Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cited Canada as an example which he didn’t want to model his state’s pandemic response to.
Speaking to Fox News’ Mark Levin, DeSantis defended his early opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns, noting that if he had not, Floridians would have little freedom and a crippled economy like in Canada.
“We were the leading state fighting against coronavirus lockdowns,” DeSantis said.
“I believe had Florida not done that, you would see the other states to have followed Canada, for example, [which] is still locked down.”
DeSantis credits his opposition lockdowns to have inspired other states to reopen and abandon more controversial public health measures.
From early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida decided to enact few public health restrictions and chose to reopen faster than most states. In terms of cases, Florida has largely done better than many states.
In Canada, most residents have been barred from travelling, gathering in groups or practicing regular religious services for over a year. Constant lockdowns have also had a devastating impact on the economy, leading to businesses failing and skyrocketing debt.
In May, DeSantis signed a bill banning “vaccine passports” and other local orders that make vaccination required in unnecessary situations. Multiple other states followed, ending the possibility of a nationwide vaccine passport in the United States.
DeSantis believes that many within the bureaucracy wanted a Canada-style lockdown, and it took the governor of the third-largest state to dissent to stop them.
“I think that’s what a lot of these bureaucrats wanted to see in the United States. And we made sure that we lead in a different direction,” he said.
“You just have so many threats to freedom nowadays. And what we’re doing is we’ve essentially, ‘Katie, bar the door’ to protect Floridians and to protect their freedoms and opportunities. And you see it in a number of different ways.”
The Trudeau government’s newly-unveiled online “hate speech” bill would criminalize any discourse that is not “far left woke speech,” the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) warned.
On June 23, hours before the House of Commons adjourned for the summer, the Liberals introduced Bill C-36 – a bill to crack down on “hate speech” published online.
The bill would reinstate section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, amend the Criminal Code and Youth Criminal Justice Act to give the government new powers to address hateful content and give the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to compel citizens to cease online communication.
According to PPC spokesperson Martin Masse, the legislation would effectively criminalize dissent and criticism that doesn’t align with “far left wokeism.”
“Hate speech is already illegal in Canada but you must meet a high bar to prove it in court. However, C-36 will vastly expand the power of human rights commissions to crack down on all kinds of unpopular speech that could be described as hate speech based on vague and subjective criteria,” said Masse.
“The Liberals have spent the past several years making every issue about race, gender and religion. They and other far left groups and politicians have been calling everybody who disagrees with them racist, bigots and white supremacists. With C-36, their goal is clearly to shut up dissidents who reject far left wokism, or at least scare them and force them to be very careful about what they say. It’s to criminalize any speech that is not far left woke speech.”
In an emailed statement to True North, Masse also slammed the Conservative Party of Canada for not speaking out against the legislation since it was unveiled last week.
“They are courting the Liberals’ centre-left vote and won’t take any position that jeopardizes this strategy. That’s why they won’t oppose C-36. Electoral expediency is more important for them than principles,” said Masse.
Soon after the bill was tabled, Conservative MP and justice critic Rob Moore addressed the law claiming that the decision was political and not a genuine attempt to tackle hate speech.
“Once again, we see all Canadians can expect from the Trudeau Liberals are photo ops and announcements,” More told CTV News on Wednesday.
“The fact this bill was brought forward in the last minutes before Parliament ends for the summer shows this Liberal government is only interested in political posturing ahead of the next election — not rooting out hate speech.”
Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole has not yet addressed Bill C-36 publicly or his party’s position on the law since it was first announced.
If a fall election is called by the government, Bill C-36 will die and will have to be reintroduced in the next parliamentary session.
It turns out that Bill C-10 was just the tip of the iceberg of the Trudeau government’s plans to control what you can say and what you can see online.
Bill C-36 aims to shut down opinions the government doesn’t like — with no recourse and no clear explanation about what is legal free speech and what is illegal hate speech.
In other words, it aims to take the worst elements of cancel culture and turn it into federal law.
True North’s Candice Malcolm explains how the Trudeau Government is taking steps to censor the internet, shut down speech they don’t like and erase due process and the rule of law.
The British Columbia government has apologized after asking Canadians to snitch on their unvaccinated family members.
On Thursday, an official BC government Twitter account called on residents to tag their unvaccinated friends or family members in the replies. The tweet has since been deleted.
“Thank you! Next, let’s get to 80%! Tag a friend or family member who still needs their first dose and help them register here: gov.bc.ca/GetVaccinated,” read the tweet.
Despite the tweet’s deletion, an unknown number of people were publicly outed as unvaccinated in the replies.
According to Black Press Media, the BC government apologized for the incident saying that they will work to “ensure this does not happen again.”
A survey by Leger from 2020 found that 40% of Canadians were willing to snitch on their fellow citizens for not complying with COVID-19 measures.
In comparison, only 27% of Americans were willing to do the same when asked the same question.
Several places including London, Ontario have established COVID-19 snitch lines where residents can report others for breaking gathering limit rules or playing sports in parks.
In British Columbia, the City of Vancouver has a reporting system where residents can report house parties with 6 people or more and gatherings of 50 or more people.
Not one Canadian has sent Liberal Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault a letter or email in support of further further regulating the internet, the government says.
The lack of support was revealed following an Order paper question filed in the House of Commons by Conservative MP Alex Ruff.
“With regard to correspondence received by the Minister or the Prime Minister related to internet censorship or increased regulation of social media sites since January 1, 2019, how many pieces of correspondence were received? And how many pieces of correspondence asked for more internet censorship or regulation?” Ruff inquired.
According to a response from the Department of Canadian Heritage, Guilbeault’s office “has not received any correspondence asking for more internet censorship or regulation.”
However, the response from the government noted that “a total of 389 pieces of correspondence related to internet censorship or increased regulation of posts on social media sites” were sent to the ministry as of April 30.
The revelation flies in the face of past claims by Guilbeault that a “very high proportion” of Canadians were in support of anti-internet laws like Bill C-10 and Bill C-36.
Critics have claimed that Bill C-10, which seeks to upgrade the Broadcasting Act to meet current online media environments, and Bill C-36 which hopes to regulate online hate speech are a threat to Canadians’ free speech rights.
“This is really an important point. There are some people out there, a minority clearly, who would advocate that we shouldn’t intervene, there should be no laws whatsoever regarding the internet, and anyways what happens on the internet stays on the internet. Well, it’s clearly not the case,” claimed Guilbeault during a Commons heritage committee.
“A very high proportion of Canadians are asking the government to step in. It’s very clear we will act.”
Guilbeault has also accused critics, which include former CRTC officials, of belonging to an “extremist element” of the Conservative Party. According to a poll by Public Square Research and Maru-Blue a majority of Canadians support free speech rights over Bill C-10. The poll found that 73% of Canadians would choose their rights to freedom of expression over further regulation.
It took seven years for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to repeal section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. After an eight year reprieve, it’s coming back.
This section allowed the weaponization of the Canadian Human Rights Commission against unpopular speech under the auspices of combating “hate speech.” Activists leveled complaints against Maclean’s magazine and Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant and the Western Standard, and countless others without the means or notoriety to fight back. Indeed, this is why section 13 prosecutions had a 100% conviction rate until the last few years.
It took the human rights commissions underestimating their enemies to expose, and ultimately undermine, their regime of speech restrictions. It was still several years before the Conservatives summoned the political will to take section 13 out to the woodshed. Even then, it was a private member’s bill, not a government bill, that did it.
Now, the Liberal government is quite proudly trying to revive section 13, tabling – in the final House of Commons sitting before summer – Bill C-36, which purportedly addresses “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech.”
In the five days since the Liberals tabled this pro-censorship bill, there’s been not a word about it from Conservative leader Erin O’Toole.
Conservative justice critic Rob Moore put out a statement saying the “bill will not target hate speech – just ensure bureaucrats in Ottawa are bogged down with frivolous complaints about tweets.”
Moore’s concern for the bureaucracy’s workload notwithstanding, it’s clear he and the Conservatives are missing the point.
Section 13 isn’t wrong because of its mechanics – it’s wrong because it limits free speech. C-36 exploits people’s ignorance of what “hate speech” means, and more importantly, that there already exists a criminal threshold for it.
If reinstated, the new section 13 will prohibit the use of the internet to communicate “hate speech…in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
Those grounds range from race and sexual orientation to religion and gender identity.
The bill includes a “clarification” that speech is not prohibited “solely because it expresses mere dislike or disdain or it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”
Should this bill get to committee, there will no doubt be plenty of haggling over where the government is supposed to plot certain slurs or polemics on the spectrum of “mere dislike” to “vilification,” but engaging in these debates will be an admission of defeat.
As a free speech absolutist, I can take comfort in not needing to draw an arbitrary line. Liberties extend to such a point as they threaten someone else’s liberties. This is why threats of violence and defamation have existing criminal and civil remedies, respectively, in law. There is no right to be liked by your fellow man. The duty to love your neighbour is a moral one, not a legal one.
Canvass the activists supporting a restoration of section 13 and you’ll find many of them seek to establish approved positions on various issues, thus shrinking the bounds of discourse.
Is it hate speech if someone says homosexuality is a sin? What if one says transgender women should not be able to compete in women’s sports? How about uttering “I hate Christians”?
The Liberals point to horrific hate-motivated attacks and lay the blame at hateful rhetoric. Race-motivated attacks and vandalism of mosques, synagogues and churches are consequences of people’s own hatred, not of free speech. Moreover, speech that is truly repugnant is rejected by society and the people in it, making state limitations unnecessary.
C-36 infringes on the mother of all freedoms – free speech. Without freedom of speech, we lack the ability to advance arguments on anything else that matters.
Politics is full of compromise. This is especially true of Canadian Conservative politics, whose motto ought to be “This isn’t the hill to die on.” As my friend Mark Steyn has often said, eventually you run out of hills.
If the Conservatives – and any other politicians, for that matter – are not prepared to stand up for free speech, anything else they seek to do is irrelevant.
There was a time when this would have been a no-brainer. After all, in the heyday of the human rights hate speech regime in the aughts, there were principled stands from several Liberal politicians, as well as left-leaning authors, journalists and columnists – all of whom seemed to understand that supporting free speech is not an endorsement of every expression of free speech.
This is no longer the case. “Free speech” is maligned as anachronistic and oppressive, and those who stand up for it are forced to defend the worst applications of individuals’ right to speak freely.
This is no doubt contributing to the Conservative cowardice on this issue. It was easy for Conservatives to be the party of free speech in the face of Liberal Bill C-10, which vastly expands government’s ability to regulate the internet. It’s harder when defending free speech means defending the speech that makes – and often should make – a society uncomfortable.
“Midnight Madness: as Canadians slept, the Liberals, Bloc and NDP combined to pass Bill C-10.”
That is how Canadian law professor and the country’s foremost expert on law and technology, Michael Geist, described Tuesday evening’s House of Commons shenanigans that allowed the Trudeau government to ram through its controversial internet censorship law.
This comes after we saw “the government limiting debate, overruling its own committee chair, and using every available procedural manoeuvre to get the bill passed in the House of Commons,” Geist reports.
In a nutshell, C-10 attempts to take the government’s outdated cultural regulatory mechanism, the CRTC, and awkwardly apply it to the internet. This will give bureaucrats (and the partisan operatives that direct them) the power to meddle in the content you see online.
The bill seeks to regulate everything from Facebook to Netflix to Google, and potentially replace those companies’ algorithms with a government-approved one. This would allow the feds to push content they like, and hide content they don’t.
This should make all Canadians feel a bit uneasy.
It’s bad enough that woke Silicon Valley executives already tilt the playing field to suppress conservative ideas and journalism. The idea that Liberal hacks in the PMO could determine what you see and what you don’t puts Canada in uncomfortably close proximity to totalitarian China.
It turns out that Bill C-10 was just the tip of the iceberg of the Trudeau government’s plans to control what you can say and what you can see online.
Speaking at the Banff World Media Festival last week, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault hinted that the Liberals had something far worse coming.
“Now this is going to be controversial. People think that C-10 was controversial. Wait until we table this legislation,” he said, doing his best impression of a Bond villain.
Here it is: Trudeau government introduces legislation to crack down on so-called “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech" online. This is utterly terrifying. https://t.co/X1zBYSEAT2
Lo and behold, less than 24 hours after the Liberals rammed through C-10, Justice Minister David Lametti tabled C-36, a bill to crack down on so-called “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech” online.
Lametti tabled the last minute bill on Wednesday, which among other things, proposes to reinstate the much-maligned provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act, Section 13.
Scrapping Section 13 was one of the crowning achievements of the Harper government.
Trudeau’s new hate speech bill would bring it back, and make it illegal to use the internet to “communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech…in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
As always, the devil is in the details.
Hate speech, a vaguely defined term, is already illegal in Canada. This bill seeks to expand the government’s power to crack down on messages and comments they don’t like, based on subjective and ill-defined criteria.
Perhaps worst of all is the mechanism that could be used to pull down content the government doesn’t like. Bill C-36 gives the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to compel citizens to cease online communication or pay a monetary fine.
Compelling Canadians to remove content under threat of a fine (or worse) is only part of what Trudeau has already told us is his ultimate goal.
After Trudeau won a minority election in 2019, his mandate letter to Heritage Minister Guilbeault laid out his top priorities.
In that letter, Trudeau ordered the government to: “create new regulations for social media platforms, starting with a requirement that all platforms remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours or face significant penalties.”
Removing content the Liberals do not like, within 24 hours no less, erases any possibility for due process or appeal. It allows the government to play judge and jury, and compel technology companies to do their dirty work.
These internet censorship laws have no place in a free and open society.
Singapore announced that they are going to learn to live COVID-19 and move away from a “COVID-zero” approach.
They are going to stop quarantining travellers, stop quarantining close-contacts of people who test positive and stop monitoring daily infection numbers.
Anthony Furey says Canada can follow Singapore’s balanced approach to COVID-19.
As Kingston city crews were removing a statue of former prime minister and Kingston member of parliament John A. Macdonald, two veterans stood at the site holding Canadian flags as a sign of protest. One of them, Gordon Ohlke, joined The Andrew Lawton Show to explain why he decided to take a stand.
After sharing his “amazing” vaccine experience, he said: “we don’t get through this unless the vast majority of the population gets that first shot….And the way to do that is to make sure everyone, even that crusty old uncle who resists, or that friend who’s skeptical — encourage them, convince them, tell them that they need to get vaccinated….making sure that everyone gets the vaccination is the way to get through it…everyone, even the people who are hesitant, need to get that.”
Every political leader in Canada is taking a similar line, and the incentivization measures are getting silly.
Probably the most embarrassing pitch came from Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Standing in an empty vaccination centre, he said: “We have a bit of a problem…no one is here. Because we’re not getting enough demand right now. And that’s why Alberta today is announcing that we are launching the Open for Summer Vaccine Lottery, with three one million dollar prizes….We need to just nudge those who haven’t gotten around to getting their vaccines yet.”
But significant opposition to vaccination persists, and million-dollar prizes or not, there will continue to be people who decline, for a multitude of reasons. It is disingenuous to smear them all with the epithet “anti-vaxxer”.
There are those who are opposed to all vaccinations on principle; there are also those who are not opposed to vaccination per se, but oppose these particular vaccines because they’re experimental, or because they’ve been rushed, without undergoing proper safety trials; there are those who support these vaccines, but have concluded, based on their own risk assessments, that they are better off without one; there are those who have already recovered from COVID and prefer to rely on their own immune systems; there is also opposition that appears to be linked to culture, religion, or ethnicity (prompting other desperate measures, such as vaccine centres for “those who identify as Black”) and there are many other nuanced and considered positions beyond these.
Most jurisdictions are pinning their reopening plans to vaccination rates, which are generally approaching two-thirds to three-quarters of their populations. But the governments must know that they cannot get much higher than that without making vaccination compulsory. There will remain a sizable group of stubborn “vaccine-hesitant” people, who just won’t be persuaded.
But maybe all the coercive rhetoric and bribery isn’t actually to persuade the remaining hesitant people at all.
When do politicians ever put anything above their own political interests? Governments want to claim credit for solutions more than they want to solve problems. If they insist vaccines are the solution, they want to be seen to push that solution more than they want to implement it.
Our governments must suspect that SARS-CoV-2 infections are going to rise again in the autumn, no matter what they do.
The vaccines appear to be effective in reducing symptoms and duration of illness, but they do not prevent infection. And as the now endemic virus continues to mutate, the vaccines will begin to lose their efficacy, and the number of infections will rise as the weather turns cold. Our governments know that someone — but preferably not them — will be blamed for that.
These current campaigns may well be nothing but theatre, so that when numbers do start to go up and restrictions are reintroduced, our governments can say they did everything short of enforcing compulsory vaccination.
But if they escape blame in this way, where will the blame fall?
It’s not so much that they’ll intentionally make a scapegoat of the unvaccinated — it’s more likely that they’re just trying to paper over their own errors — but the upshot will be the same. For it to work, not only do political leaders need to be seen to pull out all the stops in pushing the vaccines, but the “vaccine-hesitant” also need to continue to refuse. Ironically, the governments need their exhortations to fail, and it’s possible that the only reason they’re pushing so hard is that they know they will.
It’s increasingly clear from the evidence that lockdowns have been largely useless.
It’s also clear from the randomized controlled trials that masks make no statistically significant difference in viral spread in a populace. Despite these non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), infections have continued to rise and fall based on the mysterious behaviour of a virus that doesn’t care about government NPIs.
If everyone were to be vaccinated, and numbers still continued to rise, our politicians would have nowhere left to hide.
But vaccination rates won’t get near 100% – and pushing for a solution that requires full cooperation but can’t achieve it is a perfect strategy for the evasion of blame. If numbers rise, they can point to the unvaccinated; if numbers don’t rise, they can take credit for the vaccine rollout. And so the growing hostility for any continuing restrictions or further COVID-related deaths will be directed at the unvaccinated, instead of the government.
A recent CBC article bore the subtitle: “Unvaccinated Canadians are a ‘tinderbox’ that threatens Canada more than variants, experts say”. The thinking is that vaccines are a collective prophylactic remedy, like fluoride in the water supply, rather than an individual preventative medicine. But unlike fluoride, which can be avoided by drinking bottled water, for instance, this remedy requires individual consent (or legal compulsion) for an injection that protects against an illness most people neither suffer from nor are in any danger of dying from.
As the incentivization and coercion continue to ride roughshod over that once-important notion of informed consent, we are accelerating towards a caste system, in which the vaccinated will feel morally justified in discriminating against the unvaccinated. We can expect a kind of righteous persecution and segregation on a scale unknown in Canada.
Most of this could have been avoided had our governments followed their pandemic response plans — instead of copying China’s lockdown strategy — and shielded the vulnerable where possible, leaving the rest of us to achieve population immunity naturally.
But those plans were negligently cast aside, and subsequent layers of error, falsehood, and censorship have brought about the current predicament.
If the coronavirus continues to spread, the likely scenario that will unfold is that those who withhold their consent to vaccination will become a persecuted minority merely for exercising their right to bodily autonomy, while politicians escape blame for the ongoing mishandling of their pandemic response.
But on a more positive note, there will be at least three new vaccinated millionaires.
Andrew Mahon is a writer based in London, England. He has written for the Post Millennial, the Daily Wire, the Conservative Woman, the Spectator and others.
