The degree of control exercised over individual Canadians by various levels of government was already on the increase before the human rights disaster of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic handed the power mongers even more control than they’d dreamed of. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the horrific Online Harms Act provisions for even more dystopian government oversight if it is passed in its current form:
It seems Justin Trudeau isn’t only a dick – he also gets his ideas from one. Philip K Dick, to be precise. Trudeau’s government has proposed a new law that would give judges the power to put an individual under house arrest if they fear he might commit a hate crime. That’s right – might. It’s right out of The Minority Report, Dick’s 1956 dystopian tale of a future America in which a “Precrime” police division uses intelligence from mutants known as “precogs” to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence. Welcome to woke Canada, where Dickian nightmares come true.
It is courtesy of Bill C-63 that the pitiable citizens of Canada might soon find themselves languishing in court-ordered confinement despite having committed no crime. The bill is devoted to tackling “hate” on the internet. As is always the case when officialdom puffs itself up and declares war on mean words online, it is riddled with draconianism. For example, the mad law, if passed, would allow people to file complaints (shorter version: snitch) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission if they spot “hate speech” online. Those found guilty of this sin of making a nasty utterance could be ordered to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation. [NR: Other reports say it’s up to $50,000 with an additional $20,000 in fines … per complainant.]
Imagine the levels of grift this would give rise to. The offence-seeking snowflakes of the phoney left would finally be able to monetise their hurt feelings. Call a “transwoman” a fella and he (yes, he – sue me) could potentially drag you to the CHRC for a nice little payday. The law would incentivise complaint-making. Worse, it would foster self-censorship. Who would risk getting angry online, far less logging on when drunk to wind up the woke, when it’s possible they’ll have their pockets turned out by a misnamed Human Rights Commission so that some professional victim can be compensated for the pain of having seen a word or idea he doesn’t like?
It really is possible it will be ideas, not just blind hatred, that will be punished under C-63. The justice minister Arif Virani’s promise that speech that is “awful but lawful” will not be censored, and that a “high threshold” will have to be met before people are penalised for what they post, is not reassuring. After all, Canada’s a country in which entirely legit publications have found themselves under investigation by the Human Rights Commission just for publishing controversial matter. Maclean’s magazine had its collar felt by the human-rights overlords following a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. The CHRC also launched an investigation into Alphonse de Valk, a priest, after he raged with passion against same-sex marriage.
I’m not confident that a nation that has such an inquisitorial body, a body whose very description of itself as a “human rights” commission is a brazen act of Orwellian deceit, will keep its promise of permitting the expression of “awful” thoughts. So much is branded “hate speech” these days – from correctly calling “transwomen” men to saying Islam has a lot of dumb ideas – that it feels inevitable that the expression of fairly normal ideas that Canada’s woke regime just doesn’t like will get swept up in this crusade against “hate”. Indeed, under Canada’s C-16 gender-identity law, “deliberately misgendering” a trans person is treated as a potential “violation” of their human rights. I predict that C-63’s incentivising of snitching will cause an explosion in complaints of “misgendering”. Perhaps Canada will become a no-go zone for thoughtcriminals like JK Rowling.
But it is C-63’s proposal to introduce something like precrime into Canada that has caused most waves. The idea is that individuals who are talking shit online, especially if they’re aiming their invective at minority groups, could be ordered to stay indoors or to wear an electronic tag if a judge fears there could be an “escalation” in their behaviour. Precrime, then. Dick’s idea made flesh. The newspaper headlines give a sense of how chilling this suggestion is, how headlong Canada’s descent into dystopia has become. “Justice minister defends house-arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future”, says the Globe and Mail. Mate, when you’re defending the confinement of people who’ve broken no law, it’s surely time to stop and think.
