Tamara Ugolini exposes Justin Trudeau’s Liberals’ alarming censorship push: Bill C-11 redefines social media users as CRTC-regulated broadcasters, mirroring Orwellian control, while Bill C-18 forces platforms to pay only state-approved journalists. The Online Harms Bill, backed by 90% public opposition but dismissed by the government, proposes a Digital Safety Commission with sweeping powers over "disinformation" and "hate speech," despite vague definitions. Legal scholar Bruce Party warns this "administrative state trinity"—delegation, deference, and discretion—undermines democracy, shifting power to unaccountable bureaucrats. COVID-era policies proved how such systems suppress dissent under arbitrary "public interest" claims, raising fears of authoritarianism. Skepticism extends to CBC’s 69% government funding and the convoy protests’ flag controversies, where planted evidence allegedly fueled media narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the Justin Trudeau Liberals bury opposition around their sweeping censorship plans.
Plus, a Canadian lawyer will discuss the administrative state tiptoe and the role it will play in censorship from the government that once campaigned on honest, transparent, and accountable governance.
It's Tuesday, April the 18th, and I'm Tamara Ugolini, guest hosting tonight on the Ezra Levant Show.
With the Justin Trudeau Liberals moving forward on their massive legislative program to censor the content that Canadians access online, it should come as no surprise that they are burying and suppressing opposition to it.
Ezra has previously warned you of the incremental pieces of legislation that will work as a domino effect on free expression in Canada.
The Liberals' sweeping online censorship and regulation plans will both relegate and delegate the free flow of information on the World Wide Web into the hands of a few.
The first of which is Bill C-11, an act to amend the Broadcasting Act, which essentially declares social media users as individual broadcasters and subjects them to the whims of the Canadian Radio Television Broadcasting Corporation, otherwise known as the CRTC.
C-11 is a piece of legislation so ambiguously worded with such sweeping power that even Liberal-appointed Senator David Richards drew the chilling comparison between Bill C-11 and Nazi Germany's Ministry of Enlightenment or, better yet, George Orwell's fictitious depiction of the Ministry of Truth in the dystopian writing of his authoritarian state in the novel 1984.
I'm wondering if anyone on the staff of our Minister of Heritage understands this.
In Germany, it was called the Ministry of National Enlightenment and every radio was run by Joseph Goebbels.
Complete ideological manipulation in the name of national purity.
No decree by the CRTC could in any way tell us what Canadian content should or should not be or who should be allowed to bob their heads up out of the new murkiness we have created.
Like Orwell's proclamation, the very bill suggests a platform that decrees all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
And Bill C-11 certainly spells out who they might be.
The bill allows for further government tampering of algorithms to prop up or suppress whatever content they do or do not want you to access.
And for Canada's Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who oversees much of this regulation under the guise of stopping miss and disinformation, he believes without a doubt that the government will win because Canadians must be better digital citizens.
But if we don't address this disinformation problem, well, they win.
And we will not let that happen.
Now, more than ever, Canadians need reliable and credible information.
We need the tools and knowledge to recognize and fight back against online disinformation.
There is an urgency to act.
And we're acting.
We all have a responsibility to help in the solution and be better digital citizens.
We need to remember that democracy just doesn't happen like this.
We have to fight for it.
We have to fight to keep it.
He says that journalists are on the front lines of fighting disinformation, but only those state-approved journalists will be tolerated under these censorship plans.
So I also want to recognize the incredible work that you guys, journalists, have done in Canada through over the past two years, from keeping Kenyans up to date on the pandemic to providing on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine, even keeping Kenyans informed what's going on at their local city hall, which is fundamental for our communities, for different regions.
So all of this is essential.
And you're at the front line of fighting disinformation.
We need you.
The society, not the government, the society needs you.
Under pieces of legislation like C-11, the government will ensure that you see content exactly like that which is featured in this woke montage that came out of the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards that took place last week in Toronto.
And I should fair warn you, it's pretty gross.
And the Canadian Screen Award goes to The Porter.
Episode 104.
You know, we made this show in a time that we desperately needed to reclaim the narrative.
Oh, wow.
Canadians really love Dildos.
I think it's so important, perhaps now more than ever, to tell stories of queer joy.
To all the trans and non-binary people in the room tonight, I love you.
I'm so glad that you exist.
Nothing bad or wrong can come from when we open ourselves up and let more people in.
I just want to dedicate this award to all the Indigenous children who were stolen from our families.
The advocacy, the activism, the pursuit of justice and equity is part of the job for all of us Indigenous creators every single day.
Seriously, those Canada's drag race people can party.
Woo!
Change making comes in many forms.
It can be having the tough conversations that make people uncomfortable on air.
It can be putting folks on camera who don't usually have their voices heard.
And the Canadian Screen Award goes to Canada's drag race, Brooklyn Heights, Brad Goresky, Tracy Belgium.
Right now we need the magic of drag more than ever.
We won!
Congratulations!
Well, this is embarrassing.
What did we win for this time?
Tom Power.
Not only did we have BIPOC representation in front and behind the camera, we had senior producers that were BIPOC.
We had queer people that were BIPOC.
We have the right to be seen in her and representation matters.
When we see ourselves, we literally can change the world.
Incredible.
You're the first female to direct a XR movie.
The first Muslim superhero.
First project with all Indigenous creatives at the helm.
Being the first lead Asian superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think, is a sign that we are making progress as a society.
We are taking steps to give each and every person in every community a chance to feel represented and seen.
It's important to be recognized for your work, particularly if you belong to a community that is historically underrepresented.
It's important to have representation in film because then it gives a voice to people who are used to not being heard.
using their voice to call out systemic racism, to amplify those actively engaged in anti-racist work, and to challenge the structural inequality at the core of media organizations in Canada.
We all have to take responsibility for moving forward in a way that is inclusive and you can be marginalized and still have privilege.
When I say my work, I mean sort of lifting marginalized communities.
Tracy, what have you learned about yourself?
Through this process of becoming a very public version of the activist you always were.
It's been a journey.
Let's just keep on telling stories that are inclusive, are about representation.
Representation matters.
It really truly does because I couldn't see myself on screen for the longest time.
This marks the first time the Golden Screen Award has been won for a film directed and written by women.
I hope that black and brown kids from Scarborough can watch this film and see themselves.
I am really excited about the new wave of Canadian comedy and the way it's opening up in terms of inclusion and representation.
I think the future of Canadian comedy is going to be extremely diverse.
It's the first time we've seen black Canadian history represented in this way.
Vaccinated: Risk and Choice00:09:02
Did you watch the ETK with us, Queen Elizabeth Tribune?
I was.
Okay.
I mean, I'm super psyched to renew the monarch, though, right?
Oh, sorry, just catching up with my unquestionably Canadian friends.
Then there's Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which will create digital intermediaries that force search engines and social media companies to pay news organizations that they link to.
But of course, they will only pay Trudeau-approved registered journalists who hold government news licenses.
The rest of us little guys, well, no cash for you.
And of course, there's another ambiguously worded sweeping piece of legislation by, yet again, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
It's a bill that is expected to be tabled in the coming weeks called the Online Harms Bill, or perhaps the preferred double-speak name, the Online Safety Bill.
This online harms or online safety bill, whatever it ends up being named, will create an entirely new bureaucracy known as the Digital Safety Commission, which the government itself says will have a broad mandate.
These new regulators would operationalize, oversee, and enforce the new regime.
That's literally what they call it, a regime.
The bill was first published as a legislative and regulatory proposal in the summer of 2021 as part of the government's attempt to confront harmful content online.
Minister Rodriguez believes that Canadians are hurt by whatever the government deems as unacceptable, hateful content, including, of course, myths and disinformation.
So I also want to recognize the incredible work that you guys, as journalists, have done in Canada through over the past two years, from keeping Kenyans up to date on the pandemic to providing on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine, even keeping Kenyans informed what's going on at their local city hall, which is fundamental for our communities, for different regions.
So all of this is essential.
And you're at the front line of fighting disinformation.
We need you.
The society, not the government, the society needs you.
Through the government's commitment to address online safety, the government claims that online platforms threaten and intimidate Canadians and put safety at risk and undermine Canada's social cohesion or democracy.
And yet they are so out of touch that they don't recognize that media in Canada is in crisis because they refuse to report facts or partake in actual news gathering, but rather continue to resort to propaganda and narrative clinging.
As you guys know, the news sector in Canada is in crisis.
And this contributes to the heightened public mistrust and the rise of harmful disinformation in our society.
Just think for a moment that between 2008 and 2015, and today, 451 news outlets closed their doors in Canada.
In the last two years, 64 of them closed their doors.
It's as though Trudeau's wedge issue of campaigning on COVID-19 vaccination status in the fall of 2021 snap election was not at the behest of unprecedented social division in this country.
Do you remember the hateful segregationist rhetoric spread by this supposedly Democratic leader that claims to care about hurt feelings and harmful, hateful content?
I have a question from Tamara Ugalini from Rebel News.
Thank you, Mr. Trudeau.
The only reason that I'm allowed to ask you this question is because today the federal court ruled that the government doesn't have the right to determine who is or is not a journalist.
This is the second election in a row that the court had to overturn your government.
Do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why?
First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the press gallery and the consortium of networks who have strong perspectives on quality journalism and the important information that is shared with Canadians.
The reality is, organizations, organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines,
around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe, is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
You deserve a government that's going to completely say, get vaccinated.
And you know what?
If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice.
But don't think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people.
And now is the time for people who are still resistant to getting vaccinated to realize that that choice, which has consequences on putting our kids at risk,
which has consequences at having us risk more lockdowns because they haven't chosen to get vaccinated yet, that there will be consequences for those people in not being able to go to a gym or a restaurant, not being able to go to a movie theater, not being able to get on a train or a plane.
We're still making sure that people who've done their part and gotten vaccinated are able to get through and get back to as much of a normal life as possible on planes or trains without worrying that their kids are going to be sitting across the aisle from someone who's unvaccinated and putting them at risk.
I'm here to protect the freedoms of those who did the right thing and who want to get back to school, to restaurants, to traveling, to vacations.
I want to stand up for the choice of those who are there for their neighbors, not those who are risking us all going into further lockdowns, of slowing our economic recovery.
Trying to bring people together is not always compatible with science, with respect for human rights, with the best way to move things forward.
I mean, when Aaron O'Toole talks about, oh yes, we need to unite people, we need to bring people together, he's talking about defending the rights of people who are anti-vax.
And more than just being wrong, because no one's entitled to their opinions, they are putting at risk their own kids, and they're putting at risk our kids as well.
That's why we've been unequivocal.
If you want to get on a plane or a train in the coming months, you're going to have to be fully vaccinated so families with their kids don't have to worry that someone is going to put them in danger in the seat next to them or across the aisle.
And yes, we can all say to a certain extent that it is unfortunate that people who chose not to get vaccinated are now the ones clogging up our ICU systems and our hospital beds that should be available for people who did their work and did get vaccinated,
making sure workplaces can keep themselves and their employees safe, making sure that businesses that choose to move forward with vaccination requirements aren't subject to unnecessary or unjustified lawsuits to endanger my kids and endanger us all of future lockdowns and risk all of us having a slower recovery.
If you make a choice, a personal choice, to not get vaccinated, then I will have no sympathy for you when you come to me and said, oh, but I can't go out to a restaurant with my friends, or I'm not being allowed to go to the gym, or my employer is telling me I have to continue to work from home.
You don't have a right to endanger others.
Those people are putting us all at risk.
Blatant Misleading of Canadians00:05:03
Showing his inability to self-reflect, Trudeau knows he must censor everything from vaccine misinformation to extremism.
As though his own government, with their safe and effective big pharma marketing campaign slogan, haven't been the purveyors of pharma profiteering extremism and blatant scientific misinformation throughout the COVID narrative.
Canada plays a leading role to make our world a better place during this time of crisis on fighting harmful content online through the sharing of information and best practices.
We must identify and develop common standards.
There is no doubt the digital space has incredible power for good.
But from disinformation on vaccines to online extremism, we've also seen the threat it can posed to our democratic values, systems, and our citizens.
This is a moment to stand for democracy against disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, and to stay true to these values that have led to respect and prosperity around the world.
See, while always ensuring and defending free speech, we must make it clear that it cannot be okay to bully and attack people online.
Governments and especially big technology companies need to safeguard people's data and privacy and address online harassment and violence to ensure trust in technology.
We can't allow the benefits of the digital space to come at the expense of people's rights or safety.
That means taking real action to protect our societies against polarization and radicalization while defending the rights of citizens online.
Nonetheless, through this new bureaucracy called the Digital Safety Commission, the Government of Canada claims to be committed to putting in place a transparent and accountable regulatory framework for online safety in Canada.
But they have already started off on the wrong foot.
See University of Ottawa law professor and research chair in internet and e-commerce law, Michael Geist, writes in a recent blog post about the subject for which he has filed an access to information request to find out just what kind of feedback the government was getting on their chillingly dystopian online censorship plans.
He details the launching of consultations on this bill beginning in 2021 under then Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbo, when the government initially refused to release the actual submissions garnered from the consultations and instead posted a fluffy what we heard report that downplayed public concerns and failed to mention fundamental criticisms.
He says that the government only released the submissions after they were legally obligated to do so under the Access to Information Act for which he filed this request under.
The response to his ATIP details the public consultation preliminary overview of submissions and clearly states this.
90% of respondents are unsupportive of the proposal.
Concerns most cited are those around censorship/slash freedom of expression, the 24-hour removal provision, the role of law enforcement and fears around surveillance and the definition of hate speech.
A lack of definitional detail, insufficient protections for marginalized groups, and linkages to law enforcement exacerbating existing social inequalities were also concerns that were raised.
A mere 5.4% of individual respondents are supportive of the proposal, while 4.6% of responses were mixed, neutral, or otherwise unclear.
Yet in the What We Heard report, the ministry says in the key takeaways and executive summary that there was support from a majority of respondents for a legislative and regulatory framework led by the federal government to confront harmful content online.
This blatant misleading of Canadians is what undermines democracy, contributes to distrust in institutions, and is obviously not the marker of open, honest, or transparent governance.
And remember when the same ministry said that they want to put a transparent and accountable regulatory framework in place for online safety at the same time that they are failing to fully inform you on policies, their development, and their consultation?
If this bill comes to fruition, it will be the icing on the liberal baked censorious cake that will further criminalize and penalize media that is not government funded or state approved, exactly like Stalin's Pravda or Hitler's book burning.
Delegating Authority to Agencies00:14:54
And the dissenter, the contrarians, and those still speaking truth to power will be crushed by the iron fist of authoritarian dystopian censorship.
Stay tuned next as we're joined by a legal expert to discuss the repercussions of this kind of ambiguously worded legislation being put into the hands of administrators to enforce.
And now joining me in studio at Rebel News headquarters to discuss the implications of the administrative state is legal academic Bruce Party, who is currently serving as the executive director of Rights Probe.
a leading public policy and governance think tank.
Now, Bruce, you have done a lot of work critiquing, you know, sort of legal progressivism, social justice, the ambiguous administrative state.
Can you explain what you mean when you talk about the holy trinity of the state and then also broken down further in terms of the trinity of the administrative state?
Right.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
So let me just start with this idea, which I've spoken about before, which is that the most powerful ideas are the ones we don't know we have.
And one of those ideas is, I think, the main problem or one of the main problems that we have right now.
So the trinity of the state, the traditional way of looking at the state.
You've got three branches of government, legislature, executive branch or administration, and the courts.
And one of our traditional ideas is that those three branches of government are supposed to be separate.
They do different jobs.
And one of the reasons for that is to keep us safe from their tyranny.
If they're all doing separate jobs and not colluding together, they are checks and balances on each other.
The holy trinity of the administrative state is occurring because this separation is starting to disappear and they're starting to work together.
So when legislatures pass legislation, which is the thing they're supposed to do, they're supposed to, in theory, pass statutes with the rules in them.
The executive branch is supposed to take those rules and then execute them, which is why it's called the executive branch.
And the courts are supposed to take those rules and apply them to particular cases.
What's happening now, not every time, not across the board, but it's the trend, that legislatures pass statutes not with the rules in them, but with the authority passed over to the executive branch to pass the rules themselves.
It's a delegation of authority.
And then the courts, instead of watching over this relationship and making sure that the executive branch sticks to its knitting and doesn't do anything it's not allowed to do in a statute, is inclined now, the courts generally are inclined to defer to the authority of the executive branch.
And the result of the delegation and the deference is that the executive branch, the administration, more and more has the discretion to decide what the public interest is and how individual autonomy should be overridden to achieve it.
So that's what I mean by the holy trinity of the administrative state, delegation, deference, and then discretion.
And once it has that discretion, it runs away with it, which is exactly what happened during COVID.
Well, and how do we bring back those other two parts then, deference and discretion, because it sounds like they've been disregarded for the third point.
Well, yes, and so It's very difficult because this idea both of delegation and of deference, delegation by the legislature and deference by the courts, these are the ideas that are now deeply embedded in our legal system.
It is a fundamental belief in the validity, indeed the necessity of having an administrative managerial state.
In other words, the idea is society can't function unless we have experts and officials with the authority and the discretion to tell us all how to behave.
That's the premise, if you like.
And until we challenge that premise effectively, this is the system we're going to have.
And that's a very tall order because it's a very deeply accepted idea now in our institutions.
Well, and as they move forward to quash the ideas that we don't even know that we've had, because the public arena, as we see, will be censored basically by the ambiguously worded pieces of legislation that I covered at the first part of this monologue.
And so when you don't even bring those ideas that we don't know we have into the public arena and debate them and have robust discussion and further refine the ideas and arguably also refine the rules around legislation, then where does that lead us legally?
Right.
Well, see, it's a self-enforcing problem, right?
So you identify this problem, and then what is happening, including in the statutes that you were referring to, is that the job of policing what is spoken about and what is seen online and so on are delegated to government agencies to basically make up the rules on the go so as to defeat the idea that we should defeat the idea.
So it's a self-reinforcing thing.
The longer we are on this path, the more difficult it will be to turn around.
As I said, it's very deeply entrenched.
And it's difficult to address incrementally.
To sort of say, well, let's try and curb this step by step by step by step because the incremental approach is what got us here.
The administrative state and the premise of it have been around for a long, long time, decades, but not in such a full-blown way as we have now.
The administrative state, as it presently exists, has grown up over a long period of time.
And it now is such a machine that it controls basically everything in society.
And it thinks that its job is to manage society.
That's the problem.
That's the idea.
If we had a critical mass of people who basically came to the conclusion that the job of government should not be to manage society, that that, in fact, is the problem itself.
That's the place to start.
And I want to come back to that.
But first, this enmeshing of the administrative state within the courts themselves.
How do you regain that impartiality between those two prongs of the trinity of the state?
Yes.
Well, the courts would not view this as a lack of impartiality.
There's a category of law called administrative law, and that would make sense, right?
Because it's the portion of the law that deals with the judicial review of administrative action.
That is, when people come to challenge what a government agency has done, they go to a court and say, Would you please see what they've done and see if it's consistent with their statutory mandate?
Now, that's the moment where there's a tendency on the part of the courts to defer to the agency.
That doesn't mean it's carte blanche.
It doesn't mean that they never say it's wrong, not at all.
But on balance, that's the inclination, as opposed to what could have been the opposite view.
And some would argue, and I would be inclined to agree with them, that we had an opposite view at some point in the past.
The opposite view would be this, that administrative agencies actually should not be allowed to do anything unless they have explicit instructions and mandate within a statute from the legislature.
So, instead of that default position, more and more we're getting to the other default position is, well, as long as it's sort of within their basic mandate, and as long as they have been reasonable in interpreting that mandate, and they've shown sort of why they're justified, well, then it's going to be okay.
That idea is going to be difficult to shift, but I think it needs to be.
And that is only, like you stated, coming from a public groundswell of enough people demanding a change in that regard?
Yes, so one of the realities of the law is that it's a product of the culture.
One of the reasons that people have had faith in the law that has been dashed during COVID is that they thought the law would save them, and it didn't.
But the law is a product of the culture.
So, if the culture goes a certain way, the law is likely to follow.
And so, there's no direct relationship between what the public thinks and what happened in a particular case, because that wouldn't be proper.
But in terms of the large trends in the culture itself, those do have an effect.
So, if you had a culture that got to the point of saying, this system of government is not working, it's wrong.
We don't believe it anymore, then you would see probably slowly an evolution of the law, both in statutory terms and in terms of what the courts did, towards that resolution.
But we're nowhere near that right now.
No, I was going to say, arguably, we are starting to approach that sort of teetering of looking at the governance that we've had in place for the last eight years primarily and all throughout COVID and saying, you know, this isn't working for us any longer and there's no accountability.
But I wanted to kind of come back to what you said that the role of government is, and that is, as it seems right now, they believe that their role is to delegate and relegate rules onto society.
In your opinion, what is then, if that's not it, what's the role of government?
Yes, well, it is the role of government in some sense.
So, let's go back to that original division of power, separation of powers that I spoke about, the original trinity of the state, the legislature, executive, and courts.
So, the way classically government would work is that you'd have legislatures passing statutes with the general abstract rules in them that governed us all.
So, for example, you even, I mean, this still exists today.
If you go to the criminal code, for example, you will see in the criminal code the various offenses.
And they describe, they define what the offenses are.
And in that definition, you can discern what the requirements of each offense are.
So, you open up the code and you see murder.
Okay, well, what are the requirements?
What acts?
What mensoria do you require in order for the prosecution to succeed in a court for murder?
That's the way it should work.
You should be able to go to the statute, open the book, or go online, and see what the rules are.
More and more, that's not the case.
It's still the case in some situations, in some statutes, but also the statutes now tend to include provisions that say, oh, and the cabinet can make regulations about these things.
And this agency can make guidelines about these.
And this commission can make policies about that.
And so if you look in the statute, you can't actually see what the rules are because the actual rules, as applied to us day to day, are not in the statute.
They're over there in the policies or the regulations or the guidelines or in the particular orders or in the recommendations of the public health officer.
And sometimes you can't tell what they are at all because they're being made on a case-by-case basis.
Frederick Hayek said that one of the elements of the rule of law is having rules that are fixed and announced beforehand.
In other words, as citizens, we should be entitled to know what the law is.
If we want to go and find it and look for it, we should be able to see what it is so that we can govern ourselves accordingly.
And right now, we're in a system where, in many situations, that is not possible to do because all of these bits of the administrative state are essentially making up the rules as they go.
And so obviously there's legal implications there, and the courts are deferring back now to the administrative state to determine, I guess, even case law in some instances.
Well, sure.
I mean, the courts, I mean, the courts by definition have to decide cases one at a time because that's what comes before them.
But there's also supposed to be a consistency between the results in each case because they have to follow precedent.
Now, that principle is still in existence in our system, but one might make the case that the consistency between decisions is not maybe what it always ought to be.
But my main concern is the inconsistency and the incoherence and the plethora of rules about everything that is generated by the executive branch in particular without real, meaningful, specific supervision a lot of the time.
And it is very possible, much more possible, to have inconsistent decisions made by the various elements inside the managerial state than it would be in a court.
Because at least in a court, you can see what the decision is, and you can see what the reasons are.
You can go and look it up and read it for yourself and see whether or not it makes sense.
That's good.
That's fair.
That is often just not possible to do inside the workings of this big, huge managerial estate apparatus.
Especially when the legislation is so ambiguously worded, open to interpretation and broad.
Inconsistent Decisions Inside the Managerial State00:06:57
And so that's what we're seeing being proposed with things like the online harm spell.
And so in your legal opinion, what are some of the repercussions having such loosely worded pieces of legislation being deflected onto someone like a public safety commissioner to enforce?
Right.
Well, this encapsulates this whole problem.
It's a good illustration in the specific sense of the larger phenomena, right?
So if you have a statute that contains, sometimes you could say they contain a general idea or even an idea that looks like a rule, but it's not.
It's essentially a vague platitude and then transfers over the responsibility of fleshing out what it really means to a committee or a commission or as the case may be, as may be the case with this online harms bill.
We haven't seen it yet, but that's what the word on the street is.
Then the legislature has not actually made the hard call about what the rule is.
So part of their role traditionally, and this is sort of my opinion, not only me, but we would say that the job of the legislature is to make the hard policy call in this sense.
Your job, you're elected, you're sitting in the legislature, your job is to tell us where the line is, the line that you are drawing between lawful and unlawful.
Tell us.
Tell us what it is.
You've been elected.
You have legitimacy in the democratic sense.
Tell us what it is.
Instead of pushing off that job, ducking it to some committee or commission or agency or ministry or somebody else to make the hard calls and decide things case by case.
So nobody knows what the rule is.
I wish they would do their job.
Well, it's very reminiscent of running around like a chicken with your head cut off.
And I like the point that you make there about elected officials who are supposed to make, who are supposed to legislate.
That's their job.
That's what they're elected to do.
But in this case, they're deflecting that responsibility and that role onto unelected bureaucrats.
And really, they're bloating the bureaucracy with things like an online safety commissioner and creating a whole new bureaucracy to oversee a mandate that they themselves say is very broad and potentially far-reaching.
Aside from the sort of legal implications of something like this, can you speak on the morals or the ethical implications of it?
Censoring online content specifically.
Well, censoring online content, that means we're getting right into the heart of free speech, right, in this situation.
And so in a free country, my take on speech, I mean, if you're actually living in an actually free country, then this doesn't happen.
Right?
It's not like in a free country, free speech is absolute, because that wouldn't be true.
Because sometimes speech crosses the line into violence, for example.
Your speech should be curbed.
Here's what I think the general rule should be.
Your speech should be curbed, can be curbed when that speech is violating somebody else's right.
So you have a right to be free from violence.
So if I come up to you in the street and say, you know, you give me your purse or I'm going to hit you.
Okay, well, that's speech, but it's also now an assault because it's a threat.
It's a threat of imminent violence.
And there are other examples.
You have the right not to be defamed.
If I defame you, therefore, you can sue me for my speech.
Defamation is speech.
So there are exceptions along the way.
But one of those exceptions ought not to be, in my opinion, the idea that, well, what you're saying is not in the public interest.
Because that means I'm not violating anybody's right in particular.
It just means that the government thinks they don't want to hear what I have to say.
Now, that is crossing the line from having a regime of free speech with exceptions.
That makes sense.
Into, well, your speech is not free anymore.
Now, basically, you have to get our approval.
And this is where these two things come together, right?
The idea of encroaching upon free speech and then the role of the administrative state, because the administrative state, going back to the theme, has the discretion to decide what's in the public interest and allows for the violation of individual autonomy for that purpose.
That's the problem.
And they have really upheld that public interest and what's for the greater good rather than tried to leave it up to the individual to decide what is right and just.
That's exactly right.
And this is one of the problems that we've had during COVID.
I mean, a lot of people, quite rightly, quite rightly and quite understandably, during COVID have focused on the efficacy of all the policies.
Did lockdowns hurt or harm?
Does wearing a mask do anything?
What about the vaccines?
Were they tested properly?
Do they actually provide any protection?
Or don't they pose a greater threat than they do benefit?
I mean, all those are good questions.
But the problem is that those questions are dealing with what is in the public interest.
Are those policies in the public interest?
Now, that's all very well to ask, but that's missing the problem.
And the problem is these officials have the discretion to decide the public interest.
The problem is not the public interest.
The problem is they have the discretion to decide that.
So you're just arguing on the margins.
We have to challenge the idea that they have the discretion to decide the public interest so as to put aside individual autonomy.
That's the problem.
And just in closing, because we could go on, I'm sure, for hours, but how do you challenge that?
How do you set that precedence that they don't have the discretion to make such a decision?
Well, you can't challenge that through a, very easily, through like a legal action.
You can't go to a court and say, well, they shouldn't have the discretion to decide that because they do.
I mean, that's the way the law is working right now.
So it's a deeper thing.
It's almost a cultural thing.
We have lived with a managerial state for so long.
People have grown up knowing nothing else.
And they think that's what government does.
They think that's what it's for.
And to come along and suggest that the government shouldn't be managing society, that's like heresy.
Anarchy and Alexa00:03:34
Like, people won't understand what you're talking about.
It's like anarchy.
It's like anarchy.
Like, what else do you want it to do?
How else are we going to live?
People think it's an essential part of civilization.
And in order to change this, you sort of have to reimagine what you mean by civilization so that people get their lives back without being managed by this nanny state from cradle to grave and every single aspect of their lives.
And arguably they won't be able to do so if sweeping online regulation proceeds.
Exactly right.
Well, thank you, Bruce, for joining me.
Always a pleasure to chat with you.
And hopefully we can stay in touch for future.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Welcome back to tonight's Ezra Levant show.
Now let's go through some of the comments from today's live stream.
Milo MacDonald says, I'm 69% less depressed about the state of Canada today.
I think that's in reference to Elon Musk's recent titling of the CBC as 69% government funded.
And I definitely feel safer on Twitter now that CBC has taken a little bit of a break.
So we'll see how long that lasts.
Queen Marifa says, the first time I saw the picture of that flag, I thought it was weird.
There was no other or no pictures of protesters approaching this person who would have been offensive to many immediately.
I thought it was a setup by Trudeau or his cronies.
Great work, Alexa.
And so that comments in reference to Rodney Palmer's testimony at the National Citizens Inquiry, where he correctly highlights that Alexa has done more investigative journalism over the past few years than anyone I've seen from the mainstream media.
And specifically when it came to debunking where those hate-filled flags, as per the Justin Trudeau liberals, came from at the Freedom Convoy.
So the Nazi flag and then the trucker modified Confederate flag.
And for anyone who's not sure what I'm referring to, you can find Alexa's full report.
Maybe we will link to it in the written component of the live stream.
Feastidious 2644 says, I noticed the tie too.
That was David Menzies with his one color away from the trans flag tie.
Can anyone tell me what happened with that comment that Brendan Miller said to Freeland about the questionable flags being planted by the liberal government?
I guess they are actually taxpayer-funded media.
The government does not fund anything.
Well, arguably, we give our taxes to the government, who then delegates where the money will go.
So I think it is an accurate description to say that they're government-funded.
And I can't recall exactly what the response was to lawyer Brendan Miller in the Public Order Emergency Commission when he questioned the government about those flags in particular.
But the fact that they were never seen again and the fact that Alexa rightfully pointed out the certain angles and certain areas where these flags were seen only one time, I think that speaks for itself.
And that is a wrap on tonight's Ezra Levant show.
Until tomorrow night, same time and place.
From all of us here at Rebel News Headquarters, to you, our appreciated viewers at home.