{"id":74512,"date":"2022-06-23T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T07:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=74512"},"modified":"2022-06-22T11:39:29","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T15:39:29","slug":"the-government-believes-that-anyone-opposed-to-bill-c-11-is-spreading-misinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/06\/23\/the-government-believes-that-anyone-opposed-to-bill-c-11-is-spreading-misinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act<\/em>, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.<\/p>\n

You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.<\/p>\n

And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act<\/em>. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible \u2014 like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies \u2014 results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think that\u2019d be worth a think.<\/p>\n

But you’d be wrong.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy \u2014 one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.<\/p>\n

He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” \u2014 a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.<\/p>\n

Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who \u2014 as reasonable people often will \u2014 disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses \u2014 including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott \u2014 are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.<\/p>\n

And we are all liars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient? Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,10,28,53,15],"tags":[459,86,676,58,458],"class_list":["post-74512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-criticism","tag-crtc","tag-internet","tag-parliament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jnO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74513,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74512\/revisions\/74513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}