{"id":91406,"date":"2024-09-09T03:00:47","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T07:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=91406"},"modified":"2024-09-08T12:28:03","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T16:28:03","slug":"bill-c-63-the-online-harms-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/09\/09\/bill-c-63-the-online-harms-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the National Post<\/em>, Barbara Kay<\/a> explains why the Trudeau government will probably be urgently trying to get Bill C-63 through into law when Parliament resumes sitting later this month:<\/p>\n

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

The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist of the hourglass. Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 16, and the Liberals will urgently seek to pass Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act<\/em><\/a>, now in its second reading.<\/p>\n

If passed in its present incarnation, this deeply flawed bill will drastically curtail freedom of speech in Canada (which, to be fair, is not an outlier on digital crackdowns in the West. Switzerland, of all places, just passed similar legislation<\/a>).<\/p>\n

We already have hate-crime laws<\/a> in the Criminal Code that address advocacy for genocide, incitement of hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred. Apart from its laudatory intentions in removing online content that sexually victimizes children, Bill C-63 seeks to curb all online hate speech through unnecessary, inadvisable and draconian measures inappropriate to a democracy.<\/p>\n

The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aper\u00e7u<\/em><\/a> by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out”.<\/p>\n

Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.<\/p>\n

Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act<\/em>, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012<\/a>. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the Trudeau government will probably be urgently trying to get Bill C-63 through into law when Parliament resumes sitting later this month: The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,10,28,53],"tags":[459,186,58,887,593,417],"class_list":["post-91406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-internet","tag-justintrudeau","tag-socialmedia","tag-victimlesscrime"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-nMi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91406","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=91406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91407,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91406\/revisions\/91407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}