Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent resignation leaves a mixed bag of attempted government control of the internet in Canada. Because authorities elsewhere who want control may copy these strategies in whole or in part, they are worth looking at.

Down for now: Canada’s Online Harms Bill

Bill C-63 is currently stalled because Parliament has been suspended (prorogued) until March 24. Among provisions aimed at reducing child porn, etc., these were also snuck in:

It also amends the Criminal Code to create a new standalone hate crime offence that would allow penalties up to life imprisonment to deter hateful conduct, as well as raise the maximum punishments for hate propaganda offences from five years to life imprisonment for advocating genocide.

Catherine Lévesque, “New Liberal ‘online harms’ bill to make online hate punishable up to life in prison,” National Post, Feb 27, 2024

The bill would have reinstituted key provisions of Section 13 of the Human Rights Act that was dropped in 2013 amid much controversy.

Censorship in Canada, such as the bill legislates, is likely to be very selective. Earlier this year, a number of marches and sit-ins in and around university campuses and neighborhoods, protesting the Gaza–Israel war, surely fit the definition of hateful conduct against Jewish people. But the government promoting the new legislation appeared hardly to notice them at all. The inevitable inequity that such legislation typically embodies was part of the reason why Section 13 was deleted.

But Bill C-11 is now law

Bill C-11, which, arguably, gives the Canadian government control over what Canadians post on the Internet, was passed in 2023:

But the legislation is also a gateway to online censorship. It does this by giving the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission the power to regulate what they call “user generated content.” This means that what Canadians post to places like YouTube and TikTok would fall under government control…

The government swears that they’re not planning on using these powers to censor Canadians’ voices, but then why have them on the books?

“EDITORIAL: Why Bill C-11 is a problem,” Toronto Sun, July 19, 2022

C-11 has not made headlines yet, possibly for several reasons. Canadians are not currently allowed to post links to major news media on Facebook. For example, when I try to post a link to Facebook, I get a message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.” That’s because Trudeau has tried to force Facebook to pay to support legacy Canadian publications that decreasing numbers of people read. And Google, also ordered to pay up, has tried to follow suit in various ways.

A second reason may be that at least some Canadian writers simply avoid writing for Canadian publications now. Canada has nothing like the US First Amendment that protects freedom of the press. For example, the Section 13 uproar stemmed specifically from the tolerated persecution of major Canadian media and commentators at the hands of Islamists.

So where do things stand now?

For a variety of reasons, Trudeau’s political party, the Liberals, are not likely to win the next election. The Conservatives, the likely winners under Pierre Poilievre, are not supporters of legislation against free expression. That may mean not only that C-63 is dead but that the government will not seriously attempt to enforce C-11.

Bill C-413: A war on reality-based thinking?

But a third bill, also put on hold by Trudeau’s resignation, C-413, is worth keeping an eye on. Introduced in the House of Commons September 26, 2024, it criminalizes “hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada.”

The critical problem with this legislation is the context. The church-run residential school system for Indigenous children in Canada was a generally acknowledged failure. Hearings that lasted from 2008 through 2015 massively documented the failures and paid out massive compensation, with little controversy.

But starting in 2021, reports began to surface about large numbers of unmarked graves and “Youngsters thrown into incinerators. The corpses of children thrown into lakes and rivers. Priests ‘decapitating’ children. Little girls conscripted to bury babies. Dead boys hanging by their necks in a barn.” While media dutifully published these claims, none of them, to the best of my knowledge, have been substantiated. Meantime, nearly a hundred churches were burned down in apparent retaliation.

It’s hard not to conclude that the principal purpose of any such legislation as C-413 is to criminalize honest examination of these extraordinary, sensational claims, especially given that more everyday abuse claims are not even widely contested.

Bill C-413 may seem like a problem exclusive to Canada. I disagree; it is simply a small part of a larger picture worldwide. It represents a mindset which — for want of a better word — I call private truth. That is, it amounts to a demand that everyone agree that private beliefs, however they clash with reality, are some sort of protected truth, to which adherence must be enforced.

Private truth has led to a war on math, a war on science, and a war on biology in the school system and elsewhere. Bill C-413, seen in this light, is a war on history as a pursuit of fact.

And Canada is hardly the only country where such a war would appeal to various interest groups.