The groups speaking out against Trudeau's plans to censor the Internet
For two years, Rebel News has been warning about Trudeau’s plans to censor the Internet. Right after the 2019 election, he appointed Steven Guilbeault, the convicted criminal, to be his heritage minister, and he gave him a “mandate letter”. That’s a job description, a to-do list, for a cabinet minister. The first point was for Guilbeault to ramp up pay-offs to media. They used a slightly more polite way of saying it.
But that was job one: pay off friends. And job two was: censor enemies.
First he proposed Bill C-10 — which would nationalize the Internet, in terms of regulation and jurisdiction. It would let the government rule over YouTube and Facebook and Netflix and Amazon and Google, just like it runs TV stations in Canada — determining who could live and who could die, and more importantly, who pays taxes and who gets handouts. Who gets licences. Like radio stations.
And then C-36, which revives the “hate speech” provisions of the human rights act, which lets people be prosecuted for saying hurtful things — not criminal things, just mean things — online. Except they made it worse, of course — complaints get to be made in secret. You can have a secret vendetta against someone, and they’ll never even know who hit them. But you’ll have to pay them thousands.
Those are both awful. But right after Parliament broke for the summer, Guilbeault went further. His department released hundreds of pages of proposed new legislation, a third law — not C-10 or C-36, which died when Parliament was suspended. But a third law, the biggest and worst ever. And you can see why they dumped it during the summer, not when Parliament was around.
On last night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra discussed a whole raft of groups who care enough about Internet freedom to weigh in on the proposed legislation.
After breaking down what many of the groups had said, Ezra remarked:
There are actually about a half a dozen other groups that scorch the government like this, and these are scholars, they're legal experts, or internet industry groups— they are not partisan people, these are not political parties— in fact, the Conservatives have been silent, but all of these experts think its astonishingly bad law and policy... but I can see only one journalism group that weighed in— our friends at the Independent Press Gallery, run by Candice Malcolm of True North— about fifty or so independent journalists in it, including Rebel News.
Ezra's full monologue, along with full episodes of The Ezra Levant Show, are available to subscribers of RebelNews+.