Trudeau government ‘gaslighting’ critics of Online Harms Act, legal expert warns

Dr. Michael Geist pointed out that Bill C-63 gives a digital safety commission an astonishing array of powers with limited oversight.

One of Canada’s top legal pundits warned that the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is “ready” to “gaslight” opponents of a new bill that could lead to jail time for vaguely defined online “hate speech” infractions.

In recent an opinion piece critical of Bill C-63, which is the Online Harms Act that was introduced in the House of Commons on February 26, law professor Dr. Michael Geist said that the text of the bill is “unmistakable” in how it will affect Canadians’ online freedoms.

Geist noted that the new bill will allow a new digital safety commission to conduct “secret commission hearings” against those found to have violated the new law.

“The poorly conceived Digital Safety Commission lacks even basic rules of evidence, can conduct secret hearings, and has been granted an astonishing array of powers with limited oversight. This isn’t a fabrication,” Geist wrote.

He observed specifically how Section 87 of the bill “literally” says “the Commission is not bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence.”

The Liberals under Trudeau claim Bill C-63 will target certain cases of internet content removal, notably those involving child sexual abuse and pornography.

The reality is that the federal government under Trudeau has gone all in on radical transgender ideology, including the so-called “transitioning” of minors, while at the same time introducing laws that on the surface appear to be about helping children.

As for Geist, he noted that when it comes to Bill C-63, the “most obvious solution” to amend the bill “is to cut out the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions, which have nothing to do with establishing Internet platform liability for online harms.”

“Instead, the government seems ready yet again to gaslight its critics and claim that they have it all wrong,” Geist said. “But the text of the law is unmistakable and the initial refusal to address the concerns is a mistake that, if it persists, risks sinking the entire bill.”

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.

One of Canada’s foremost constitutional rights groups, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), warned that the proposed “Online Harms Act” is a serious threat to freedom of “expression” and could lead to “preemptive punishment for crimes not committed.”

Geist observed that the Trudeau government with Bill C-63 “is ready to run back the same playbook of gaslighting and denials that plagued” as it did with its other internet censorship Bills C-11 and C-18.

“Those bills, which addressed Internet streaming and news, faced widespread criticism over potential regulation of user content and the prospect of blocked news links on major Internet platforms. Rather than engage in a policy process that took the criticism seriously, the government ignored digital creators (including disrespecting indigenous creators) and dismissed the risks of Bill C-18 as a bluff,” Geist wrote.

“The results of that strategy are well-known: Bill C-11 required a policy direction fix and is mired in a years-long regulatory process at the CRTC and news links have been blocked for months on Meta as the list of Canadian media bankruptcies and closures mount.”

Geist observed that Bill C-63 had “offered the chance for a fresh start,” but instead there “were red flags,” particularly with respect to the “Digital Safety Commission charged with enforcing the law and with the inclusion of Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions with overbroad penalties and the potential to weaponize speech complaints.”

“The hope – based on the more collaborative approach used to develop the law – was that there would be a ‘genuine welcoming of constructive criticism rather than the discouraging, hostile processes of recent years,’” Geist wrote.

“Two weeks in that hope is rapidly disappearing,” he added.

Geist observed that Bill C-63’s changes to the Human Rights Act “absolutely open the door to the weaponization of complaints for communication of hate speech online that ‘is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.’”

Indeed, the bill, as per Section 13.1, would allow for those found in violation to face penalties up to $20,000 for the complainant as well as up to $50,000 to the government (Section 53.1).

LifeSiteNews has previously reported that many, including prominent Canadians who are not known to be conservative such as author Margaret Atwood, oppose Bill C-63. Additionally, billionaire Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have been critical of Bill C-63.

Marty Moore, litigation director for the JCCF-funded Charter Advocates Canada, previously told LifeSiteNews that Bill C-63 will allow a new digital safety commission to conduct “secret commission hearings” against those found to have violated the new law, raising “serious concerns for the freedom of expression” of Canadians online.

The JCCF launched a petition, which can be signed here, calling on Trudeau to “stop” the Online Harms Act.

Related Topics:#AnthonyMurdoch #BillC-63 #DrMichaelGeist #FreedomOfSpeech #InternetContentRemoval #LifeSiteNews #OnlineHarmsAct #Trudeau

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Censorship Industrial Complex

France condemned for barring populist leader Marine Le Pen from 2027 election

Published on March 31, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. The globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the populist French opposition party, has been sentenced to prison and barred from standing for election as president in 2027, following a court ruling against her for alleged financial crimes.

Le Pen is currently leading polls to win the presidential election, being 11 to 17 points ahead of the party of the globalist President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling Monday on charges of “misuse of EU funds” sees Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) party, facing two years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on running for elected office. Her lawyer stated she would appeal the ruling.

Speaking a day before the verdict, Le Pen said, “There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”

She is to address the French nation in a televised statement Monday night.

Party leader Jordan Bardella responded on X, saying, “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed.”

Bardella has called for “peaceful mobilization” in support of Marine Le Pen, with a petition launched in protest at the “democratic scandal” of her effective cancellation as a candidate.

The RN won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2024 French parliamentary elections, being the single largest party overall. It is prevented from entering government by a “cordon sanitaire” – an agreement between liberal-global and left-wing parties to “firewall” national-populists from power regardless of how many people vote for them.

Le Pen’s appeal would suspend the jail sentence and the fine of 100,000 euros – but would not be heard until 2026, effectively sabotaging her preparations for the 2027 election should she win. The ban takes effect when the appeal process is exhausted, meaning Le Pen is free to campaign until her appeal is heard in a year’s time.

The court ruled that Le Pen, whose RN was the single largest party in the recent French parliamentary elections, had misused 3 million euros in EU funds by paying party officials based in France.

She had told France’s La Tribune Dimanche on Saturday that “the judges have the power of life or death over our movement.”

The judges appear to have given her party a death sentence. Eight further RN members and twelve assistants were also found guilty in the same trial.

Elon Musk has warned the move will “backfire,” with globalist house magazine The Economist in agreement that “her sentence for corrupt use of EU funds could strengthen the hard right.” Its report stated, “Barring Marine Le Pen is a political earthquake for France.”

The shockwaves have reached across Europe, and around the world. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels,” joining Dutch and Hungarian national-populist leaders Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban in condemnation of the move.

According to commentators, the legal ruling shows that the liberal-global regime is now canceling democracy. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said on X of worldwide globalist moves to criminalize its opponents: “This is a five alarm fire.”

Citing the lawfare undertaken against then-candidate Donald Trump, former State Department official Mike Benz described the many examples of the rule of lawfare were “a dagger in the heart of democracy”:

Donald Trump Jr. asked whether the French judiciary are “just trying to prove JD Vance was right” – referring to the vice president’s “blistering attack on European leaders” over their rising censorship and anti-democratic moves. Vance told EU and UK leaders in Munich, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

U.S. political strategist Steve Bannon also referenced populist figures facing legal persecution in his “War Room” rundown of the Le Pen affair today:

The move to legally “firewall” Le Pen has left even her political opponents disturbed, with the ruling Prime Minister Francois Bayrou reportedly “disquieted” by the verdict. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-liberal LFI and a determined political enemy of Le Pen, has said, “The decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people” – not the courts.

Right-populist leader Eric Zemmour, who coined the term “remigration,” warned of a “coup d’etat” of activist judges in 1997 – and said today that “everything has to change” as “it is not for judges to decide for whom the people must vote.”

Laurent Wauquiez of the conservative Les Republicains – who have also refused to work with the RN in coalition – said, “The decision to condemn Marine Le Pen is heavy and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy that an elected official be forbidden to stand for election.”

It seems this latest example of liberal-global lawfare may even see Le Pen’s party rise in the polls, with a survey today showing two-thirds of all French voters saying her ineligibility would not stop them voting for her RN party.

Nearly half of voters believe she was treated harshly “for political reasons,” with a quarter believing the move to bar her will be a “trump card” for the party overall.

Whether the move “backfires” or not, the message to Western electorates is becoming clear. You can vote for liberals of the left, right, or center – because anyone offering a real alternative will be locked out of power, or locked up in jail.

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. After canceled elections, speech crackdowns, and criminalizing their opponents, the globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter

Published on March 30, 2025

Todayville

By Cam Wakefield

“It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,”

“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.

This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.

What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.

The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?

A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike.

Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.

Parents Allen and Levine were questioned by police over their WhatsApp messages.

For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.

So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.

But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.

Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.

“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”

Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.

Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”

One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.

Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?

What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.

Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”

Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.

After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.

So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.

This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.

Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?

It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.

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