Connect with us

Media

Trudeau’s ‘online harms’ legislation includes life imprisonment for ‘hate speech’

Published

10 minute read

Justice Minister Arif Virani

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

While the government claims the bill is intended to protect kids, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre said Liberals are looking for clever ways to enact internet censorship laws.

Details of new “online harms” legislation to regulate the internet have emerged, revealing that the bill could lead to more people jailed for life or fined $20,000 for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.

Bill C-63 is titled “An Act to enact the Online Harms Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act and An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.”

It was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons today and passed its first reading in the afternoon.

The new bill will create the Online Harms Act and modify existing laws, amending the Criminal Code as well as the Canadian Human Rights Act, in what the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claim will target certain cases of internet content removal, notably those involving child sexual abuse and pornography.

According to the Trudeau government, Bill C-63 aims to protect kids from online harms and crack down on non-consensual deep-fake pornography involving children and will target seven types of online harms, such as hate speech, terrorist content, incitement to violence, the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, child exploitation, cyberbullying and inciting self-harm.

Virani had many times last year hinted a new Online Harms Act bill would be forthcoming.

While the Trudeau government claims the bill is being created to protect kids, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre said the federal government is looking for clever ways to enact internet censorship laws.

During a February 21, press conference, Poilievre said that Trudeau is looking to in effect criminalize speech with he does not like.

“What does Justin Trudeau mean when he says the word ‘hate speech?’ He means speech he hates,” Poilievre said.

As part of the new bill, the Trudeau Liberals are looking to increase punishments for existing hate propaganda offenses in a substantial manner.

The Online Harms Act will also amend Canada’s Human Rights Act to put back in place a hate speech provision, specifically Section 13 of the Act, that the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper had repealed in 2013 after it was found to have violated one’s freedom of expression.

The text of the bill, released Monday afternoon, reads that the Canadian Human Rights Act will be amended to add a section “13” to it.

This section reads, “It is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

“In this section, hate speech means the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination,” the bill reads.

A “Clarification – hate speech” in the bill reads, “For greater certainty, the content of a communication does not express detestation or vilification, for the purposes of subsection (8), solely because it expresses disdain or dislike or it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”

Earlier Monday, details of the bill were released to the media in a technical briefing.

“New standalone hate crime offence that would apply to every offence in the Criminal Code and in any other Act of Parliament, allowing penalties up to life imprisonment to denounce and deter this hateful conduct as a crime in itself,” the technical briefing reads.

“The maximum punishments for the four hate propaganda offences from 5 years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide and from 2 years to 5 years for the others when persecuted by way of indictment.”

For now, the law will affect all social media platforms as well as live-streamed video services, notably Meta and Google (YouTube).

Bill creates three ‘Digital Safety’ positions to enforce rules and let anyone file ‘complaints’

Bill C-63 mandates the creation of the Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office.

The ombudsperson along with the other offices will be charged with dealing with public complaints regarding online content as well as put forth a regulatory function in a five-person panel “appointed by the government.” This panel will be charged with monitoring internet platform behaviors to hold people “accountable.”

Bill C-63 also includes text to amend Canada’s Criminal Code and Human Rights Act to define “hatred” as “Content that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination, within the meaning of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and that, given the context in which it is communicated, is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of such a prohibited ground.‍ (contenu fomentant la haine).”

Most worryingly, the new bill will allow it so that anyone can file a complaint against another person with the Canadian Human Rights Commission for “posting hate speech online” that is deemed “discriminatory” against a wide range of so-called protected categories, notably gender, race, those, or other areas.

If a person is found guilty of violating the Human Rights Act by going against what the government deems to be hate speech, they face fines of $20,000 along with being mandated to take down any postings online, notably on social media.

Many aspects of Bill C-63 come from a lapsed bill from 2021.

In June 2021, then-Justice Minister David Lametti introduced Bill 36, “An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act and to make related amendments to another Act (hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech).”

It was blasted as a controversial “hate speech” law that would give police the power to “do something” about online “hate.”

It was feared that it would target bloggers and social media users for speaking their minds.

Bill C-36 included text to amend Canada’s Criminal Code and Human Rights Act to define “hatred” as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than dislike or disdain (haine).”

If passed, the bill would theoretically allow a tribunal to judge anyone who has a complaint of online “hate” leveled against them, even if he has not committed a crime. If found guilty, the person would be in violation of the new law and could face fines of $70,000 as well as house arrest.

Two other Trudeau bills dealing with freedom as it relates to the internet have become law, the first being Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, that mandates Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), oversee regulating online content on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix to ensure that such platforms are promoting content in accordance with a variety of its guidelines.

Trudeau’s other internet censorship law, the Online News Act, was passed by the Senate in June 2023.

The law mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. As a result, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, blocked all access to news content in Canada. Google has promised to do the same rather than pay the fees laid out in the new legislation.

Critics of recent laws such as tech mogul Elon Musk have said it shows “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada.”

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Health

Dr. Pierre Kory Exposes the Truth About the Texas ‘Measles Death’ Hoax

Published on

The Vigilant FoxThe Vigilant Fox

She did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she died of pneumonia. But it gets worse than that…”

Turn on the news today, and you’ll hear about a measles outbreak in Texas. The headline? A 6-year-old girl has “died from measles.” The coverage is nonstop. And the goal is simple: to make you angry and afraid.

But here’s what they’re not telling you.

That little girl should still be alive. She should be at home with her mom, dad, and siblings. But their unconscionable loss, which is being heavily politicized, is not what the mainstream has led us to believe. Her death was the result of medical error. Plain and simple.

And you should be angry.

Join 100K+ Substack readers and 1.6 million 𝕏 users who follow the work of Vigilant Fox.

Subscribe for top-tier news aggregation and exclusive stories you won’t find anywhere else.

When this case first made the news, little was known. But those who know it’s okay to ask questions began asking them.

Was she vaccinated for measles? If so, was the vaccination done recently or while she was ill? What treatment did she receive, if any? Was she infected with the wild type, or was this due to a leaky vaccine? Did she die with measles or from it?

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) stepped up and interviewed the mourning parents to uncover the truth about what really happened to their 6-year-old daughter.

Headlines

Parents of Child Who Died During Texas Measles Outbreak Speak Out

Mar 18
Parents of Child Who Died During Texas Measles Outbreak Speak Out
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.

The emotional interview reveals the child was not vaccinated for measles. She fell ill, and while the spots faded quickly, her breathing was affected. Her parents became concerned and took her to the emergency room at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas.

It was all downhill from there. And before long, their daughter was gone.

Dr. Pierre Kory Shares Disturbing Information

In a display of journalistic integrity, CHD obtained the 6-year-old’s medical records from her parents. Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care physician, had a chance to analyze the records and shared his thoughts with CHD.

According to Dr. Kory, the child “did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she died of a pneumonia. But it gets worse than that, because she didn’t really die of pneumonia. She died of a medical error.”

Let that sink in.

Loving parents just lost their young child due to a medical error. But not only that, their story is being twisted and used to spread fear about measles and to push the measles vaccine—two things this family does not appear to agree with.

As it turns out, their four other children came down with measles following their sister’s death. All four were treated with cod liver oil (vitamin A) and budesonide (a steroid). And all four recovered quickly. No vaccination necessary.

Kory calls the case “absolutely enraging.”

“When you admit someone to the hospital for pneumonia, what you need to do is you treat what’s called empirically, meaning you put them on antibiotics that you think will cover the most common organism.”

Covenant Children’s Hospital failed to do this.

“I mean, this is like medicine 101. You put them on two antibiotics to cover all the possibilities. It’s a grievous error, and it’s an error which led to her death.”

Not only did Covenant Children’s Hospital fail to provide the appropriate antibiotics, when they noticed their error, they dragged their feet and delayed another 10 hours.

“By that time, she was already on a ventilator. And approximately 24 hours later, actually less than 24 hours later, she died.”

And she did not pass away peacefully. According to Kory, “she died rather catastrophically.”

“I can only surmise that she died of a catastrophic pulmonary embolism.”

Kory calls the whole thing “disturbing.

And it is. What happened to this young girl at Covenant Children’s Hospital was indeed disturbing. But the way this tragedy is being portrayed in the media and used inappropriately and inaccurately to cause fear and push the measles vaccine is downright disgusting.

Gone are the days when people seek help from local media to expose injustices. The media machine has one job and it isn’t to help you.

This young girl should still be here. Hugging her parents and giggling with her siblings. Enjoying the start of Spring and looking forward to celebrating Easter.

Instead, the media is exploiting this family’s unimaginable loss to push an agenda, and social media is swirling with nasty criticisms.

We can only hope this poor family receive justice and support as they combat the unwarranted attacks on their character, choices, and way of life.

“Pray. Just pray for us. That’s the best you can do, for now,” the father said.


Share

Subscribe to The Vigilant Fox.

For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.

Continue Reading

Health

How gender activists stole the media, distorted medicine, and hurt Canadian kids:

Published on

Macdonald-Laurier Institute By Mia Hughes for Inside Policy

News outlets abandoned balanced reporting on medical transitions for minors long ago

There is a major medical scandal unfolding in Canada, and our media is fueling it. In gender clinics across the country, doctors put healthy adolescents on invasive medical procedures that can impair fertility, sexual function, and bone density, damage bodily systems, and result in the removal of healthy organs. Teenage girls are being put into menopause, and young men are being chemically and surgically castrated. This is all done without a clear diagnosis or solid scientific evidence that these treatments are safe or beneficial.

Yet Canada’s mainstream media portrays these interventions, euphemistically called “gender-affirming care,” as evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving. Top outlets such as CBC, CTV, and Global present paediatric gender medicine as uncontroversial.

Flawed Coverage Putting Canada’s Youth at Risk

The scandal of paediatric gender medicine contains all the elements of a sensational news story – conspiracy, intrigue, deception, and blackmail. It involves powerful institutions suppressing dissent, whistleblowers risking their careers to speak out, and innocent young people being harmed in the crossfire. There are medical professionals ignoring basic ethical principles, activists influencing policy under the guise of science, and victims being vilified and silenced. All this should prove irresistible to the inquisitive journalistic mind.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that, aside from the National Post, Canada’s mainstream media has opted to ignore the story and instead act as a mouthpiece for extremist trans activists, uncritically echoing their talking points. To understand how harmful and inaccurate the mainstream coverage of this issue is, it is essential to debunk the key claims of the trans activist lobby.

Let’s start with puberty blockers as a fully reversible pause. CBC first reported this claim in 2012, when the puberty suppression experiment was still in its infancy, then it pops up consistently throughout the intervening years, all the way up to the present day and the network’s dismal coverage of England’s Cass Report in 2024. CBC also feeds this misinformation directly to children in a CBC Kids article from 2023.

CTVGlobal, the Globe and Mail, and others are equally guilty of spreading this inaccuracy to the public. It is understandable that many Canadians believe puberty blockers are a fully reversible pause and that therefore restricting access to these drugs is unnecessary government overreach. The trouble is the claim is false.

In truth, before Dutch researchers introduced puberty suppression for trans-identified adolescents, studies showed that 63 per cent to 98 per cent of youth eventually outgrew their gender distress. However, once puberty blockers were implemented, nearly all adolescents progressed to irreversible cross-sex hormones, with persistence rates of 98 per cent to 100 per cent. The explanation for this striking reversal of persistence rates is that the cognitive and sexual development that occurs during puberty naturally resolves gender dysphoria in most cases. Blocking puberty, therefore, means blocking the natural cure for gender-related distress.

Yet our mainstream media continues to call puberty blockers reversible because Canada’s “experts” in “gender-affirming care” continue to cling to this belief, despite the mounds of scientific evidence to the contrary. It is the same for the claim that affirming a young person’s transgender identity and providing access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries amounts to “life-saving care.” The most pernicious of all trans activist misinformation, the transition-or-suicide narrative is ubiquitous in Canada’s mainstream coverage of this controversial medical treatment.

There are many examples. The most reprehensible is in the CBC Kids piece, in which a young trans-identified person is quoted as saying, “If I wasn’t able to start this therapy, honestly, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore.” This content directly contradicts suicide prevention guidelines, which emphasize that the media must never oversimplify or attribute suicide to a single cause because suicide is known to be socially contagious.

The truth is the transition-or-suicide claim rests on exceptionally flimsy scientific evidence. Surveys of trans-identified youth do show increased risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, but completed suicide in this population is rare. The elevated risk is likely due to co-existing mental health issues that are extremely common in youth who identify as transgender. All systematic reviews to date have found no good quality evidence to support the transition-or-suicide narrative, and the Cass Report and a recent robust study out of Finland reached the same conclusion.

The final most common falsehood repeated by our top news outlets is that very few people regret undergoing these hormonal and surgical procedures. This appears regularly in articles on the subject. Once again, this falsehood appears in the same CBC Kids article, in which children are told that regret is experienced by only “around one per cent of all patients who received gender-affirming surgery, according to a review of 27 studies.” (Of note, the review cited by CBC is among the most poorly conducted study in a field already known for exceptionally low standards, leading one exasperated critic of the paper to ask, “where exactly is the line between incompetence and fraud?”)

These falsehoods remain ever-present in Canada’s reporting on paediatric gender medicine because our journalists have misplaced trust in medical associations, most notably the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH, an activist group masquerading as a medical association, has been thoroughly discredited in recent years, but these revelations have failed to penetrate the Canadian media landscape.

Even more remarkably, it is not only the media who were duped by WPATH. Almost every major medical association in North America, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, follows the lead of this fraudulent activist group that sets standards of care based on flimsy science, buries evidence that does not align with its political goals, and believes “eunuch” is a valid gender identity even children can possess.

The WPATH Files, released in March 2024, revealed professionals within WPATH, including a prominent Canadian endocrinologist, are aware that children and adolescents are not capable of understanding the lifelong implications of puberty suppression, that there is significant regret among this cohort, and that gender-affirming clinicians are conducting an unregulated experiment on people who identify as transgender.

How Activists Shaped the Narrative

In October 2011, CBC’s The Passionate Eye aired a documentary titled Transgender Kids. The four children featured in the film were some of the earliest participants in the puberty suppression experiment and the filmmakers compassionately tackled some tough questions, such as how young is too young? And how should parents respond to their child’s desire for these extreme medical interventions?

This was the first time CBC had reported on “transgender children,” a brand-new type of human being only made possible by the puberty suppression experiment. What happened next very likely shaped the way the institution handled the issue going forward.

On January 27, 2012, Egale, which describes itself as a “2SLGBTQI+” charity, published an open letter accusing the CBC of “violence” towards “transgender children” due to repeated instances of misgendering in the documentary. According to Egale, “this significantly increases the likelihood that the viewing public will incorrectly view these children as victims of ‘gender confusion’ and their parents as horribly misguided.” The group demanded a public apology from CBC and recommended that the public broadcaster use the GLAAD media style guide going forward when reporting on trans issues.

Egale’s public response sent a clear warning to Canadian media: questioning whether children and adolescents could truly be transgender or make such life-altering decisions would not be tolerated. As a result, from the outset, activists tied the experiment to change the sex of children to a human rights cause, dictated the tone of media coverage, and effectively forbade  genuine journalistic scrutiny of these invasive medical procedures.

The highly publicized suicide of trans-identified teen Leelah Alcorn in 2014 injected the “transition-or-suicide” myth into the Canadian mainstream narrative. Trans activists seized on Alcorn’s suicide note as supposed proof that affirmation and medical interventions saved lives, and from that moment on, our news outlets led parents to believe that questioning their child’s sudden transgender identity or desire for irreversible hormones and surgeries could have fatal consequences.

Having learned its lesson five years previously, in 2017, CBC pulled a second documentary called Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best before it aired after “over a dozen” complaints from Canadian trans activists. The activists claimed the documentary was “harmful, would “disseminate inaccurate information about trans youth and gender dysphoria,” and would “feed transphobia.”

In reality, the documentary was fair and measured. It contained all the standard trans activist talking points but also presented the opposing perspective. It featured Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who highlighted the historically high desistance rates before the introduction of puberty blockers and pointed out that many children experiencing gender distress would likely grow up to be gay.

This is what journalism is meant to do: present the full picture. But in a media landscape dominated by trans activists, news outlets abandoned balanced reporting.

A Lesson from the Past

In May 1941, the Saturday Evening Post published an article with the headline “Turning the Mind Inside Out.” In it, Waldemar Kaempffert, an editor of the New York Times, described a miraculous new brain surgery called a lobotomy that cut “worries, persecution complexes, suicidal intentions, obsessions, indecisiveness and nervous tensions” out of the mind. Kaempffert compared the procedure that involved blindly swinging knives inside a patient’s brain to the delicate work of a watchmaker.

Kaempffert’s article was just one of many glowing media endorsements of what would become one of medicine’s greatest atrocities. With each published piece, word spread, offering desperate families a false sense of hope. Encouraged by the promise of a “cure,” relatives sought lobotomies for their loved ones – including, most famously, the Kennedys, who, in the same year as Kaempffert’s article, subjected their daughter Rosemary to the procedure, with devastating consequences.

The misleading coverage of “gender-affirming care” has a similarly dangerous impact. First, each article reinforces the pseudoscientific notion that some children are transgender, embedding this idea into public consciousness and fueling the social contagion of adolescents adopting trans identities. Then, with every article that exaggerates the benefits of hormones and surgeries and downplays the harms, young people come to believe that this medical treatment is the solution to their pain. However, minors do not sign consent forms. That is the responsibility of parents.

Therefore, consider the real-world consequences of the falsehoods our journalists are propagating. Parents who rely on mainstream media may make disastrous decisions for their child based on ideologically driven narratives.

Glimmers of Courage

Amidst a sea of misinformation, there has been the occasional glimmer of courage. In 2021, CTV’s W5 produced a balanced segment showcasing the voices of detransitioners and asking whether there was adequate safeguarding in youth gender medicine.

In February 2024, Radio-Canada’s Enquête team produced a stunning piece of investigative journalism in which an actress posing as a trans-identified 14-year-old obtained a prescription for testosterone after just a nine-minute appointment at a private gender clinic in Quebec. In response, local trans activists smashed the windows of the Radio-Canada headquarters in Montreal. Then in April 2024, the Globe and Mail published a balanced and thoroughly researched opinion piece calling for a review of Canada’s approach to treating this vulnerable cohort.

CBC’s The National tackled the issue twice, approximately one year apart, and the second showed some measure of improvement in willingness to grapple with the complexity of the issue. However, this is nowhere near enough. These brief glimmers of hope are still drowned out in a sea of activist propaganda.

A Call to Action

One of the greatest challenges in exposing the scandal of paediatric gender medicine is that the truth is so shocking it defies belief. To the average person, it seems impossible that an entire medical field could be hijacked by an unscientific and irrational ideology – that endocrinologists could be chemically castrating healthy adolescents without solid scientific justification, that surgeons could be removing the healthy breasts of teenage girls without any proof of benefit, and that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health could have fraudulently duped the entire medical world into endorsing a reckless, ideology-driven experiment with no scientific underpinning. It sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. Yet every word is true.

Which means now more than ever, journalists must do their job – question, investigate, and expose the corruption of gender medicine. Skeptics need a platform, victims must be heard, and the harms must be scrutinized. Now is the time to plainly state that there is no evidence that “gender-affirming care” is lifesaving, puberty blockers are neither evidence-based nor reversible, and detransition rates are clearly rising. For over a decade, Canadian media have trusted activist-clinicians and the discredited WPATH while ignoring or vilifying those fighting to protect young people. This must end – immediately.


Mia Hughes specializes in pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion and the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights. She is the author of “The WPATH Files” and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Continue Reading

Trending

X