Legal group warns Trudeau’s Online Harms Act will ‘weaponize’ courts against Canadians

” it is likely to exacerbate the problem of social conflict, weaponize the courts and the human rights tribunal for political purposes, and introduce fear into the online social environment “

A Canadian legal group has warned that a Liberal government bill seeking to further clamp down on online speech will “weaponize” the nation’s courts to favor the ruling federal party and do nothing but create an atmosphere of “fear.”

The warning came from the freedom-orientated legal group The Democracy Fund (TDF), which released a 26-page long legal brief going over just how dangerous the Trudeau government’s Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, is.

“Historically, the power to censor has been a weapon of authoritarian regimes. This power inevitably expands and eventually eliminates the civic process by which society adapts and progresses,” observed TDF in the legal brief.

TDF said it has no “reason to believe this will not happen in Canada.”

“It will not reduce social conflict. On the contrary: it is likely to exacerbate the problem of social conflict, weaponize the courts and the human rights tribunal for political purposes, and introduce fear into the online social environment,” noted TDF.

TDF asserted that as “disturbing as expressions of hateful attitudes” can be, the government should address these issues through “open dialogue and education.”

Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. 

LifeSiteNews reported how the Conservative Party has warned that the bill is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced nor come to light before the next election.

Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to 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. 

Related Topics:#AnthonyMurdoch #BillC-63 #LifeSiteNews #OnlineHarmsAct #TheDemocracyFund JustinTrudeauCensorship

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New Australian law, if passed, will make the gov’t the sole arbiter of truth’

Published on November 16, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By David James

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it a democracy.

In a crushing blow to free speech in Australia, the lower house of federal parliament has passed an amendment, known as the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. It imposes obligations on digital communications platform providers to prevent the dissemination of content “that contains information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive, and is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm of a specified type (misinformation and disinformation).”

Several dissenting politicians have expressed outrage and incredulity at the legislative move. Nola Marino, a member of the right-wing opposition Liberal Party said that she did not think that Australia, a liberal democratic society, would ever be “debating a bill that is explicitly designed to censor and silence the Australian people.”

National Party member Keith Pitt described the legislation as a “yawning chasm that is incredibly … dangerous to this country.” He expressed shock that the amendment was being put forward, adding that Western democracies such as Australia have been built on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Such principled objections were ignored, however. The legislation now has only to pass in the Senate (the upper house) to become law.

The first and most obvious criticism of the law is that it puts the government authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in the ridiculous position of deciding what is and isn’t “false” information. That is not only absurd – how could ACMA, for example make judgements on subjects like vaccines or viruses – it means that the law cannot be applied universally.

Governments routinely put out false information, arguably more often than they put out true information. Will they be penalized? Of course not. Advertisers present information that is false. Will they fall under his law? No. It will only be directed at people who are saying things that the government does not like, especially in relation to health policy. It is politics, not law.

When governments distort the law for political ends, it inevitably ends up in badly crafted legislation, and that is what has happened here. The law depends for its integrity on clear semantics, words whose definition is clear. But two key words, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading at best.

They are variants of the word “information”; the prefixes “dis” and “mis” have been added to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth (“information” being something objectively observable). It is a diversion. What is happening instead is that the law will target the intent of the writers.

Disinformation is defined as information that is “intended” to mislead and to cause harm. With misinformation there is no such intent; it is just an error, but even there it requires determining what is in the author’s mind. The aim is to outlaw thinking that is not congruent with the governments’ official position.

Pointing out this definitional slipperiness could be the basis for an effective rebuttal of the legislation. Courts are very poor at establishing intent.

A second problem: How do we know what meaning the recipients will get? Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from approbation to intense hostility. To state the obvious, readers think for themselves and inevitably derive different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronizing and infantilizing, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. It is legislation that is not just aimed at controlling the thoughts of the producers of the content, it is targeted at the thoughts of the recipients: two layers of absurdity. The result would be like targeting the “thought crimes” depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

Censorship regimes operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of the available content is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. But what matters is the quality of the content, not the quantity of the messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative eventually become meaningless, while sound analyses will cut through.

The main purpose of the legislation is to silence critics of the Australian government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. The aim is to ensure that in future health authorities and the political class are immune from scrutiny and criticism. It is unlikely to be effective. What they have done instead is demonstrate that Australia does not have adequate protection for free speech, nor is it genuinely a democracy.

Censorship Industrial Complex

CBC continues to push unproven unmarked graves claim, implies ‘denialism’ should be criminalized

Published on November 15, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The CBC has published yet another article implicitly promoting the unproven claim that former residential school sites contain the unmarked graves of Indigenous students, citing activist who want dissent from the official narrative criminalized.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is still pushing the unproven claim that unmarked graves have been discovered at former residential schools while implicitly calling for “residential school denialism” to be criminalized.

In an October 31 article, the state-funded CBC highlighted former residential school attendees who called for punishments for “residential school denialism,” implying citizens should be punished for denying the existence of unmarked graves despite the fact that no bodies have been found.

“Residential school survivors are calling on Canada to criminalize residential school denialism, echoing one of the findings in a report about unmarked graves and burial sites associated with the institutions,” the government-funded outlet claimed.

According to former students of the schools, those who oppose the mainstream narrative, by pointing out that no unmarked graves have been discovered or that some children benefitted from the schools, which some former students themselves have attested, should be silenced.

Alarmingly, this suggestion to criminalize the denial of an unproven claim is supported by a New Democratic Party (NDP) MP who recently introduced a bill which would charge those who “promote hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada.”

While the CBC report rigorously outlines the dangers of so-called “denialism,” it failed to mention the above discrepancies in the official narrative.

Residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set-up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.        

While some children did tragically die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed  that many of the children passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to underfunding by the federal government, not the Catholic Church. 

As a consequence, since 2021, when the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims  that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

In fact, in 2021, Trudeau waited weeks before acknowledging the church vandalism, and when he did speak, said it is “understandable” that churches have been burned while acknowledging it to be “unacceptable and wrong.”   

Similarly, in February, Liberal and NDP MPs quickly shut down a Conservative motion to condemn an attack against a Catholic church in Regina, Saskatchewan. The motion was shut down even though there was surveillance footage of a man, who was later arrested, starting the fire.   

Additionally, in October 2023, Liberal and NDP MPs voted to adjourn rather than consider a motion that would denounce the arson and vandalism against 83 Canadian churches, especially those within Indigenous communities.   