Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I do agree with the comments of the previous two speakers.
In February 2022, The Globe and Mail published a column with the title, “It's time to end the sedition...by enforcing the law and following the money”. It said, “people have been terrorized for more than a week”. Seditionists and terrorists: Who was the author talking about? This was in February 2022. Yes, of course, they were talking about the truckers. There was no violence, no weapons, no assault and no storming of Parliament, but there were parking violations, road hockey, dancing in the snow and unkind words about the government—seditionists and terrorists. Who was the author of this column? Can you guess? It was one Mark Carney, now the Prime Minister.
In 1992, American political theorist Samuel Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny”. Anarcho-tyranny, he said, is a kind of government dysfunction. The dysfunction occurs when a government is simultaneously unable or unwilling to deal with serious crime, leading to a kind of anarchy while, at the same time, being ruthlessly oppressive in punishing minor transgressions of law-abiding people. The government allows violence, theft, political corruption and foreign interference while it is obsessed with controlling what ordinary people say, think and feel.
In Bill C-9, the government seeks to criminalize an emotion: “hatred means the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”. It is criminal to detest but legal to dislike, but to detest, of course, means to intensely dislike—that's the meaning of the word—so it will be legal to dislike but criminal to intensely dislike. Where is the line between dislike and intensely dislike? Of course, nobody knows that. The line will be drawn wherever the authorities want it to be drawn to punish speech that the government hates.
Bill C-9 also criminalizes protests that “provoke a state of fear”, but not the fear of violence, as we have offences for that already. No, Bill C-9 will prohibit protests that provoke a state of fear of offensive ideas.
That is what the truckers were accused of. That's why Mark Carney described them as seditionists and terrorists.
Bill C-9 will be used to prohibit peaceful protests—like that of the truckers—that the government hates.
In a free country—and I mean in a genuinely free country, which we once claimed to be—you are allowed to hate other people and you are allowed to say that you do.
Thank you very much.