Trudeau's internet censorship plan didn't die. Carney just sent Guilbeault's staffer to run it at the UN
Noémie Dansereau-Lavoie was the minister's office contact on Steven Guilbeault's "Diversity of Content Online" project, the 2021 plan written with Google and Netflix to steer what the algorithms show Canadians. Now Mark Carney has made her ambassador to UNESCO, just as the UN agency writes new rules for the internet and Canada pays to help.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: The Trudeau government's plan to shape what Canadians see online did not die with its failed bills; it moved to a United Nations agency in Paris, and Mark Carney has now named a former Steven Guilbeault adviser as Canada's ambassador there.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced the appointment of Noémie Dansereau-Lavoie as ambassador to UNESCO, the UN agency for education and culture, in a Nov. 3 news release that drew little notice. Dansereau-Lavoie has not been a diplomat. She spent about 10 years at Radio-Canada, then worked for the Quebec government and served as the City of Montreal's French-language commissioner. Her official biography also lists the years 2019 to 2021 as a senior adviser in the office of the minister of Canadian Heritage, a post then held by Guilbeault.
Guilbeault was then making his case for a law to police the internet. At a Canada 2020 event on March 31, 2021, the harm he led with was to politicians, describing public officials driven out of public service by hateful content aimed at them. On blocking websites in Canada, he said: "Could we envision having blocking orders? Maybe. It would likely be a last resort, a nuclear bomb in a toolbox of mechanisms for a regulator."
Documents obtained by Rebel News through an access to information request, more than 1,800 pages of internal Canadian Heritage emails from the spring of 2021, show what Dansereau-Lavoie worked on. A request form from Guilbeault's office for a ministerial video message to UNESCO names the program as "Diversity of Content Online" and lists her as the contact in the minister's office. Officials discussed copying her when a final text went to the Australian government, and on June 22, 2021, she wrote to Australia from her own government account seeking a quote for the news release. The records show an adviser carrying a file for her minister, and she is not accused of wrongdoing.
That file produced the Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content Online, released June 30, 2021, and written with the governments of France, Germany, Finland and Australia, with Google, Netflix and the French music company Deezer, and with activist groups. The text, which has since been removed from the federal website, states that "content recommendation algorithms should promote content reflecting different sources, perspectives, ideas and genres." It says any measure against disinformation and misinformation "should ensure respect for the right to freedom of expression," counts "public service media" as part of a healthy media ecosystem, and adds that "information about media ownership and funding sources should be made accessible to the public."
Critics saw governments and platforms agreeing on what recommendation systems should favour. John Robson's July 9, 2021, column in the National Post, headlined "Ottawa's new guide to internet control," argued that the aims of Bill C-10, then stalled in the Senate, had been issued anyway as principles. The signatories undertook to publish their "specific commitments" by December 2022. The last archived copy of the page, from October 2025, still listed Annex A as "TBD."
The principles rested on UNESCO's 2005 convention on cultural diversity, and Guilbeault pitched them by video to a UNESCO conference in June 2021. Two years later the agency published its own guidelines for governing digital platforms, calling for a regulator in every country, content moderation, oversight of algorithms and special powers during elections. "To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay," said UNESCO head Audrey Azoulay.
Canada's engagement has deepened under Carney. Last November, at the UN climate conference in Brazil, his environment minister signed a UNESCO declaration on "information integrity on climate change," committing Canada to work with technology companies on how their platforms spread "climate disinformation." In February, Heritage Minister Marc Miller travelled to Paris and gave UNESCO $300,000 for work on the digital environment, and Canada voted to begin drafting a binding protocol that would extend the 2005 convention to the internet. At home, the government has revived an expert panel, one of whose members holds a UNESCO Chair, for a third attempt at online harms legislation.
Three earlier bills, Bill C-10, Bill C-36 and the Online Harms Act, failed in Ottawa in the face of public opposition. A UNESCO protocol would be written where no Canadian voter has a say. The United States leaves the agency effective Dec. 31, with the State Department saying it had come to advance "divisive social and cultural causes." Canada is moving the other way, with money, a vote for the protocol and an ambassador who handled the algorithm file in Guilbeault's office.
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COMMENTS
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Bryan Poynter commented 2026-11-10 21:43:48 -0500It’s time to leave the UN I will support the first party that promises to leave! -
Ruth Bard commented 2026-11-10 20:58:37 -0500It’s highly irritating to hear plural pronouns used to refer to a single individual. Let’s respect English grammar (without which we lose the ability to communicate clearly), but let’s also be truthful. “Diana” should be referred to as “he.”
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-11-10 20:39:56 -0500This deal of taking the censorship law to the E.U. is a frightening turn of events. May God help us get around that censorship so we can find out what’s really happening.
