National
Canada’s Governor General slammed for hosting partisan event promoting Trudeau’s ‘hate speech’ bill
From LifeSiteNews
Mary Simon, Canada’s supposed non-partisan head of state, appeared to be supporting a Liberal government bill that will further regulate the internet.
Governor General Mary Simon, who serves as Canada’s official non-partisan head of state and representative of King Charles III, has taken heat for hosting a conference supporting a new federal government bill that could lead to large fines or jail time for vaguely defined online “hate speech” infractions.
On April 11, Simon hosted an event titled “The Governor General’s Symposium: Building a Safe and Respectful Digital World” at her Rideau Hall residence, with the goal to “bring together individuals who experience online violence and experts from across the country to share their experiences, explore solutions, and create allyship and networks of resilience.”
The guest list for those invited included those supportive of Liberal Minster Attorney General Arif Virani’s Bill C-63, or Online Harms Act. Some of the invited guests included former Global News reporter Rachel Gilmore, LGBTQ activist Fae Johnstone, Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, and Ottawa school trustee Nili Kaplan-Myrth. No members of the Conservative Party or independent journalists were invited.
After news spread of the event, which Simon herself posted about on X, many took to social media to voice concerns over Simon hosting the event.
“Can you imagine the Queen having a seminar at Buckingham Palace to talk about a bill before the House of Commons in England? That would be outrageous. That’s what @GGCanada Mary Simon just did,” said political commentator Tom Korski on a CBC radio show.
Another X user @IMHeatherAmI wrote, “Trudeau has corrupted everything.GG Mary Simon is abusing her power by “promoting contentious Liberal bills that are trying to be passed in Parliament.”
Rideau Hall gave no comment that Canada’s supposed non-partisan head of state appeared to be supporting a Liberal government bill that will further regulate the internet.
“The Governor General is non-partisan and apolitical,” Rideau Hall said in a statement.
In comments sent to the media about apparent conflicts of interest, a spokesperson for Simon said that she will keep advocating for “digital respect.”
Conservative Party spokesman Sebastian Skamski observed that Simon should be “ashamed” for “politicizing and exploiting” the office of Governor General, which is supposed to be completely non-partisan.
The Online Harms Act was introduced in the House of Commons on February 26 by Virani and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.
Bill C-63 will modify existing laws, amending the Criminal Code as well as the Canadian Human Rights Act, in what the Liberals claim will target certain cases of internet content removal, notably those involving child sexual abuse and pornography.
However, the bill also seeks to police “hate” speech online with broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics.
Details of the new legislation to regulate the internet show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.
The bill also calls for the creation of a digital safety commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and a digital safety office.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has said Bill C-63 is “the most serious threat to free expression in Canada in generations. This terrible federal legislation, Bill C -63, would empower the Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute Canadians over non-criminal hate speech.”
JCCF president John Carpay recently hand-delivered a petition with 55,000-plus signatures to Canada’s Minister of Justice and all MPs.
National
Canada’s Digital ID Drama Heats Up as Regulators Sidestep Parliament
From Reclaim The Net
These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.
And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.
Canadian regulators plan to move ahead with introducing national digital ID without the parliament’s involvement.
Leaving the process out of the parliament in terms of approval and oversight is sure to add to the existing controversy around the issue of digital ID, which was in the past criticized and even rejected precisely by a number of Canadian MPs and parliamentary committees. On the other hand, this might explain why the regulators might rather take a route bypassing the lawmakers, despite the risky – in terms of proper democratic process – nature of such maneuvering. Critics are now calling this (another) example of Canada’s Liberal government’s overreach. Reports about these goings-on are based on Shared Services Canada (SSC), a government IT agency, recently announcing how the work on setting up a digital ID system for the whole country was progressing, while presenting this as essentially no different than current forms of obligatory ID (for instance, Canada’s equivalent to the social security number in the US). But opponents in the parliament, and beyond, have been consistently for years reiterating that the scheme is fraught with dangers that are not comparable to those affecting traditional ID systems, neither in depth nor breadth. These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused. And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior. But SSC and other digital ID backers address these issues almost in passing while selling the benefits to the public as more convenience via unified access to government services, and even as something “empowering” citizens. However, what the most prominent individuals and organizations that push for global digital ID adoption (like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, the EU, and the WEF…) present as a way to usher in more equity and equality is seen as creating exactly the opposite effect. “Segregation and discrimination” is how one report out of Canada put it, the context being recent: Covid vaccine “passports” and the treatment received by citizens who decided against taking the jab. |
Alberta
Media melts down as Danielle Smith moves to end ‘transitioning’ of children in Alberta
From LifeSiteNews
After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.
A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation:
- The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law.
- The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors.
- The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.
Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.
Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.
The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.
The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders.
In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News:
Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles.
‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’
Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said.
This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them.
The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one:
Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity.
To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people.
Fortunately, Smith appears to know what she’s doing here. She’s taken her time to ensure that the legislation she has put forward will pass, and that it is defensible in court. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has just led the Saskatchewan Party to its fifth straight majority government, is of a similar mind—he’s promised to put forward legislation protecting female spaces as a matter of first priority. It took long enough, but Canada’s conservatives are finally starting to move.
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