Andrew Scheer’s silence on Trudeau’s revived Section 13 "hate speech" law—repealed unanimously in 2013—risks empowering vague, retroactive censorship targeting critics like Michael Cooper, who was fired after rebutting a false link between conservatism and New Zealand violence. Karina Gould’s proposal to block Twitter during elections mirrors authoritarian tactics, while legacy media (CBC, Globe & Mail) and tech giants may collude to suppress dissent under $600M in government-funded pressure. A 2019 petition at stopsection13.com demands Scheer reject this "perfect storm" of state-enforced speech control, warning it could turn Canada into an outsourced censorship ally while undermining democratic debate. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, today I talk about section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
I have a bit of experience in this, as you may know.
I was prosecuted on the Alberta equivalent of this law for 900 days for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed a dozen years ago.
Well, Stephen Harper repealed that bill in the federal parliament in 2013.
A great achievement.
Now Justin Trudeau wants to bring it back.
I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop Trudeau, but Andrew Scheer seems to be going along with it.
That can't stand.
We have a show today.
It's 100% on censorship.
I hope you'll watch it.
Hey, before I get out of the way, can you please go to the rebel.media slash shows and think about becoming a premium subscriber.
It's $8 a month, $80 for the whole year.
You get access to the TV version of this podcast.
I think it's worth watching.
Get access to Sheila Gunread's show, David Menzie's show, and you're $8 a month.
That helps keep the lights on here, folks.
All right, here's the podcast.
You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.
Tonight, Stephen Harper repealed the Section 13 internet censorship law.
So why is Andrew Scheer letting Justin Trudeau revive it?
It's June 11th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
In 2013, Stephen Harper's Conservatives voted to repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That's the censorship provision that made it an offense to hurt someone's feelings, or actually even worse, it made it an offense to potentially cause one person to have hard feelings about another person.
The language really is that vague.
It really was a feelings crime, a thought crime, not even a word crime.
Here's the text of the now repealed Section 13.
It was illegal to publish anything, including on the internet, that, quote, is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.
So that created the counterfeit human right not to be offended, which of course that's not a real thing.
What that really was was government power, the power to silence you, masquerading as a human right.
That odious law was finally repealed in 2013, but now Justin Trudeau's liberals are looking to bring it back.
They're studying this at Parliament's Justice Committee right now.
And to my horror, Andrew Scheer's conservatives haven't lifted a finger against it.
They just haven't.
They're not actively cheering it on that I can see.
But they have made a team decision, a party-wide decision, specifically not to champion freedom of speech.
I can't name a more important issue for conservatives, actually.
It's more important than taxes or immigration or fighting terrorism or respecting our military.
It's more important than any trade deal, more important than criminal justice, because if you don't have free speech, you can't talk meaningfully about any of those other issues.
So it's so clear to me.
The Liberal government, really, any government, it's not just liberals, all politicians, they don't like their critics, but the Liberals in particular are seeking to shut down criticism of them on key political issues, especially immigration, by the way.
They're looking to silence speech that isn't governed by our criminal code.
I'm fine with our criminal code generally.
But they're looking to silence legitimate political criticism under this hurt feelings law because it's easier to shut someone up than debating them.
Here's a mashup of Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan, the immigration minister, both of them personally attacking us here at the Rebel, for example, reading word for word the same talking points, claiming that we're fake news that ought to be condemned.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives and the member opposite engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
Now, normally I'd be flattered by that.
I have no problem with politicians bad-mouthing me, feelings mutual.
It's a sign that we at the Rebel are not bought and paid for, like, say, the CBC, who seem to specialize in sending female reporters on first-date-style walk-in talks with Trudeau, where they ask really tough questions like this.
Last book you've read or the book you're reading?
The just finished The Patch, which was Chris Turner's history of the oil patch.
But I'm also about to start the new Ken Follett, the third book that is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth.
That's your nerdy side.
No, that's my...
You're sci-fi.
Nerdy side.
No, no, it's not sci-fi.
It's just a sweeping historical epic, I'm sure, but I haven't started it yet.
What kind of music are you listening to right now?
If you have time.
Or podcasts.
Podcasts?
No, I don't.
I've tried.
I run regularly and I've tried to do the podcasting, but it doesn't really say.
I don't like people talking in my ears when I'm trying to run.
I like to sort of vibe out.
Yeah, I'd rather be hated by Justin Trudeau than to be his concubine.
But the problem is that Trudeau isn't just arguing with us here.
He's not just condemning us here.
He wants to ban us.
He and his point person on the job, Karina Gould, have made it crystal clear they want to silence Trudeau's enemies.
Not to debate us.
This was first told to Facebook directly by Trudeau, to their chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, that if Facebook didn't silence critics like us in the run-up to the election, Trudeau would force them to.
Remember, he used that phrase, fake news.
That's what he calls anyone who disagrees with him.
And he's now demanding that social media companies comply with him.
Trudeau met with other censors in Paris recently.
Emmanuel Macron, the hated president of France, who's really at war with his own people, and Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister who has been revealed recently to be beholden to Chinese interests and is pursuing a very Chinese-style policy of government censorship.
Kangaroo Court Controversy00:06:08
So Trudeau and Macron and Ardern met behind closed doors in Paris with social media companies to announce that they have persuaded most social media companies to crack down on their critics in the next election.
Now, that's deeply troubling.
We see purges of conservatives already from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
But if you're purged from those companies, you're silenced.
But you're still free.
You don't go to jail.
You're not fined.
You're not dragged through a court system for years.
And that extra edge, though, that punitive side, that embarrassing, time-consuming, grinding psychological warfare side of Section 13, the prosecutions, that is what appeals to Trudeau and his Liberal Party.
They don't deserve the name Liberal anymore, by the way.
It comes from the Latin word for freedom.
That's where Section 13 comes in.
The left is generally happy when a Conservative voice is silenced online.
Sometimes leftists go the extra mile.
They want them out of a job, or they boycott a company, or they harass someone's employer.
But Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act would go further than any of this.
It would expose any conservative voice to tens of thousands of dollars in fines and legal costs.
And the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, it's a kangaroo court run not by real judges, but by non-judge activists.
They have tremendous power to do weird and strange things that a normal court couldn't.
I remember when I was prosecuted by the Alberta version of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, that Alberta version literally demanded in writing.
That I not only pay cash to a radical Muslim activist who was offended by me, but the Human Rights Commission actually demanded that I give him two full pages in the magazine that I published back then, unedited, for him to say literally whatever he wanted to say about me.
I'm serious, that's actually what the Human Rights Commission demanded from me, that I give up two pages of my magazine to some Sharia law thug from Pakistan.
No normal court would even think of that.
That's so weird.
But human rights commissions aren't real courts.
That's what this is about.
It's not even about censoring people now.
The social media companies do a pretty good job of censoring for Trudeau already.
This is about humiliating conservatives, deterring conservatives, demonizing them, costing them money.
It's really about vengeance for Trudeau.
I won't get into all the procedural reasons.
It's built that way, but a few examples include the fact that unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court, in a human rights kangaroo court, the complainer doesn't have to pay for his own lawyer.
Unlike a civil lawsuit in a real court, if you're wrongfully sued and you win, you don't get your costs paid by the false accuser.
Unlike in a criminal lawsuit in real court, you don't have to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.
Unlike a criminal lawsuit in real court, you have no legal aid help if you're poor.
It's the worst of all worlds, these kangaroo courts.
It's exactly what Justin Trudeau would love.
I mean, think about it.
He tried to let his criminal friends like SNC Lavalan off the hook, and he tried to convict innocent people like Vice Admiral Mark Norman.
He couldn't get away with that in a real court.
That's why I call these Human Rights Commissions a kangaroo court.
That's one reason why Harper shut down Section 13, and it's a big reason why hucksters like Trudeau like it.
And the very offense itself, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.
Give me one more reason on that, likely to.
So maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't.
But it's all in the future, so you can't even say I didn't do it.
No one said you did.
You don't actually have to have done anything wrong to be guilty of it.
Just maybe something in the future could happen, but you could be charged now.
Expose a person to hatred or contempt.
So by writing something on the internet or making a video or drawing a cartoon or sharing something on Facebook, you could expose someone to the human feeling of hate.
I'll admit, when I was young and I saw the movie Schindler's List about the Holocaust, it gave me hard feelings towards Germany, or at least some Germans, or at least the Nazis.
Does that make Schindler's List hate speech?
Of course not.
But is that movie likely to, as in maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, expose a person to hatred or contempt?
Well, of course.
Of course it could.
That's an old example.
How about a new example?
There's a new movie out there right now called The Hate You Give.
Title sort of gives it away, doesn't it?
If you watch that movie and have some hard feelings, whoever made the movie is guilty of Section 13.
Emotions are a natural part of the human personality.
We're all a little bit different in that is in fact I think that's the point of art and all communications, fiction, non-fiction, to cause an emotional response is part of being human.
And not all emotions are comedies and laughter.
Sometimes there are tragedies.
Sometimes there are calls to action.
Sometimes there are memorials.
Watch the movie Killing Fields.
Watch Apocalypse Now.
Watch American Sniper.
I watched that and I hated al-Qaeda even more.
How about you?
Could a powerful piece of art or political commentary or even just a joke expose a person to feelings of hatred of contempt by another person?
Of course it could.
In fact, without a doubt, since there's no way to measure hurt feelings or being offended, I should point out that truth is not a defense to Section 13.
You can say something true that makes a person have hard feelings.
In fact, the truth is much more enraging than fiction, isn't it?
Fair comment is irrelevant.
Religious belief is irrelevant.
Simply being mistaken is irrelevant.
The only test is did you or didn't you say something that might in the future cause someone to have hard feelings about someone else?
So of course this law had a 100% conviction rate for a quarter of a century on the books.
There literally is no defense to it.
Every one of us is guilty of this law every single day, unless we literally talk to no other human being ever.
Every one of us does something that could maybe cause offense in the future, of course.
We're all guilty.
It's just who's charged.
So of course the liberals want this back.
And of course the lawyers and the bureaucrats want it back.
Free money, free bureaucracy building, lots of power, free way to stick it to their enemies list.
Conservatives and Cameras00:09:19
But what about Andrew Scheer?
You know, when he ran for the leadership of the Conservatives and he eked out that razor-thin win on the final ballot, back then Scheer promised to fight for free speech, especially on campus, by the way.
He sounded really good back then, but since then he's literally deleted that policy from his website.
You can't find it.
And he's gone wobbly out of fear of the media mob, fear that he'll be demonized too.
During recent hearings on hate speech at the Liberal Run Justice Committee, Michael Cooper, a Conservative MP from St. Albert, dared to push back at the hateful assertion by a Muslim lobbyist that conservatives were to blame for a mass murder in New Zealand.
Now, Cooper pushed back, saying the terrorist in New Zealand himself denied that he was a conservative.
In fact, said he admired communist China.
That's true.
And it was a rebuttal to a false accusation.
Mr. Suri, I take great umbrage with your defamatory comments to try to link conservatism with violent and extremist attacks.
They have no foundation.
They're defamatory and they diminish your credibility as a witness.
But after the Liberals all claimed that they were offended, it's easy to say, isn't it?
Andrew Scheer literally fired Cooper from the committee, saying it was inappropriate.
Well, just say it, Andrew.
Michael Cooper's words were likely to cause hatred or contempt.
I mean, could be, right?
And worse and weirdly, Andrew Scheer ordered the remaining conservatives on the committee to vote to turn off the video cameras when Mark Stein, Lindsey Shepard, and John Robson testified at that committee.
Understand how nuts that is.
The Conservatives invited those public figures to testify.
They invited them to come to Parliament, presumably to testify for free speech, and they showed up.
They took time out of their days.
And then, when they were all sitting in parliament about to give their testimony, the conservative MPs literally voted to turn off the cameras on them so the world could not see them arguing for free speech.
According to Andrew Lawton, our friend who was right there, the order to have these conservatives vote against the cameras came from Scheer himself, to literally vote to turn off the cameras on their own witnesses they had invited.
What is going on here?
Why did Scheer's point person on the free speech battle literally cheer for Karina Gould in committee earlier this year, complimenting her on how sharp she looked and telling her she should go harder and faster on the censorship?
Minister, always lovely to see you.
I love that necklace, by the way.
That's just beautiful.
So I'm asking you, please, if you are ready in regards to the social media platform, willing to make the hard decisions, to take the hard actions, and not six months from now, but now, please.
What is going on here?
Why is not a single conservative MP allowed to even talk about this issue?
Why have they all been whipped?
Why are they not just being passive, but actually voting to suppress free speech witnesses and calling for Karina Gould to go faster and harder on censorship?
What is going on here?
How is this possibly conservative?
How does this possibly help the party politically forget about doing right and wrong?
How does this help them win?
Don't they have any sense of self-preservation even, knowing that all the people censored will be conservatives, of course?
Does Andrew Scheer think that if he is very, very quiet, the censorship tiger will devour him last?
What is going on?
How did the party of Stephen Harper, which voted to repeal Section 13, unanimously they voted to repeal Section 13, how is that party now cheering or at least standing quietly for Trudeau to revive Section 13?
Well, I guess because there was one man who did not vote to repeal Section 13, Andrew Scheer himself, who was Speaker of the House that day and thus didn't vote.
What an irony.
He was the man who, as Speaker, controls everyone else's freedom of speech in parliament, the man who was effectively the judge of the court of parliament, who could rule a word unparliamentary, who could demand an MP retract a statement.
Maybe he fell in love with the power to regulate speech.
He was called the Speaker, after all.
If he himself could tell a prime minister or a cabinet minister to sit down and shut up and retract a word, I can imagine that would feel pretty powerful.
I don't know, that's a theory.
Can you come up with a better explanation?
Maybe there's a simple theory.
That defending free speech isn't cool now like it was back in 2013 with the mean girls in the media party, that is the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, the new junk websites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and Vice.
They all hate free speech now for some reason because, well, I know the reason, because they know conservatives use free speech to get around the leftist mainstream media.
So if Andrew Scheer were to stand up for free speech today, all those media reporters would attack him hard, much harder than Stephen Harper had to deal with back in 2013.
In fact, back then, most media, at least grudgingly, supported Harper's move for free speech.
Today, the same media party would love to censor any conservative because the media have become politically radicalized, but also out of their own business interests, they would love to silence online competitors, even us.
So what about you?
What about you, dear viewer?
I know that most people who watch my shows are Conservative Party members.
Some are Maxime Bernier supporters.
I would ask you to sign a petition to Justin Trudeau to have him stop Section 13.
But I know that, of course, Trudeau wouldn't listen.
He'd throw it in the garbage.
He doesn't listen to anyone.
He loves censorship.
He will bring it to law if he can.
But what if I asked you to sign a petition not to the prime minister or to Karina Gould, but to Andrew Scheer himself, to ask him to take off the whip from his own MPs, to ask him to let his own MPs be true conservatives, or at least to speak their conscience, to allow them to stand up for freedom of speech?
I'm not going to ask Andrew Scheer to let Michael Cooper back in.
We know he won't.
He has too much pride invested in that weird firing.
But to stop Section 13 itself, a great effort by countless grassroots conservatives for years finally convinced Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party to repeal it.
It took years.
And that repeal has stood for six years, and we're all the better for it.
Don't let Stephen Harper's achievement be undone.
Don't go quietly along with Justin Trudeau and Karina Gould.
And don't, for God's sake, be an active participant in it by voting to turn off the cameras on Mark Stein and Lindsey Shepard and John Robson.
So I've drafted a petition, but it's to Andrew Scheer.
Look, I know he can't stop Section 13 on his own.
He lacks the tools to do that.
But if he and his MPs make a proper fuss about it and engage the remaining true journalists left in this country and perhaps engage the larger civil society and use all the tools in their toolbox like the remaining conservatives in the Senate and use whatever rules of parliament, maybe, just maybe, this awful decision by Trudeau to ram through censorship on the eve of the election could be stopped or even slowed down just to delay it till after the election, it could be done.
I mean, Trudeau could still force it through for sure.
He's got an absolute majority, but if Andrew Scheer made a big enough fuss, I think he could make this too costly for Trudeau, and Trudeau would abandon it as he abandons many things that get tough to do.
I think Trudeau could back down.
I really believe that.
But it won't happen if Andrew Scheer won't do it, and he's not doing it.
The NDP loves Section 13.
This is an emergency now.
All of those freedoms will be washed away.
Stephen Harper's achievement will be wiped out.
So please sign our petition right now to Andrew Scheer.
It's simple.
You can see it at stopsection13.com.
It simply says, we call upon Andrew Scheer to stand up for freedom of speech by opposing the revival of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Well, it says.
He promised he'd be for free speech when he ran for conservative leader.
The Conservative Party was unanimously for free speech under Stephen Harper.
The country needs free speech.
We need an opposition to oppose censorship.
It's easy for him to do.
If he's worried about what the country thinks, he'll be in good stead.
Canadians like free speech, but these days, I'm worried that Andrew Scheer cares more about what the media party thinks than what Canadians think.
Please sign our petition at stopsection13.com, and I will personally deliver it to Andrew Scheer myself.
go to StopSection13.com.
Free Speech Concerns00:08:08
Welcome back, my friends.
I want to show you a clip spoken by Karina Gould, the extremist Democratic Institutions Minister.
I call her extremist, although looking at her, she seems young and charming, and she doesn't raise her voice or shout or swear.
She's not like old yeller Catherine McKenna, the global warming minister.
She's very calm on the outside, and that may be boring even.
And that may be one reason why she gets away with things that few other politicians could.
I find it deeply disturbing.
I'm going to show you a Q ⁇ A by a reporter in Parliament, enfrancais, but we've translated it.
We've got a translation that will play for you.
I want to ask you a question.
If this had been spoken by Doug Ford at the provincial level, Jason Kenney at the provincial level, or by Stephen Harper at the federal level, a conservative cabinet minister saying they would consider turning off Twitter or Facebook or any other social media if they didn't censor the enemies of the government.
I put it to you, you would have heard this clip before now hundreds of times.
This clip is actually almost a week old.
Here, without further ado, here is Justin Trudeau's cabinet minister, Karina Gould, musing about literally turning off Twitter like North Korea and China have done.
Take a look.
There was an expert that said in a committee last week, I don't know about cutting the signal, but he said, well, do we have to shut the tap and cut off these large organizations as long as they're not responding to requests?
Is this possible?
Well, that's an interesting example.
The government is looking at all the different possibilities, as I said on many different occasions.
We're taking a whole-of-government approach with regards to digital platforms in general.
You heard the question.
There were witnesses who says, yes, cutting the signal, cutting them off.
Would you consider that?
We are considering all the different possibilities.
Could you imagine that?
The arrogance, the chutzpah.
Yes, you can imagine that because she's a Trudeau cabinet minister.
But can you imagine the docile and the passivity and more than that, the just sheer lack of curiosity from the media party that greeted that?
That was not some secret recording.
That was in the foyer of the House of Commons.
Yet the only other journalist I know who has dug into this matter is our friend Andrew Lawton of TNC.news, who joins us now via Skype.
Andrew, it's great to see you again.
Whenever we talk, it's about bad news, though.
Yes, it is.
And, you know, there's a really shameful part of this, Ezra.
There's, I think, a two-pronged tragedy here.
Number one is that a minister of the crown would dare to say that.
And there's another clip from the same press conference where she says it's something to think about.
And the other tragedy here is that, as you mentioned, that's almost a week old.
And there has been effectively no English language mainstream media coverage of this.
There was one story in Le Journal de Montréal, which is where I learned about it.
There's been a column in the National Post.
But as far as actual reporting, I have not seen anything from the mainstream press on what is, in effect, the democratic institutions minister with the emphasis on the institutions and not the democratic, saying quite literally that her government would consider shutting down private companies that aren't even Canadian companies if they don't comply with what the federal government's doing.
And that a minister would say that is reprehensible and that the media would not hold her feet to the fire for it is all the more shameful.
Andrew, I'm so glad that you corrected me to point out the Journal de Montréal, which is a very large newspaper in Quebec owned by Pierre Carl Pellado, actually, the former boss of the Sun News Network.
I'm so glad that you corrected me because, of course, they did break the news.
That's also how I learned about it.
So it's not completely dead, but the fact that you and I, and French is not either of our mother's tongues, the fact that we had to learn about it from a French tabloid in Montreal is embarrassing to the media party.
What do you think of my question that I posed earlier, Andrew, that if, I don't know, if Stephen Harper were prime minister and a Jason Kenny, a Pierre Polyev, a John Baird, or some cabinet minister of the day would have said, yeah, I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Twitter.
Yeah, I'm thinking of going full North Korean and shutting them down if they don't do my business.
They're already following the criminal code.
They're already liable for other crimes on the books.
The facts that Karina Gould is demanding they censor politics and she's threatening to pull the plug, I swear that is Iran stuff, North Korea stuff.
And like you say, just the slightest murmur in English Canada and nothing more.
No, and I think that there's an important point here.
And you know, one observation I've made in the past is that what the media accuses Donald Trump of doing, Justin Trudeau's government has actually been doing.
When you look at the SNC Lavalin affair, firing the Attorney General, I mean, these things that really the media is in hysterics and has been for years about Trump doing, the Trudeau government does with relative impunity.
And here we have, and I don't use this word lightly, and I want to make very clear that I say this word because of the gravity of the word.
But this is a fascist proposition for the government to threaten to shut down private enterprise for non-compliance with a government restriction on speech.
And again, I know the media calls everyone fascists and Nazis and the new Hitlers and all of that.
And I'm not using this with the same level of looseness that they do.
I am talking about what is at its core a fascist principle for government to want to shut down social media companies.
And by the way, Ezra, this is not, for my part anyway, a defense of social media companies.
I find that they themselves are quite reprehensible in the way they engage with free speech.
But I have to stand up for that freedom here.
So it's not that I'm sympathizing broadly with social media companies.
It's that the Canadians who use those platforms to communicate are the ones that are actually being punished here, not the companies themselves.
If government shuts down Twitter, it's not just taking away Twitter's speech, it's taking away the speech of anyone who uses Twitter.
Yeah, you're so right.
And also the right of people to hear someone.
There's the right to speak, but there's also the right to hear.
I mean, for example, here at the Rebel, we have almost 200,000 followers on our Rebel Twitter account.
I have almost the same.
So I feel like I have a freedom of speech, but those, I don't know, 180,000 people or whatever it is, surely they have the right to hear from us.
It's a mutually consenting adults point of view.
Normally, liberals are all for pro-choice for consenting adults.
And yet Karina Gould, you know what?
She made me think of something.
I just had a flashback.
Andrew, I remember a dozen years ago when I was interrogated by a bureaucrat in the province of Alberta.
I've just forgotten her name, thank goodness, on behalf of the Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohamed.
And what struck me about my meeting with her, which I put on YouTube a decade ago, was how banal it was, how boring it was, how bureaucratic it was.
In fact, I think that the top thing on her mind was it was a Friday afternoon and she just wanted to get out of the office.
It was not in a police dungeon with one light bulb hanging and someone shouting at me.
It was so banal.
And I think you look at Karina Gould and she's nice enough and boring and doesn't raise her voice.
Societal Tensions and Anti-Social Orders00:05:27
That's how censorship comes in, not with a jackboot, but in the year 2019, it comes in friendly, bureaucratic buzzwords, and quote, in partnership with social media companies.
So she's pressing Twitter behind the scenes.
They're not yielding to her, so she's getting mad.
But imagine what YouTube, Facebook, Google have already agreed to behind the scenes all politely.
Yes, and the core of that is the Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity Online.
And I don't want to make your team work here, but I would love if they could put this up in post, because there's one line of this that I think is very important in the preamble.
And the preamble talks about how social media plays a valuable role in healthy and resilient democracy.
But it also says this.
However, these platforms have also been used to spread disinformation in an attempt to undermine free and fair elections and core democratic institutions and aggravate existing societal tensions.
And of those three things here, to undermine free and fair elections, to undermine core democratic institutions, and then that third, to aggravate existing societal tensions.
This is one of these terms that, like Islamophobia in M103, is entirely defined by its lack of definition here.
Because what the media will call a societal tension, what the government will call a societal attention, we have no idea.
It could be a spirited debate about immigration.
It could be a spirited debate about free speech.
It could be a spirited debate about anything that I view as part of a democracy that the government views as aggravating a societal tension.
And the challenge is that the very premise of this exercise in wanting to get social media companies to be partners, as you say, is not just to prevent Russia from buying a million dollars of Facebook ads.
It is in the very text the government is putting forward to social media companies to try to deal with what is effectively summarized as simply disagreement, which is the very cornerstone of elections.
Because I'd say that liberal versus conservative versus NDP, that's an existing societal tension.
So why are we trying to pretend those are things that social media companies should be not fostering, but shutting down?
Yeah.
And that's exactly right.
I mean, the other day I saw some NDP member of parliament saying that there should no longer be any divisive witnesses called to parliament.
You know, the word division, that's actually a technical way of calling for a vote in parliament.
I call for a division.
I mean, in the olden days, MPs would stand up and go, exit the parliament to different lobbies and literally be counted.
They would divide like the Red Sea before Moses.
Now the votes are done electronically or by voice vote.
We call it calling for a division.
We accept that there are societal tensions.
We accept that there are divisions and that the best way of dealing with them is through free speech and democracy.
If they're trying to make it so you can't have societal tension, you can't change human nature.
You can't change group nature.
And if you're driving it underground, if you're banning it, it will express itself in non-peaceful ways.
I think this is deeply, deeply anti, anti-it misunderstands human nature and democratic nature.
Divisions are okay.
They're natural.
And you have to let them express themselves peacefully and orderly, or they'll express themselves violently as they do in places around the world where free speech is banned.
I don't know.
This just seems like a misunderstanding of what democracy is all about.
Well, and even if we can all say that there have been problems from polarization, which I agree, I think society is very polarized.
I would take polarization 100 times out of 100 if the alternative is state-mandated, state-enforced unanimity.
And this is the challenge here, is that you have to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.
And in this case, it's far better to have the disease if the disease is polarization and the cure is censorship.
Well, polarization implies that we have a deeply divided public.
There are some issues that's going to be polar.
I mean, yes, no, on, off.
Abortion, I suppose there is a middle ground on that, but that's an example of an issue that by nature will be polarizing.
You know, you read the word societal tensions, and we've done a show on that digital charter before, but we will certainly come back to it.
You and I have been in the United Kingdom together reporting together on the talk.
You were one of the real reporters, and I know you're coming back again with us on Tommy Robinson's trial.
They use something there called an anti-social behavior or an anti-social order.
Police can give you a ticket.
It's basically a dispersal order.
They just say, here's a piece of paper.
It deems you to be engaging in any sort of anti-social behavior, even if you're by yourself.
And if you don't immediately leave, you will be arrested for not leaving.
And this was originally brought in to deal with football or soccer riots decades ago, but now they're used for any politics.
I saw them used in Tommy Robinson's political campaign last month.
That anti-social behavior, anti-social order is such a catch-all.
Anti-Social Orders Explained00:07:47
You could say the same thing on Twitter.
Oh, he's being anti-social.
Delete him.
What does that mean?
Criticizing the government?
We have the right to do that.
I'm worried about the vagueness of the language here, Andrew.
Yes, I'm worried about the vagueness of the language.
But at its core, I also think that there is no amendment to the language that would make it justifiable for what Karina Gould is saying is on the table to shut down social media companies to happen.
And I mean, there's a practical issue here in that these companies do not exist in Canada in many ways.
I mean, Google has offices here.
Twitter and Facebook have very small teams here.
But really, they exist outside of the country's borders.
So what she's actually talking about, I would presume, is not just going to Twitter and flipping a switch, but going to Rogers, to TELUS, to Bell, to all of these other companies and say, you need to flip the switch so that Twitter is not accessible on your ISPs.
And now all of a sudden, we're not just talking about slapping one company on the wrist.
We're talking about an entire approach where government is the gatekeeper of the internet, which is supposed to be the exact opposite of what the internet is to Canadians.
Isn't that interesting?
You know, I should tell you, just yesterday, I received an email from Twitter that there had been a complaint about one of my tweets criticizing a terrorist group called Hamas.
It was a very quick tweet.
Twitter had an investigation and cleared me.
But that's not the first time it's happened.
I have been notified in the past by Twitter that Pakistan, the government of Pakistan, has objected to some of my tweets.
Now, some of them were so old I didn't even care.
Obviously, someone's looking through almost 10 years of my tweets.
But I mean, that's the kind of company we'll be in.
Pakistan is literally blocking some of my tweets from their country.
Pakistan tried to, I presume it was Pakistan or maybe it was Hamas itself, tried to get me to delete a tweet.
That really is the company that Karina Gould would have us keep.
And that's not a place I think most Canadians would go to.
Last question for you, Andrew.
Is there a reason why the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC, who would go absolutely ape if these words had been said by a Harper cabinet minister?
Why are they being so quiet here?
Where's the Canadian Civil Liberties Association?
Where's Penn Canada?
Where's the Canadian Association of Journalists?
Where's a Canadian Journalist for Freedom of Expression?
Why are they all like they have a laryngectomy or something?
You know, I'm sympathetic to some of those third-party groups because the media has not actually done its part in making Canadians aware that this issue is going on.
So I think that some of these groups where I agree there have been some tenuous relationships with free speech, they can't comment on something they don't know about.
So I give them the benefit of the doubt for a period of time.
Now we're talking about it.
New media has exploded with it.
I think people need to either wake up or be accepting of a willful disregard here.
Look, you and I both know there's $600 million on the line to mainstream media.
And we've talked about the possibility that that will influence coverage.
This may be a practical example of that in action.
I mean, when you mentioned your experience with having the Pakistani government reporting tweets, I mean, everyone in Canada has been for years talking about the threat of, you know, outsourcing Canadian jobs to Pakistan.
And now we have Pakistan outsourcing its job of censorship to the Canadian government.
So apparently this is now, we're finally on the receiving end of outsourcing, but not the type of job we should want any part of.
The media needs to realize that it is the one that's going to suffer because if the government is licensing itself to be able to shut down social media companies because it doesn't like what is on those companies in election times, it's not a big jump to get to the government being able to shut down the National Post website, shut down the Rebels, shut down TNC.news.
And that is not what we want of Canada.
So you have to look 20 yards, 40 yards, 80 yards down the line here.
You can't just look at what's right in front of you.
Yeah.
You know, you've been very generous with your time today, Andrew.
I just want to show something that happened over the weekend.
The New York Times did a huge story, and this is the online version, but it's actually on the front page of the print edition on websites they hate.
And you can see some of our alumni there.
You can see Lauren Southern there, Gavin McInnes, Faith Goldie.
In the top right, second from the right, you can see Candace Malcolm of TNC.news.
You can see Jordan Peterson on there.
Basically, everyone is Tommy Robinson on there.
Everyone the New York Times doesn't like politically, they're trying to demonize for being on YouTube.
So you've got this strange mixture of legacy media like the New York Times hating their online competitors.
You've got politicians like Karina Gould hating their critics.
And you've got Silicon Valley tech companies that, on the one hand, want to control their medium, but on the other hand, there's a lot of social justice warriors within them.
I think we're in for a perfect storm.
And in the next six months, we're going to see if Canada can withstand that because those are three forces that would censor people like you and me.
I just wanted to show that story in the New York Times.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that other than we just all got to keep doing what we're doing.
Yeah, so just jealousy that I wasn't on the grid.
That's another discussion for another day.
Yeah.
All right, Andrew, great to see you.
Thanks so much.
And we'll keep watching TNC.news for your good work over there.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Well, that's our friend Andrew Lawton.
And he's going to be going back to the UK with me on July 4th and 5th to cover Tommy Robinson's contempt trial.
Yeah, it's going back to court again.
Stay with us.
That's more Ahead on the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
What did you think of this show today?
I don't understand why Andrew Scheer isn't grabbing on to this Section 13 fight.
I think it's an easy win for him.
I think Stephen Harper showed that the opposition to free speech is a lot weaker than it looks if you just listen to the media party.
There's a few self-interested lawyers and extremist identity groups that'll squawk, but they always do.
Ordinary people say, yeah, free speech, that's Canadian.
A lot of newcomers to Canada from different backgrounds who Trudeau might say, oh, well, they don't want free speech.
No, they came to Canada.
They want free speech.
We just went through this six years ago.
It shouldn't be hard.
The conservative base is unanimously for free speech.
The targets of censorship are overwhelmingly conservative.
This should be a winner.
But I think Andrew Scheer is too terrified of the media party.
In other words, he's more afraid of the media party than he's afraid of you.
And that's why I'd ask you to go to stopsection13.com.
Sign the petition.
I'll deliver it to him.
Or else, the kind of censorship you saw Karina Gould say, I can't believe no conservative's gone after Karina Gould.
Come on.
That is such easy shooting if you're trying to shoot down government ideas that are cockamame-y.
It's good morally.
It's good politically.
I don't understand what's going on here.
We've got to give Andrew Scheer proof that Canadians care about it.
Go to stopsection13.com.
All right.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.