Ezra Levant critiques Canada’s Online Harms Act (C-63), split by Trudeau’s Liberals into child protection and delayed censorship provisions, despite existing laws like Harper’s revenge porn ban. Mark Joseph warns definitions of "hatred" and preemptive restraining orders persist, risking free speech. The Amish face fines for refusing the ArriveCan app, exposing systemic digital coercion—30 cases aided by helptheamish.com. Levant calls C-63 a tool to silence dissent like Rebel News, urging legal resistance via stopthecensorship.ca while linking to conservative financial and media alternatives. [Automatically generated summary]
Sort of a surprise announcement from the Liberal government.
They're going to split their censorship bill, C63, into two parts.
I'll give you my thoughts on it.
I'll show you a statement from the Justice Minister, and we'll talk with the Democracy Fund senior litigator.
Is it a substantial backing down of the Liberals, or is it a trick?
I'll give you my point of view, but first I want to invite you to subscribe to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
It's eight bucks a month, which might not sound like a lot to you, but boy, it sure adds up for us.
It's very meaningful to us because, of course, we get no government money and we get no money from big tech.
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That's rebelnewsplus.com.
Click subscribe.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Sensorious bug.
Splitting Censorship Bill00:14:44
Breaking news, the Trudeau Liberals have blinked on their censorship law, Bill C63.
Now, they haven't canceled it, but they've decided to split it into two parts.
They're proceeding quickly on the first part, which includes things like banning revenge porn and child pornography.
By the way, revenge porn was already banned by Stephen Harper 10 years ago.
And of course, child pornography was banned decades ago.
Those were obviously added to the censorship bill as a distraction from the real purpose, stopping political criticism of the government.
But they say they're now going to split off the censorship provisions and go slower on those and faster on the pornography part, which is a win for freedom of speech and a win for the 75,267 Canadians who signed our petition at stopthescensorship.ca, one of our largest petitions ever.
But as you can see in this video clip here, the Liberals still say they are committed to bringing in those censorship provisions.
So this could be a trick to make us lower our guard.
What do you think?
Here's the Justice Minister whose title is also the Minister of Online Harms.
Literally, the word censorship is built into his job description.
Take a look.
So I'm here to talk about Bill C63, the online harms bill.
What I'm seeing to you and to Canadians is that we as a government are making the determination to divide this bill into two parts.
The first part of the bill will deal with the parts that target children and combating child sex predators and issues that relate to revenge porn.
That is parts one and parts four of the bill.
Parts one deals with the Digital Safety Commission.
Part four deals with how you prosecute child sex predators under new tools under the Mandatory Reporting Act.
Part two of the bill will be the Criminal Code Amendments and the Canadian Human Rights Act amendments that deal with the important combat against hatred.
These bills will proceed on different tracks.
We are putting our emphasis and prioritization in our time and efforts on the first portion of the bill, which deals with child sex predators.
Yeah, if you heard him, he says he's going to go faster on the pornography provisions, but he still will go on the censorship provisions.
Now, I have personally heard C63 referred to by several journalists as the kill rebel bill.
Of course it is, because we're one of the few news outlets in Canada that does not take money from Trudeau, so we're one of the few news outlets in Canada that cannot be controlled by Trudeau.
If Trudeau can't use the carrot with us, he'll use the stick with us.
Censorship.
Even though he's hated by his own party, Trudeau has the votes to smash this bill through Parliament.
He supports this censorship, and he has a deep personal hatred for rebel news.
Remember this?
Hey, this is assault.
I'm on a sidewalk.
What is this?
I'm on a sidewalk.
I am on a sidewalk.
What is this?
You cannot crush me.
No Russian organ.
Hey!
Now, you've seen Trudeau's bodyguards beat up our reporter, David Menzies, and you've seen Christy Freeland's bodyguards beat up David Menzies, too.
If they'll commit an assault against our rebel news reporters, breaking the law, they'd obviously think nothing of changing the law to get us either.
And both Jagmeet Singh's NDP and the separatist Bloc Québécois have said they support the censorship provisions of C-63-2.
That is enough to ram this through, and then Trudeau's Senate will rubber stamp it.
I'm glad Trudeau blinked today a little bit, I think, but it's nothing more than a blink.
If we're to take the Liberals at their word at face value, they still intend to pass the law, just under a different name.
C63 will create three new censorship agencies in Canada.
It'll give the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to investigate anyone in Canada for anything they post online or have ever posted online in the past that could hurt feelings.
It would set up a $20,000 bounty for anyone to make a complaint about you, a complaint that's successful.
It would give the courts the power to make hate speech restraining orders to stop people from saying things even before they do, even putting them under house arrest.
It is the most draconian censorship bill ever seen in Canada, and Trudeau is obsessed with it.
The fact that Trudeau and his Justice Minister now say they're going to split the bill in two doesn't mean they're done with it.
Until this bill is actually dead, it is still alive.
Do not let your guard down.
We sure won't.
I promise you, the minute the censorship bill is law, Rebel News is going to challenge it in court.
We have to.
If we don't, the law will be used to silence us and to silence you too.
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 has been overcome your government.
Do you still insist on being able to make that decision and why?
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.
And quite frankly, your I won't call it a media organization, your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
You know, we've sued Trudeau to stop this censorship more than any other news organization in Canada.
In fact, more than all other news organizations combined.
We've hired free speech lawyers to fight against censorship in the BC Supreme Court, in the Alberta Court of Kingsbench, in the federal court, in the federal court of appeal, at the Ontario Superior Court.
We are even seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada itself.
We have almost a dozen cases involving freedom of speech.
At Rebel News, we don't just use our free speech.
We fight to defend it for ourselves and to set the precedent that will benefit all Canadians too.
You know, our motto is telling the other side of the story.
But you can't do that if the government tells you that you can't even say something.
We constantly challenge government censorship, and we've had to spend more than half a million dollars this year alone on free speech lawyers.
If you think this battle is important and you want to help us challenge C63 the day it becomes law, then please consider clicking on our website to help chip into our legal defense fund.
Go to stopthecensorship.ca.
And if you haven't yet, you can also, on that same website, join the 75,267 other Canadians who have signed our free speech petition.
Please do that if you haven't done it yet.
Again, that's stopthecensorship.ca.
We're not going to stop fighting until this bill is actually dead.
Trudeau says he's going to go slower on his censorship bill than before, but he says he's still going to do it.
Now, until that censorship bill is dead, we've got to keep our guard up.
And I promise you at Rebel News, we will fight it in the courts.
To learn more and to help us out, go to stopthecensorship.ca.
Well, I have been alive to the threat of C-63 before the bill was even introduced in Parliament.
Before the last election, it was called the Online Harms Act, and they were, it hadn't been introduced yet, but believe it or not, a preliminary version of the law was circulated to the public for commentary.
It was so shocking that Twitter, and I'm talking about pre-Elon Musk Twitter, pre-free speech Twitter, they actually sent a memo, a confidential memo to the government saying this was the most draconian internet censorship bill they'd ever seen, with perhaps the exception of North Korea.
So the government sort of did a test drive of these ideas before the 2021 election.
Of course, when there's an election, Parliament is prorogued and bills sort of evaporate.
Since 2021, they have introduced it, obviously.
So this has been on Trudeau's mind for a very long time.
And I think you've heard me say before that they passed a regulation in the Gazette, which is the sort of official government publication of regulations, that the Justice Minister's title is now the Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and Minister for Online Harms.
Like, this is so integral to the Liberal Party and the government that they actually gave the minister that special title, which I find astonishing.
As you've heard me say before, Trudeau has multiple bills about internet censorship: C-11, which granted him domain over the internet, C-18, which allowed him to ring out companies like Google for cash and pay his favored media companies, the QCJO news license, qualified Canadian journalism organization license, which we were denied.
And now, Bill C-63, can you tell me a different subject that Justin Trudeau has introduced four bills on?
Something he cares so much about.
I put it to you that other than marijuana legalization, there's nothing Justin Trudeau believes in more strongly than censorship.
And I also put it to you that there is no one he wishes to censor more than Rebel News.
And that's not my speculation or a solipsism, but rather he keeps censoring us.
He tried to ban us from the leaders' debates.
He regularly marginalizes us when we fight back in court.
Now, we fight back on our own behalf.
But as you know, there's a new sheriff in town and the Democracy Fund, a registered CRA charity that we are happy to give publicity to and crowdfund for.
Well, they've done a major paper on C63.
And joining me now to talk about the latest news is our friend from the Democracy Fund, Mark Joseph, Senior Litigation Council.
Mark, great to see you again.
Thanks for having me.
I want to play again for the viewers a brief video of Arif Varani, the Justice Minister, making an announcement that is somewhat cryptic.
He's basically saying he's going to split C63 in half.
He's going to have the pornography version go forward.
And I always said that those pornography rules were a distraction from their main purpose because, frankly, most of those things are already legislated.
But he's not abandoning the censorship part.
Let's just take a look at that video to refresh the viewers' memory before we talk about it.
Take a look.
So I'm here to talk about Bill C-63, the online harms bill.
What I'm saying to you and to Canadians is that we as a government are making the determination to divide this bill into two parts.
The first part of the bill will deal with the parts that target children and combating child sex predators and issues that relate to revenge porn.
That is parts one and parts four of the bill.
Parts one deals with the Digital Safety Commission.
Part four deals with how you prosecute child sex predators under new tools under the Mandatory Reporting Act.
Part two of the bill will be the Criminal Code Amendments and the Canadian Human Rights Act amendments that deal with the important combat against hatred.
These bills will proceed on different tracks.
We are putting our emphasis and prioritization and our time and efforts on the first portion of the bill, which deals with child sex predators.
So he's saying that he's emphasizing and prioritizing and resourcing the pornography aspects here.
And frankly, I read them, and many of them, like I said, appear to be in law already.
Stephen Harper banned revenge porn a decade ago.
I don't really think that's what this bill was about.
And frankly, I don't have a lot of objections to that part of the bill.
He's a little bit unclear what he's going to do with the censorship provisions.
He's not abandoning them.
He says they're on a separate track.
He's just saying they're not putting their main efforts into it now.
Is this even an announcement, Mark?
Well, I mean, it's good that he's recognized, as most civil libertarians do, that this bill always needed to be split.
Most civil libertarian groups, particularly the TDF, had no problem with the child protection provisions under the bill.
But the problem is it's a Trojan horse because he's a bit cagey.
Part one includes seven types of harms, and four of those deal with child protection, non-consensual disclosure, intimate individuals, not problematic.
But three involve incitement to violence, incitement to violent extremism and terrorism, and content.
that foments harm, harm, foments hatred rather.
And those are still in part one.
Oh, really?
So maybe I'm wrong then when I say he split off the hate speech stuff.
You're saying it's actually going to continue on.
Like I said, he's being very cagey about it because that is those types of harms, the seven types, are in part one, the definition sections.
So unless he's saying in some reporting, I see that he's still proceeding with the harm that deals with hatred.
And that's so overbroad that it's going to capture a lot of online content and there's no exemption for reporting or journalism, I might add.
So if you were doing an interview with someone who was saying some very harmful things as a journalist, you want to report that, you might be caught under that type of harm that's in part one that he says he's proceeding forward with.
Pre-Crime And Pain00:04:00
Well, then I may have already been tricked by him because I thought, okay, we've got a bit of a reprieve.
I'm guessing the Human Rights Commission stuff, that's part of the second track.
But so give me an example.
One of the things I talked about before, and it's in the bill, is you can go to a court to have a judge give sort of a preemptive restraining order against someone who you think is going to engage in a hate incident.
You could even get them under house arrest.
There's all sorts of things.
Is that part?
Do you know offhand without checking the bill?
Is that going to be fast-tracked in Varani's new plan?
Well, that I believe is under the criminal code provisions.
That's dealing with Peace Bond and people who are talking about pre-crime.
So I believe that is included in the part two that he says he's severing from part one and part four would deal with child protection.
So ostensibly, we're okay there.
He's going to debate that, he says, later on.
But I have to double check.
Got it.
And I don't mean to put you on the spot.
We're both reacting to this, and there's not a lot of meat here.
He just, you know, it was really a one-minute statement.
So when you say fomenting hate, and again, hate is a human emotion, to foment hate.
If you could stop hate by passing a bill, I always say we would just pass the Love Each Other Act of 2024, and we would be, you just can't compel people to be happy.
People have feelings of hate when they have a grievance that they feel is unmet and unsatisfied.
And there's two ways to deal with the grievance.
One is to deal with it.
The other is to tell people to shut up about it.
Typically, telling people to shut up about a grievance only makes them feel it more because they feel persecuted now.
They feel a sense of unfairness.
So I'm going to study a little bit more what fomenting hate is.
And this is my general beef with these censorship laws.
They're subjective.
There's no way to measure, did you really feel hate?
And even if you did, what's the damage there?
In centuries of law, you had to prove you had suffered some damage.
Show me the broken bone.
Somebody, you lost some money.
So many, you had a car accident.
You just don't have a feelings part of the law.
Right.
That's always been a problem for this type of legislation, as you rightly pointed out.
I think most people recognize that.
The Supreme Court in a case called Watcott tried to move away from what they thought was a subjective problem in the definition of hatred.
And they said, well, we have to look at the effect that that hatred will have on possible discrimination against the targeted group.
But that's a sociological analysis that relies on looking at the dynamic of how and why people discriminate.
So it's not just a unitary causal analysis that you can do.
I heard some hate speech, so I'm going to go discriminate against this group.
It pushes the problem back a little bit, I think, but it doesn't get rid of it.
Yeah.
You know, there is a concept of getting paid for pain and suffering if you're in a car accident, for example, but you need a doctor's examination.
We don't just, like, you could say, oh, I feel pain.
Well, you can't just say that and get cash.
There is some sort of scientific test.
And over the years, you know, the amount you get for this injury or that injury is actually fairly settled law now.
I think the pure subjectivity of this is a danger.
And the fact that, obviously, it's like Lavrenti Beria, the Russian secret police chief who said, show me the man, I'll find you the crime.
Really, we're all guilty of causing a hard feeling if you look long enough.
It's just a matter of who gets prosecuted.
Compelled Speech Dilemmas00:04:22
And if the liberals are in power, it'll be the enemy of the liberals.
I hope the conservatives wouldn't support this bill.
Let me ask you about that.
The Democracy Fund is non-partisan, so you would never support one party or another.
But have you heard where the conservative opposition is on this?
I know that the NDP and the block have said they support C-63.
I myself haven't heard a very clear, strong statement by the opposition of you.
I have not, as I'd like to.
I mean, I look at the news, obviously, to see if there's been any comments by the conservatives.
You would think, because they have a more conservative approach to things, they're for small government, that they would not grant a government such a huge remit to govern speech, because the bill, as it's written, basically allows for full spectrum online surveillance, and it unleashes an army of bureaucrats and citizen informers to report speech en masse to this digital safety commission.
But you don't even need to do that.
You can set up a large language model.
You can set up an AI software and just auto-report.
The government can certainly do this, and bad actors could do this.
So it's just a nightmare panopticon type situation that I would hope the Conservatives would recognize and not support.
You know, there's a lot of problems out there.
I should point out that there's this little town in western Ontario.
It's really near the Manitoba border.
It's called EMO, E-M-O.
It's a little town.
And they made the decision not to have a Pride Week and Pride flags and Pride crosswalks.
And the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled that they have to, and they'll be fined for choosing otherwise.
Basically, it's a case of compelled speech.
And you have, I just feel like we are, and that human rights tribunal, it's a provincial body.
I think I've got the facts on that accurate.
I just think we need to roll back a lot of this.
And I don't see a really courageous stand in Canada by any party.
In some ways, I think we're going to be saved if we're saved by the United States.
Having a free speech absolutist like Elon Musk so influential in the Trump cabinet could have a knock-on effect with us here.
I just get the feeling that if Trudeau tried to censor Twitter, Elon Musk would lash back and Trump might threaten a tariff.
Look, that's speculation.
You have a better sense of that than I do, but definitely there is sort of a gravitational pull by having the U.S., I think, First Amendment right beside us.
And so the criticism of those officials might pull our officials their way.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But certainly the U.S. obviously have more protections than we do.
Let me tell you a very quick story, and I think I've mentioned this on the show before.
Way back when Stephen Harper was prime minister, I had been an activist for removing the hate speech provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act because I had been hit with that when I was a publisher.
I was hit under the Alberta version of that law.
So Harper, when he was PM, called me into his office.
He was worried that if he were to abolish the hate speech provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, frankly, his worry was what would the Jewish community say?
Because perversely, it was the Jewish community who had lobbied for that.
And I say it's perversely because now if you criticize radical Islam, you get hit with the hate speech charge.
So be careful of what you wish for in terms of censorship laws, because what you put in there today to get your enemies can be used against you in the future.
So I did my best to convince Prime Minister Harper that the only people who liked the censorship law were maybe some lawyers or some pundits that regular members of the Jewish community were not into censorship.
And he sort of took a leap of faith and the government supported that bill.
It was a private member's bill that the government got behind.
They repealed that section, and not a single person lamented its loss.
Like there was no outrage by people saying, hey, bring back the censorship law.
Furious About Tickets00:08:51
It was just the grievance industry that lost one tool.
So I would hope that the conservatives show some cultural courage, like Stephen Harper did.
It was amazing to me that he was so nervous about it, but he did the right thing.
Hey, listen, I want to, while I've got you here, I want to talk to you about one other thing.
I appreciate you talking about C63.
And to be honest, we don't have a lot to go on.
It was just that sort of blurting out there by a referendum.
But I want to talk to you about the case of the Amish.
We've done some stories about the Amish community that got hit with those huge fines because they didn't download the ArriveCan app on their smartphone.
These are people who do not use modern technology.
So that was an impossible feat for them to accomplish.
How are those cases going?
I know TDF has taken a bunch of them.
Right.
So we have some good news and bad news.
So the good news is we've had some success in getting some of the tickets reopened.
Some of those tickets have liens pertaining to them.
But we just found out, I think, last week that the Welland Court denied a reopening application for four Amish individuals.
There are liens involved in protecting some of those tickets.
The reasons given varied, but it seemed to be the age of the tickets that were a problem for the court.
And that the Amish, the court suggested, had to take steps to apprise themselves of various court dates.
Now, we have some problems with that interpretation.
We think there are grounds to appeal that denial.
And so, subject to instructions from our clients, we're going to look hard at that.
Yeah, I mean, the Amish are a very special case.
They don't use email.
They don't use faxes.
They don't use phones other than in real emergencies.
They honestly didn't know what was going on.
When I met with the sort of head of the steering committee out there, he told me he thought that this had something to do with masks.
Like, it was so alien.
And when you say to them, download the ArriveCan app, you might as well be speaking Chinese because they genuinely do not know what those words mean.
And, you know, the law protects other people who are sort of childlike.
They call it capacity.
Children, obviously themselves, but other people who may not be in a certain state.
And I'm not saying that Amish people are mentally limited.
I'm just saying culturally, they do not engage with smartphone apps.
And I don't know what kind of notice of a trial they received, but I think that the law, if you want to prosecute the Amish very, very bravely picking on the Amish, you should have to go the extra mile to make sure the Amish know what's happening because I don't think they did.
And I think it's sort of gross that a Justice of the Peace wouldn't reopen some of these cases.
I hope you do appeal, but you've had some success with others, right?
Yes, we have.
So we've actually reviewed disclosure in some of our reopened tickets.
We are reaching out to the Crown.
I can't comment on the state of those conversations, but we hope that we will be able to either proceed to trial.
Well, we can proceed for trial, but until then, we hope that we can have some productive conversation with the Crown.
So that's where we are in those batch.
But this last batch of tickets were denied, and that's causing us some consternation.
Yeah, you know, this really is a dictionary definition of bullying.
And these folks can't help them.
You know what I, because these folks can't or won't fight for themselves.
They're pacifists.
They will literally turn the other cheek.
They take that passage of the Bible so literally.
They submit to authority, and it would be like someone being punched and just not punching back.
And then they're punched again, and they're punched, and they will not punch back.
And I'm using a physical metaphor, but that's sort of what happened to them a hundred times with these ArriveCan finds.
And I just, it's such a bullying moment, and it's just a grave injustice.
And I'm so glad the Democracy Fund is doing it.
Folks, you know, we've done some stories on this.
I just want to tell you if you want the latest, on the Rebel News side, we've set up a website called AmishReports.com.
I've been going out there.
David Menzies has been going out there.
We've been trying to report everything that moves on this.
And if you want to actually help the Amish themselves, there's a website called helptheamish.com, which tells you what it's about.
And that money goes to the Democracy Fund.
You'll actually get a charitable tax receipt for it because there's a lot of clients.
Are you allowed to say how many clients you have?
How many Amish have signed up for help?
Yeah, I think it's approaching 30.
But new clients come in.
There's surrounding Amish communities as well that we anticipate reaching out to.
And we suspect that there are more tickets.
So we just don't know how far this goes.
The government said they only handed out a few.
I tend to not believe that.
I don't know how extensive their records are, but people, more Amish clients keep coming in as we go along.
So you know, and you just got to imagine how hard that is, because in the age of social media, a tweet can go viral and a lot of people can see it and they can all connect together.
But what if you're not on Twitter?
What if you're not on the phone?
What if you're not on email?
Word spreads slowly, mouth to ear, mouth to ear, or handwritten letters, or every Sunday when they get together at church.
So it takes a while.
And of course, to contact us, there's a friendly neighbor named Grant who is not Amish, and he helps set things up.
It's very difficult logistically to do journalism about the Amish or to do lawyering for the Amish because they're just not built for the modern world.
And I really think that it's an important project because these folks have slipped through the cracks and it drives me nuts that the government of Ontario, I think it's the government of Ontario or would it be the federal government?
I think it's the provincial government that's handling these tickets here.
Is still digging in.
It bugs me that not a single bureaucrat or lawyer over the years said, guys, is this the right thing to do to prosecute the Amish because they didn't download an app on their phone?
Like not a single person had enough humanity to say, you know, let's use some discretion here.
We can bend the rules because this is like, no, they just went full punitive.
That's a bully mentality.
And that makes me furious.
And I have to be extra furious because the Amish themselves will not get furious.
They just, it's just their way not to get furious.
Do you get furious on these ones?
Or maybe that's not your way.
Maybe you just get, well, I'm just going to hunker down and do the lawyering.
Well, you try and stay objective about this.
That focus you on the defenses that you can present.
But I will say, I mean, we've been doing, TDF has been doing this for several years now.
And so we see how much of a mess ArriveCan was.
So a lot of elderly people had a problem with Arrive Can.
Marginalized communities have a problem with Arrive Can.
And now, of course, the Amish have problems with ArriveCan.
So it was a mess from the beginning.
And of course, they're a non-conflictual community.
They manifest their biblical principles in the way they live.
So that makes it doubly hard for them to fight this.
But as you say, TDF is going to take on that fight.
You know, that old saying, it's like taking candy from a baby.
That's how it feels.
Like these brave prosecutors, these brave border cops ticketing and prosecuting the Amish.
They must have thought, well, we're going to rack up some wins.
No, the reason we say the phrase taking candy from a baby is because the baby can't fight back.
And I'm not saying the Amish are babies, but in the world of the law and the courts, they are like, in a way, they're like children.
And it makes me furious that they were abused this way.
Well, listen, Mark, I wish you good luck.
Again, those two websites to find all our reports on the subject, go to AmishReports.com.
And if you want to actually help the fight back in courts, go to helptheamish.com.
This is one of those cases where if we don't help them, no one will.
And the fact that they suffered in silence for so long just makes me extra mad.