truth is prevailing. Our U.S. neighbours, as they overcome irrational fear and return to normal life, are taking note.
Last Thursday, I appeared on ‘The Tipping Point with Kara McKinney’, on the One America News Network (OAN), reaching 35 million American homes. The response has been huge, and in large part it consists of Americans shocked to learn of the degree to which liberties have been trampled in the name of the “common good” up here in Canada.
It continues to be my privilege and honour to fight as hard as I can for those liberties. On Friday, I rose in the House to question the government on the glaring double standard that exists when it comes to peaceful protests in this country. To hear the non-answer I was given, click here. While those who attend freedom rallies are vilified, and receive court summonses and harassment from the police, other types of protests, including the one attended by Justin Trudeau last summer, are allowed to proceed unmolested.
Our Charter rights are the same for everyone. I’d like to know whether this government supports the rights of all Canadians or not. And if not, why not? Speaking of freedom rallies, I was lucky enough to have a busy Sunday full of them.
There were 1,000 people in Aylmer, hundreds in Woodstock, and over 3,000 in Waterloo.It’s truly wonderful to be part of this movement as it grows. This has been a harsh awakening, but more and more Canadians are waking up to the fact that we no longer live in a democracy.
Authoritarians are attempting to control every aspect of our lives through fear and coercion. More and more, Canadians are realizing how unethical it is to quarantine the healthy, to isolate children, to censor science, to shut down debate, and to destroy livelihoods. It’s immoral to spread fear and panic and to promote experimental injections as the necessary price tag for getting our freedoms back. Our freedoms were never theirs to take, and we must take them back, because they won’t be given.
All along, they’ve called us selfish for fighting against lockdowns. That’s the biggest lie of all. It’s not selfish to want to be free, it’s only human. Those who would take your freedom are the only selfish ones. The only rational and ethical thing to do now is to remove every single COVID-19 restriction and return to life and freedom again in Canada! That is what we must never stop fighting for. Join me, and we’ll fight together, and never stop until we win! God Bless You and God Bless Canada.
P.S. When you donate to the Sloan Political Action Coalition, you help me fight for freedom, and you stand with me for truly Canadian values that are more important than ever!
_____ Sloan Political Action Coalition · Canada PO Box 57035 RPO Brittany Glen Mississauga ON L5M 0M5
Protesters have been gathering at Queen’s Park in Toronto in front of the legislature for well over a year, and the protest on Saturday, May 15, was the largest showing since the demonstrations began in 2020.
Thousands, maybe even as many as 50,000, took to the park and streets to rally against the continuing lockdowns in Ontario. Neither the demonstrators, nor the residents in Toronto seem to be adhering to the recently-extended ‘Stay-at-Home’ order issued by Premier Doug Ford, as protesters gathered over the weekend for all types of events.
Whether it was pro-Palestine, pro-Israel or anti-lockdown demonstrations, no tickets appeared to be given in Toronto over the weekend for violating the government order. Simply looking around, the average person wasn’t adhering to the ‘rules’ either.
On May 16, 2021 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (when talking about Israel/Palestine protests) mentioned that all have the right to protest; something that provincial orders have contradicted for many months: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-
However, Canadian politicians have recently been chiming in on pro-freedom demonstrations, with Calgary’s Mayor Nenshi claiming they are “thinly veiled” in “white supremacy.” https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh also believes this is part of “extreme right-wing ideology,” connecting such viewpoints due to protesters “brazenly not follow[ing] public-health guidelines,” as he recently told reporters.
The overwhelming response from protesters was that this is likely an attempt to divide while diminishing the true meaning behind the protest.
None of the demonstrators interviewed mentioned they had ever heard any race-related discussions at the events, nor did they believe that to be the thesis of anyone or anything they experienced since attending the get-togethers.
I have never thought very highly of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was added to our constitution in 1982. Note the wording there. The Charter is not itself our constitution but merely a part of it and a late addition at that. Those who make the mistake of calling the Charter itself our constitution have bought in to the American superstition that a constitution is a piece of paper that keeps a government from going bad through its magical powers. A constitution is a country’s system of law and government, the institutions that comprise it, and the traditions that inform their motions. The largest part of it is unwritten and this is true even in the American republic. Documents like our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the one the Americans call their Constitution are merely parts of the Canadian and American constitutions respectively. They are the laws that define and set limits to the power of government institutions. They have no power to keep government within those limits apart from the loyalty of those who hold public office in obeying them, the willingness of the courts to uphold them, and the faithful vigilance of the public.
My low estimation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not because I don’t like the rights and freedoms that are listed in that document. With a few exceptions, such as the “equality rights” written in Animal Farm style doublespeak in Section 15, these are rights and freedoms that I consider to be among the most valuable elements of our Common Law tradition. It is rather because the Charter has made these rights and freedoms less secure rather than more. In part this is due to flaws in the Charter itself such as the “notwithstanding clause” in Section 33 and the broad loophole in Section 1 which effectually nullify the Charter as far as the whole point of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, that is to say that they are supposed to limit what the government can do so as to protect us from the abusive exercise of its powers, goes. The Charter’s loopholes and exceptions protect the government instead of us and for this reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was right to say that it is not worth the paper it is written on. It is also, however, because the Charter has encouraged a way of thinking about our rights and freedoms in a way that is the fundamental opposite of that which has historically belonged to our Common Law and traditional institutions of constitutional monarchy and parliament. It encourages us to think of our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by government to be limited or taken away by government freely as it sees fit, rather than our own property.
The consequences of this way of thinking having become pervasive have been most evident over the course of the last year. Section 2 of the Charter identifies four freedoms as being fundamental. The first of these is freedom of conscience and religion. The third is the freedom of peaceful assembly. The fourth is the freedom of association. The whole point, remember, of having the Charter designate these freedoms as essential is to place limits on government power, to tell the government that it must keep its hands off of these things. Yet ever since the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic last March, our provincial governments have treated these freedoms as if they were completely non-existent, much less fundamental and protected by constitutional law and the Dominion government has constantly been urging the provincial governments to clamp down on us in violation of these freedoms in even more severe ways.
In 1986 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the case of R v Oakes. David Oakes had been arrested with drugs in his possession and under what was then Section 8 of the Narcotics Control Act was presumed to be guilty of trafficking. He challenged the constitutionality of Section 8 on the grounds that it violated the presumption of innocence, a civil right spelled out in Section 11 (d) of the Charter and which had been long established as part of the Common Law tradition. That the provision of the NCA being challenged did indeed violate the civil right in question was easily demonstrated, but the Court then had to decide whether the violation was justifiable under the “reasonable limits” loophole in Section 1 of the Charter. The Court’s ruling established what has ever since been the litmus test for this question. The Court ruled that for a law which violates a Charter right or freedom to be justifiable under the “reasonable limits” clause, it first had to have a “pressing and substantial” goal. Second, it had to meet the three qualifications of a) being “rationally connected” to the goal of the law, b) only impairing the rights and freedoms in question minimally, and c) not overwhelming the benefit hoped to be achieved with its negative effects.
It is quite obvious that the public health measures fail to meet the second of the three qualifications of the second part of the Supreme Court’s Oakes’ test. When the public health officer tells you that you cannot have any visitors to your home, even if you meet outside, as is currently the case in Manitoba, he is clearly not trying to only “minimally impair” your freedom of association. What he is doing is disregarding freedom of association entirely. The provincial legislature is not allowed to do this constitutionally, nor can it delegate to the public health officer the authority to do so. The legislature cannot delegate what it does not legitimately possess itself. When the public health officer orders churches, synagogues, and mosques not to meet for the largest part of a year, cancels the most important festivals of these religions, and only permits re-opening at a severely reduced capacity that requires churches to betray the tenets of their own faith and turn worshippers away, he is similarly disregarding freedom of conscience and religion rather than making sure that his orders only “minimally impair” this freedom. There is also plenty of evidence that the public health orders fail to meet the third qualification of the Oakes’ test as well. The costs of lockdowns, measured in the destruction of lives due to the breakdown of mental health and the rise in substance abuse and suicides, the erosion of community and social capital, and the devastation of businesses and livelihoods, has been tremendous and far exceeds any questionable benefits of these insane, unjust, evil and oppressive restrictions. Indeed, I believe the case could be made that the public health measures fail every single element of the Oakes’ test.
The provincial governments have gotten away with all this stercus tauri because they have until fairly recently met with only minimal resistance on the part of the Canadian public. This can be attributed to a number of causes. One of these, of course, is the hysterical and irrational fear generated by the mainstream corporate media that have been deceitfully and despicably portraying a virus that produces no to mild symptoms in most people who contract it, from which the vast majority of people who actually do get sick recover, and which in many if not most jurisdictions has an average age of fatality that is higher than the average expected lifespan of the general public, as if it were the second coming of the bubonic plague. Another cause is the new attitude which has been encouraged among Canadians, especially by the Liberals, since 1982, of regarding our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by the government in the Charter rather than what they are, our lawful property as free subjects of the Crown which it is the government’s duty to respect.
The assault on our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have come from the provincial governments. At the same time the second of the four freedoms designated as fundamental in the Charter has come under attack from the Liberals who are in power in the Dominion government. This is the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion and expression”. Whereas our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have never been this besieged before in Canadian history, our freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression has taken hits every time the Liberal Party led by a Trudeau has come to power in Ottawa. It has been less than ten years since we finally got rid of one of the vilest elements of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. While the entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 is, in fact, an affront to freedom of thought because, despite its title, it has nothing to do with protecting our rights either as Canadians or human beings from government abuses, but is instead all about prohibiting the crimethink of discrimination on the part of individual Canadians, Section 13 was the Act’s worst provision by far. By defining any electronic communication of information “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination “to hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination it in effect forbade all negative criticism of groups protected against discrimination or individuals belonging to such groups, regardless of the truthfulness or justice of the criticism in question.
Section 13 was finally abolished during the premiership of Stephen Harper thanks to a private member’s bill repealing the foul section that received enough support from Conservative MPs and Liberal MPs of the pre-Trudeau variety – these had not yet been purged from the party – to pass Parliament. Neither Stephen Harper nor his Minister of Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who is currently overseeing the throwing of pastors in gaol and the barricading of churches in Alberta, had much to do with this for although they had spoken out against Human Rights Tribunals and their unjust infringement upon freedom of thought and speech on their road to power, in office they betrayed most of what they had once stood for, apparently having sold their souls to get there. The demise of Section 13 has long been lamented by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, and when he became Prime Minister in 2015 he dropped a number of hints that he would be seeking to revive it. The appeal of Section 13 to Captain Airhead was based on more than just the fact that it had been originally introduced when his father was in power. More than any previous Liberal leader, Captain Airhead has been of the mindset that once a progressive goal has been attained, all debate about it ought to cease. This was evident even before he became Prime Minister when he purged the party of its pro-life members. More than any previous Liberal leader, he has enthusiastically endorsed fringe progressive causes that could not possibly achieve widespread popular support on their own merits without measures that intimidate and suppress dissenters. More than any previous Liberal leader he has been prone to tell Canadians who disagree with him that they are not welcome in their own country. He has used the expression “there is no place for X in Canada” far more liberally than any previous leader and with a much wider range of Xs. (1) In all of this he has demonstrated the sort of sick, censorious, mindset to which something like Section 13 appeals. In December of 2019, after he won re-election in the sense that he managed to squeak out a plurality despite falling majorly in the polls from where he had been four years previously, he instructed his Cabinet that fighting online “hate speech” would be one of their priorities in the new session of Parliament. Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was specifically charged with finding a way to force social media platforms to remove what the Liberals consider to be “hate speech” within twenty-four hours of being told by the government to do so. This would be Section 13 magnified to the nth degree.
In response to this directive, Guilbeault came up with a bill that pursued the same goal as Section 13 through a different avenue. Last November he introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act” into Parliament. This bill if passed would place internet media under the same regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as older electronic media such as radio and television broadcasters. By going this route, Guilbeault could maintain that his goal was not to censor what individual Canadians post on the internet, but to ensure that the companies that make shows and movies available through online streaming follow the same Canadian content guidelines as other broadcasters, a goal consistent with his portfolio as Heritage Minister. That having been said, the Bill as originally drafted would have given the CRTC regulatory authority over individual Canadians’ user-generated content on social media. When objections to this were raised the Bill was amended to include an exception for individual user-generated content, but this exception was removed in committee late last month around the same time that the government moved to shut down debate on a motion that the Conservatives had introduced calling for a review of whether or not the bill violated the Charter. None of this inspires much confidence in the Heritage Minister’s claim that the aim of this bill is cultural protectionism and not censorship of thought. On Monday, faced with backlash over all of this, Guilbeault promised that they would make it “crystal clear” that the user-generated content will not be subjected to the same sort of regulatory control as television programming. Needless to say, he ought not to be taken at his word on this. Indeed, Michael Geist, the law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been one of the foremost critics of Bill C-10, has already said that the amendment the Heritage Committee proposed on Thursday evening fails to follow through on Guilbeault’s promises.
It is worth observing here that with Bill C-10, Captain Airhead and Steven Guilbeault have returned to the very first thing the original Trudeau Liberals did to control the minds of Canadians and limit their freedom of thought. At the very beginning of the first Trudeau premiership the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker pointed out how the Liberals were threatening freedom of thought through the powers of the CRTC. In a speech entitled “The Twilight of Liberty”, the second included in the collection Those Things We Treasure (Macmillan, 1972), Diefenbaker said:
The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians. Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, (2) private radio and T.V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences. One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government. Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism leveled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will. His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits.
Diefenbaker’s warning of decades ago has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because the CRTC’s official raison d’être is cultural protectionism which appeals to a much broader range of Canadians than its more covert purpose of limiting freedom of thought. Certainly right-of-centre Canadians of the more traditional variety, such as Diefenbaker himself or this writer, would have no objections to the idea that Canadian culture ought to remain Canadian. It needs to be pointed out, however, that the CRTC has been a total failure in this regards. Fifty-three years later, the Canada of 2021 is far more Americanized culturally than the Canada of 1968 was. Indeed, much of what Canadians regard as distinctly “Canadian” culture today, is merely Hollywood culture with a maple leaf stamped on it. Read the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies if you want a taste of the more authentic pre-CRTC Canadian culture. Since the CRTC failed in its official appointed task, probably because its real purpose was thought control all along, there is hardly grounds here for extending its reach over the new online media. Indeed, the scarcely disguised agenda of censorship and thought control behind the move to so extend its reach, is sufficient reason why this bill, amended or otherwise, must never be allowed to pass. It is also more than sufficient reason for voting the Trudeau Liberals who dreamed it up in the first place out of Parliament and never allowing them to resume power again. For as Rex Murphy pointed out earlier this week, “What is more galling and more threatening that the bill itself, however, is the set of mind behind it”, and that won’t go away even if the bill itself does.
(1) Disturbingly, the leaders of the other parties – including the present leader of the Conservatives – have taken to aping his example in this.
(2) The full name of this agency was changed into the awkward and absurd redundancy that it is now in 1976, but the acronym remains the same. Posted by Gerry T. Neal
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