Tag Archives: Peter Menzies

Trudeau Called ‘Most Dangerous Man In Political History’ for Plan to Regulate Online News

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Trudeau Called ‘Most Dangerous Man In Political History’ for Plan to Regulate Online News by Leanne Lawrence, Lifesite News – February 7, 2020

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trudeau-called-most-dangerous-man-in-canadian-political-history-for-plan-to-regulate-online-news Warnings continue to multiply over the “insane” and “invasive” report that recommends Canada’s Liberal government register and regulate internet media content providers. A number of commentators in and

outside Canada denounced the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review (BTLR) panel’s

report released last week as a “breathtaking” and unprecedented plan to regulate the internet.

The government-assembled panel of broadcasting experts chaired by Janet Yale was tasked with advising the Liberals on overhauling the country’s allegedly outdated broadcasting laws. Its report recommended a massive expansion of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as the renamed Canadian Communications Commission.

“A key recommendation was to extend licences currently granted to radio and television stations to all media content, along with a much stricter compliance regime,” noted the National Post’s John Ivison. Indeed, so strict is this proposed scheme that two former CRTC members are among the report’s fiercest critics.

Former CRTC vice-chair of telecommunications Peter Menzies wrote in the Globe and Mail that in a “breathtaking expansion of scope and bureaucratic hubris” and “a series of invasive and unjustifiable recommendations,” the panel “advocated for a sweeping series of interventions that would make all online media – from online sites such as Rabble to Rebel News and in any language – subject to government regulation.”

That was echoed by former CRTC commissioner Timothy Denton, who in a Financial Post op-ed wrote that the report advocates “an unprecedented power grab for the federal government and the CRTC” aimed “at nothing less than a statist counter-revolution against the internet.”

That was echoed by well-known Canadian pundit and political commentator Andrew Coyne.

The report is “breathtaking — a regulatory power grab without precedent, either in Canada or the democratic world,” noted Coyne in the Globe and Mail.

“Nobody elsewhere else is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane.”

But what the Liberal government will do remains a critical question after Heritage Minister Steven Guilbault caused a firestorm by first appearing to endorse the idea of government licenses for internet news sites, then reversing his position the next day. On Sunday, Guilbault told CTV News: “If you’re a distributor of content in Canada… we would ask that they have a licence, yes.” On Monday, both the minister and the prime minister insisted the Liberals won’t license internet news or regulate internet news.

But that’s not exactly reassuring given the report recommends that “companies delivering media content by means of the internet would be required to register with the new Canadian Communications Commission,” and that it makes “no mention here of any exemptions for news organizations,” noted Ivison.

And while the report’s “implications for press freedom are obvious – so obvious, that one would expect the whole newspaper industry to rise up as one and reject it,” it also contains an offer of “goodies” for that beleaguered sector, Coyne observed.

Indeed, even as critics allege the Trudeau government’s $595 million “media bail-out” announced in its last budget compromises Canada’s legacy media, the report outlines more ways “the government could help news outlets” losing out to digital competitors, the Globe and Mail reported.

It recommends that online media content providers must register with the CRTC and pay into a fund to support select Canadian news organizations, it reported.

Newspapers “would be eligible for subsidies paid for out of the taxes on aggregators and sharers, who would also be obliged to link” to those Canadian news sites the CRTC deems “accurate, trusted and reliable,” Coyne explained.

“Are we really going to bite the hand that feeds us, now or in the future?” he added.

Liberals and their beneficiaries believe they are “saving quality journalism,” noted Ivison, “while everyone else thinks it’s a transparent bribe.”

That’s echoed by Jack Fonseca, director of political operations at Campaign Life Coalition, Canada’s national pro-life, pro-family lobbying group. The Liberal “bailout of the privately-owned mainstream media was a bribe to ensure that major media outlets will become dependent on the government, and therefore not report anything critical about Trudeau, or else,” he told LifeSiteNews.

It’s similar to the Liberal government’s “new rules to muzzle so-called Third Party Advertisers at election time, including simple information posted on Canadian websites,” he said. Fonseca maintains those rules were “designed to de-platform all small-c conservative voices which might be critical of Liberal policies, including that of Campaign Life Coalition. We actually had to shut down our pro-life Voters’ Guide for months during the election, and then massively restrict access to it.”

Canadians should regard the recent controversial broadcasting report in the context of what they know about the Liberals, and particularly the prime minister, who in May 2014 expressed his admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship,” he pointed out.

“We need to take Trudeau at his word, and not just laugh at him as if he’s some kind of joke. He was deadly serious. A basic dictatorship is what he admires. And it seems fairly clear that’s where he’s trying to steer the country, with a clear plan in his own mind,” Fonseca said.

The possibility that the Liberals could “create a ‘media registry’ and start licensing internet and social media-based news outlets is the latest in a string of warning signs that Justin Trudeau is the most dangerous man in Canadian political history,” he added.

Moreover, if the Liberals move ahead with this plan, it’s reasonable to assume “websites like LifeSiteNews would be forced to shut down because the Liberal government would refuse to give them a license,” warned Fonseca.

“In short, Liberals will have total control of the internet and the power to block all dissenting voices.”

Contact information:

The Honourable Steven Guilbeault – Minister of Canadian Heritage
15 Eddy Street, 12th Floor
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0M5
Telephone: 819-997-7788
Email: hon.steven.guilbeault@canada.ca

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner
Shadow minister for industry and economic development
Suite 115, 70 Country Hills Landing NW
Calgary, AB T3K 2L2
Telephone: 403-216-7777
Email: Michelle.Rempel@parl.gc.ca

Justin Trudeau – Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2
Fax: 613-941-6900
justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca 
https://pm.gc.ca/en/connect/contact

Related:

‘Terrifying’: US watchdog denounces Trudeau govt’s push to control Canada’s free press https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/terrifying-us-watchdog-denounces-trudeau-govts-push-to-control-canadas-free-press

Trudeau govt backpedals on licensing of news websites after outcry https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trudeau-govt-backpedals-on-licensing-of-news-websites-after-outcry

Canadian govt. offers huge tax breaks to ‘trusted’ news organizations 11 months prior to election https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-govt.-offers-huge-tax-breaks-to-trusted-news-organizations-11-mont

Rex Murphy: Liberals’ dangerous arrogance didn’t begin and won’t end with internet-regulation bill

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Rex Murphy: Liberals’ dangerous arrogance didn’t begin and won’t end with internet-regulation bill

Only a PM and a bunch that carry the delusion they are all-wise and ever-right could have conceived Bill C-10 Author of the article: Rex Murphy Publishing date: May 03, 2021  •  2 days ago  •  4 minute read  •  714 Comments

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to a question during a news conference in Ottawa on April 30, 2021. The attempt by the Liberal government to regulate the internet through Bill C-10 needs to be stopped, writes Rex Murphy.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to a question during a news conference in Ottawa on April 30, 2021. The attempt by the Liberal government to regulate the internet through Bill C-10 needs to be stopped, writes Rex Murphy. Photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

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The all-knowing Liberals put up a tactical white flag when the national storm of who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are swept over them concerning their attempt to regulate the internet.

Debate on a Conservative motion related to Bill C-10 was shut down, though the Liberals said Monday the bill will now be amended so social media posts are not regulated. What is more galling and more threatening than the bill itself however, is the set of mind behind it.

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The bill may die or be weakened. The thinking that spawned it will remain.

The thinking that spawned it will remain

C-10, an attempt to put a pillow over the free expression of all Canadians, didn’t pop up gopher-like out of the policy burrow of a second-tier Cabinet minister. Quite the contrary. This nefarious nugget was obviously the product of the top-rank philosophes of the Prime Minister’s Office, that sensorium of the whole Liberal party, from which emerges guidance and wisdom to elevate the lives and labours of ordinary Canadians, all set out with the confidence of a closed-minded pope.

And who are the great thinkers who birth such a creature? Why they are a band of intellects unmatched since the days of ancient Greece when Plato founded his academy, and young Socrates and his buddy Aristotle were offering home tutorials at the bargain rate of a drachma a syllogism. Their business card was terse: You learn; we earn. The wokemeisters in the PMO and the Wokemeister-in-Chief, Justin Trudeau, haven’t reached the business card stage, but post-power, you may be sure they will. There are Oprah shows to come, and star invitations to Davos and the IPCC yet to be forwarded in gilded envelopes with computer-generated handwriting.

Attend to this. This retrograde and democracy-denying bill emerged from the heights, out of the thin altitude where the prime minister dwells, and wherein the various wizards and shamans, the praetorian guard of top advisers, hatch their schemes, knit their plots, and advance the Leader’s dearest notions.

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Only a PM and a bunch that carry the delusion they are all-wise and ever-right, that they alone and only they, should have rule and command over the thoughts and opinions of a whole nation, could have conceived Bill C-10. Could have put their lawyers to work composing it, then waltzed into Parliament to put it on the Order paper in the first place.

What 21st-century government, aware of speech and thought control in the great and cruel totalitarian governments of the past century, and their cruel brethren of the 21st — Communist China, sinister North Korea, Iran — every tyranny or dictatorship on the globe — would wish to ape and mirror the central characteristic of all such regimes?

All of them ruled and rule today by censorship, monitoring citizens’ thoughts and writing, even private conversation. Speech controls breed a nation of spies.

Bill C-10 may be a kitten-mischief compared with the hideous savageries of full-blown tyrannies. But great oaks out of little acorns grow. Beware the seedlings of thought and speech control. Which is another way of saying do not let governments even toy with the fundamentals of democratic understanding and the absolutes of democratic practice.

Beware the seedlings of thought and speech control

Here’s another observation: a government that yearns to censor, to pry and oversee the speech and thought of its citizens, doesn’t trust its citizens. And believes therefore it has a right to herd them into holding opinions that their wiser, smarter and obviously more progressive government tells them they must have. It’s a marvellous instance of political conceit.

Their “reasoning” preceding the drawing up Bill C-10, may easily be imagined. It would go something like this:

“Well, they (meaning the citizenry) elected us (meaning the Liberal party). And we, therefore being superior beings, now have the right to bring them up to our standards of respectable thought and acceptable opinion. We will wipe clean the moral blackboard. And lay out for the voters what the voters are allowed to say, and what they must say. Call it Cuba in a cold climate.

“We will also then apologize for their forebears, for those morally-numb pioneers who built the house of iniquity we know as Canada. We will deplore every past prime minister who was sadly neither as tolerant nor as knowing as we, Deo gratias, are. Going ahead as progressives, let us insist on the right to declare the ideas Canadians should have, and put a block on those they cannot be allowed to have. And let us be grateful that this is the one administration, the first since 1867, with the wit and moral savvy to recognize what was deficient in all who went before us. All of course save one.”

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The mindset is more dangerous than the bill

There, in speculative and imagined dialogue, is the voice of the mindset behind C-10. And the mindset is more dangerous than the bill: an assertion that this government knows what’s best and has the right to impose its ideas of what is right on everyone else. This is the new religion of woke.

They may have suspended the charge up the hill to put C-10 into law. But they have not unroped themselves from the attitudes and intentions behind it. The mindset behind C-10 is more consequential than the bill which issued from it. That this band of woke virtuecrats understand themselves as better, more clever and ever how entitled to impose all the imperatives of their virtue commandments on you.

I’ll end with the words of one who was previously vice-chairman of the CRTC, Peter Menzies. C-10 “doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy.” Well said, Mr. Menzies.

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