Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister and his heritage minister are engaged in an offensive against their critics. Yesterday the heritage minister, quoting an article, accused his critics of “a deliberate campaign of misinformation by commercial interests that would prefer to avoid the same regulatory oversight applied to broadcast media.”
While the heritage minister is quoting individuals who are part of the groups that have lobbied him and his ministry, the opponents, which he and the Prime Minister accuse of being part of a conspiracy theory and wearing tinfoil hats, number in the tens of thousands of Canadians. They include noted professors of law, Internet law experts and the former chair of the CRTC.
The government is rightly under siege for its flawed bill, Bill C-10. It is a bill that the minister seems to know shockingly little about, as evidenced in his disastrous appearances on news shows over the past two weeks.
While the minister and the Prime Minister are threatening the freedom of expression of Canadians and proposing draconian measures that would restrict and limit the expression of Canadians online, they are also proposing measures that would establish a regulatory body that could block websites from Canadians being able to see them and have social media posts ordered to be taken down. It is concerning when any government seeks to limit the freedom of expression of its citizens, especially so when it is completely unable to articulate the rationale for why this is appropriate.
The government says it is to protect Canadian culture, but there were protections included in the legislation for individual Canadians. However, the government stripped those protections, saying the bill did not need them, and now is proposing half measures that would still not address Canadians' concerns.
Some of the concerns Canadians have include the fact that the Prime Minister has a history of silencing his critics. When he is talking about being able to order web pages blocked, social media posts taken down and the regulation of social media users who have followings that meet no decided threshold, but just have a lot of followers or views, it raises concerns.
This is the same Prime Minister who fired his attorney general, the member for Vancouver Granville, as she was speaking truth to power and stopping him from his attempts to interfere in the criminal prosecution of his friends at SNC-Lavalin. This is the same Prime Minister who kicked the member for Vancouver Granville and Dr. Jane Philpott out of the Liberal caucus for speaking out against him. This is the same Prime Minister who obstructed the investigation in what was later labelled the “Trudeau II Report”, which detailed his attempted interference in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. It is the same Prime Minister who silenced committees and parliamentarians investigating the WE scandal when he prorogued Parliament and locked the doors to this place.
Canadians are rightfully wondering, as are Internet law experts and the former chair of the CRTC, to name a few, what the government is really trying to do with this clumsy legislation and its spokesperson, the minister, who does not seem to have even read the legislation. Is it really about protecting Canadian content or, in fact, is this legislation about silencing critics of the government?