Under Justin Trudeau's leadership, the Liberal doggedly pursued legislation to restrict and limit Canadians' right to free speech through bills C-6, C-11 and the Online Harms Act.

But when Trudeau stepped down and called a snap election, many of these efforts stalled as the House of Commons shut down. Now that Parliament has returned, with Mark Carney now at the helm, the Liberals are set to revisit their censorious ways.

On Thursday night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra looked at revealing remarks made by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, himself a former Trudeau cabinet minister, suggesting Carney was following the same censorious path.

“We've made a commitment to combat online harms,” Guilbeault told the heritage committee. “We will be introducing measures to address hate speech, terrorist content and the harmful distribution of intimate images.”

The Liberal government cares “more about censorship than just about anything else,” Ezra said, noting he spent the day in court fighting a Trudeau-era attempt to define what is, and what is not, journalism in Canada.

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Unfortunately, Rebel News is taking on that fight alone. “It could be different,” suggested Ezra, calling out a lack of support from other civil liberties groups like the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, PEN Canada and Amnesty International.

“I don't think a single MP bothered to press him on it,” he added, slamming the “atrocious things” included in the Liberals' Online Harms Act.

“It had life in prison as a new punishment for the standalone crime of hate,” Ezra said, listing one of the many troubling policies in the legislation. “Hate, of course, is a human emotion. It's absurd to regulate hate, it's like regulating love. You can't ban it any more than you can compel people to love.”

The vaguely defined term of “hate” is “the only thing I've ever seen the Liberals call for life in prison for, for the emotion of hatred.”

Another piece of the proposed act targets Elon Musk, Ezra explained, citing how social media companies could face a demand to remove content violating the legislation with in 24 hours or “face enormous fines that could reach into the billions of dollars.”

The only reason for this requirement “is that you want the company to simply do it out of fear and out of reflex,” he continued. 

Somehow, it still gets worse. 

“If you still control a Facebook account or some old thing, and you wrote a comment literally 10 years ago, you can be prosecuted today — there's no statute of limitations,” warned Ezra. “This law is so unCanadian it breaks centuries of tradition in our law.”

And while Carney “may look like a boring banker,” the prime minister is “no less radical than Justin Trudeau.”