Peter Menzies: For a vision of Canada's free-speech future, look to the U.K.

While in the U.S., comedians are being taken off the air temporarily, British comedians are being arrested.

By: Peter Menzies

Whether through story selection or their X accounts, most Canadian media are obsessed — to an often unhealthy extent — with events in the United States.

At times, as with teams like the Toronto Blue Jays competing in American sports leagues, it’s just for fun. On more serious occasions the fetish expands to the suspension of late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel or the latest taunting from U.S. President Donald Trump. Either way, Canada’s media have an unquenchable thirst for all things USA, USA, USA.

Notwithstanding the arguments by some that our largest city has more in common with America than it does most of Canada, this fixation is perfectly understandable. What goes on in America is important. What is inexplicable, though, is what gets left on the cutting-room floor, or, as they once said in the newspaper business, the stone. Because not everything that goes on in America is more important than what goes on elsewhere.

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution.” Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety.”

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

But there is certainly proof that the former government, and likely this one, was interested in establishing more government control over speech and communication. You can see it in how they governed. It took them three tries to pass the Online Streaming Act, but they persevered. This gave the CRTC control over all online audio and video and the power to force content it prefers on Canadians and, in doing so, suppress content they don’t. Podcasts are for now excluded but at least one party appearing at the regulator’s most recent hearing made the case that the internet and streaming are fundamentally no different from radio and the CRTC should treat them with similar quota management.

Once the Trudeau government introduced subsidies for news media, it created a panel of appointees to “qualify” journalism organizations. Then the Online News Act inserted the CRTC, traditionally restricted to broadcasting, into the business of “print” media oversight, putting that sector of the industry within the scope of a regulator for the first time.

The Online Harms Act, ostensibly meant to protect children from digital peril, defined targeted content so poorly that social media platforms would have severely restricted discourse, faced draconian penalties and would have allowed people to flood the Canadian Human Rights Commission with complaints about people who said things that hurt their feelings.

None of the above involves arrests, and the government insisted it was all Charter-compliant (though this hasn’t been tested). In any case, it's all clearly a signal that the Trudeau government wanted more control over what Canadians could say and hear.

It has become clear that Trudeau’s successor is similarly disposed. First came the Strong Borders Act, which law professor Michael Geist described as burying “dangerous lawful access provisions that open the door to warrantless access to personal information and increased surveillance capabilities.” After significant criticism, the government now plans to re-table the bill, presumably to make changes in response to the critiques (this was just announced today).

Then came Bill C-9, designed to crack down on hate and intimidation, something the Canadian Civil Liberties Association agrees is a worthy goal, but “criminal law is not the solution to every social problem.”

“As drafted, Bill C-9 risks criminalizing some forms of protected speech and peaceful protest — two cornerstones of a free and democratic society.”

C-9 also removes the need for hate propaganda prosecutions to get the Attorney General’s approval, leaving it up to police — who will face pressure from the politically motivated — to decide whether to pursue allegations. Keeping with that theme, Carney’s cyber security legislation gives the Industry minister (not the Attorney General) the power, without need of a warrant, to order the nation’s telecommunications companies to cut off internet and other services as they see fit.

Again, the CCLA and others see this as threatening Canadians’ privacy, civil and data security rights.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here. Not quite batshit bonkers, but getting there. And if you want a preview of what our leaders would like to be able to do in Canada, even if the final results would be applied differently, in line with our laws, don’t look south. Look to the U.K.

Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.

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