Like most Americans, I always tended to believe Canada was our more sensible, if less intense, neighbour. It was a country that respected liberal traditions derived originally from England, embracing values such as free speech and assembly along with tolerance for opposing views.
This is no longer the case. As authoritarian regimes are expanding all around the world, notes Freedom House, Canada and other western nations seem to be tilting in that awful direction. Some Canadians may fear the future of democracy under a new Donald Trump administration in the United States, but they would do well to look closer to home.
Indeed, even as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issues statements denouncing Russia and China, his regime is now contemplating an online harms law, Bill C-63, which would permit judges to impose house arrest on those who they fear might commit a hate crime in the future. In the case of the most heinous speech, like advocating for genocide, this law would allow lifetime imprisonment. Lighter sentences or simple house arrest could be applied to anything that censors regard as hate speech, which could include such things as “misgendering” people or criticizing any aspect of Islam.
Spiked rightly compared this to the 1956 novel Minority Report by Phillip Dick, set in 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.” The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood called it “Orwellian.”
This controlling trend was foreshadowed during the COVID pandemic, where dissenting views were censored at the behest of a federal official, a regime that one U.S. federal judge compared with “the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” In Tory-controlled Britain, the BBC, Facebook and Google worked with the government to squelch dissenting views.
Read the rest of this piece at National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: European Parliament via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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