There does seem to be a determination to make sure that the government is the one supervising people's speech. I would like to emphasize a distinction that I alluded to earlier, which is that the proper restriction on speech, in my books, is one that distinguishes between violence and speech that is not violent. It's perfectly adequate to limit speech by saying that you cannot use speech to threaten violence. That makes sense. We have those laws already. We've had them for a long time. But all these legislative initiatives, especially Bill C-63, which for my money was the worst of the lot, including Bill C-9, are attempting to cross this threshold: Even if violence is not involved, even if you are not threatening violence, you're still not allowed to say certain things, because we don't like it.
That's where you get into dangerous territory with freedom of speech. That begins to mean that your guarantee, your constitutional guarantee, of free speech is not that at all. You can just compare the Canadian state on this with the situation in the United States. I mean, in both countries we have a constitutional guarantee of free speech. In the United States, the government is not allowed constitutionally to limit speech that here would be called hate speech. Hate speech is not a thing in the U.S., because the courts have said that it is protected speech. Yet here we've ended up in a situation, in the legislation you're alluding to, where the government is trying here, there and everywhere to try to limit how people talk.