They could be devastating, yes.
Back when Bill C-16 was being debated, I was a witness at one of the Senate committee meetings. One of the senators in that meeting said to me, “Look, I'm a free speech guy, but requiring people to use proper pronouns is just reasonable speech. It's reasonable speech and therefore it's reasonable legislation.” That completely misconceives the whole idea.
The job of the government is not to legislate reasonable speech. If you had a statute which said that Canadians will be required to say hello, please and thank you because that's reasonable speech, that is totalitarian because speech is something that people decide for themselves. As long as the government thinks that its role is to make sure that people are speaking reasonably, then you're totally off on the wrong track.
People's speech is their own unless, for my money, they are threatening violence. If you're over that threshold you're going to get into potential for the kinds of problems that you are alluding to. That potential is very real.