This reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Cage": the Talosians, a dying and physically diminished race yet in control due to their telepathic powers, admonish human Captain Pike "Right thinking will be rewarded. Wrong thinking will be punished!" It doesn't occur to the Talosians that their mental powers aren't sufficient to maintain domination over humans, nor that they will be utterly at the humans' mercy once Pike and crew figure out how to overcome them.
The Liberals have brought in this legislation in an effort to squelch out the "wrong thinking" of their opponents, and seem to be working from the assumption that only they will be able to make use of the powers provided by the online harms act. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that these powers could soon be at the disposal of their political opponents, and they could soon be the people condemned for "wrong thinking." In the more robust free speech rights of the US, this act would be quickly struck down by the courts. It could potentially face a similar fate in Canada, but unfortunately I suspect many of the current Supreme Court justices will be susceptible to the progressive idea that some speech must be banned because it's inherently harmful, stretching current provisions aimed at neo-Nazis to progressive bugbears.
The thought of some appointed, beholden federal bureaucrats deciding what constitutes "misinformation" frightens me. Hell, this article could be considered misinformation if the head of right-speech decides it misrepresents the risk of the legislation.
This seemingly international impulse falls under the heading "Bureaucrats out of control," and the hidden major premise is evidently "Bureaucrats speak for the nation-state." I thought the people spoke for the nation-state, or at the very least for themselves in supposedly democratic nation-states. But hats off to Kafka, who foresaw with preternatural clarity in the 1920s just what a world run by bureaucrats would be like. Remember that Himmler, the Holocaust's principal architect, wasn't a philosopher or even a minor-league thinker, simply an out-of-control bureaucrat with social engineering fantasies.
You have always had the right to say whatever you want and you still have that right. But rights have responsibilities, something we all forget.
We have lots of sites that do not let you comment at all, take 𝙏𝒉𝙚 𝘼𝒕𝙡𝒂𝙣𝒕𝙞𝒄 for example. The 𝙉𝒆𝙬 𝙔𝒐𝙧𝒌 𝑻𝙞𝒎𝙚𝒔 strictly moderates as does the 𝙏𝒐𝙧𝒐𝙣𝒕𝙤 𝙎𝒕𝙖𝒓. The 𝙂𝒍𝙤𝒃𝙚 𝙖𝒏𝙙 𝙈𝒂𝙞𝒍 says they do but you can put just about anything there and it only gets moderated if someone complains. The toilet paper rag called the 𝑵𝙖𝒕𝙞𝒐𝙣𝒂𝙡 𝙋𝒐𝙨𝒕 just lets anything go.
There is way to much abuse, way to much misinformation and way to much intolerance done by anonymous posters to let it continue like it is. Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better but then the black sites would not enforce this. The Donald Trumps will always tell lies.
I am not too worried about censorship, I am much more worried about people like the proud boys and our very own convoy people.
I subscribe to both the Globe and the Post and like to read the different articles and takes on things that they have. . The Post does moderate, not as strictly, but does not deserve to be called a toilet paper rag.
Groups like the proud boys are despicable but I don’t view the convoy people that way and an insurrection they were certainly not.
You should be worried about censorship; it could easily happen to you.
I’ve been left of centre most of my life (73 age), and am very uncomfortable with the growing trend of wanting to shut down freedom of speech from across the spectrum but most disturbing, from the left as it is now.
I would suggest that you don't know who the "convoy people" are if you're lumping them in with the proud boys. Also, when you have Health Canada and politicians telling outright lies (they were known to be false at the time,) how can you possibly hold citizens to a higher standard than that? Disagreeing about whether electric vehicles are the way forward or not isn't misinformation - there is actual legitimate information on both sides of the debate. When any opposing viewpoint is labeled misinformation by people with inherent biases (which EVERYONE has - including both you and me,) then that makes any legislation nothing than another arm of the state to control the people. I don't see any positive coming from that.
Thank you for your very reasonable and articulate response. I am of an age where in a discussion you could “agree to disagree” and still remain friends. The total censorship of different view points has grown to a point where it is making Canadians take sides and is creating a division in Canadians. I don’t see a way forward and feel sorry for younger generations that will not know that dissenting points of view can broaden your mind and expand your view point.
The Ottawa Convoy protestors were surprised by their own success, so they partied until the music was turned off. They didn't precisely know what they wanted except that they were sick and tired of a lot of things they wanted their government and fellow Canadians to acknowledge and to fix.
An important function of protesting is to diffuse tension. Few protests used to result in instant monumental policy changes, and most probably shouldn’t for the sake of peace, order and good government. If you live in Ottawa a protest now and then comes with the landscape. There's not much point in setting up a national protest park on Ellesmere Island.
The Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is historically not a shrinking violet when it comes to a good donnybrook that raises his polling. So why didn't he sit down to a beer with the Ottawa Convoy? That would have surprised the protestors into as much passivity as their novel and creative protest froze the surprised government.
Am I missing something here? This is Canada. We used to settle things over sport and beer. It's cost effective. Instead we're putting on a big, expensive, choreographed show that's going to have repercussions and entrench beliefs.
Going by the excellent comments in The Line we are better off to use our taxes to renew our subscriptions.
Colin, you say in part, "... Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better ..." but you have offered up only your given name (which, I presume is actually you) but you have not offered up your surname.
The result is that I have no idea of whom you really are. I point out that both my given name and surname is part of this post; in fact, that is the case whenever I choose to post a comment in whatever forum for I believe that I MUST take responsibility for anything I post. Perhaps, you might consider the same concept, particularly given that you have just endorsed it!
If you still think that comment sections are anything but a cesspool of anger-inducing trolls in 2023, you sir have a problem.
It's good practice to treat as the low-brow entertainment that it is and conversely, giving it the same weight as the serious articles it lives under, is an error on your part, not that of the commenters.
Whatever happened to good judgement? Do you really need the nanny state to tell you what's appropriate or not? Isn't being a functioning adult having the ability to discern bullshit from the rest?
I don't need anyone to tell me how to behave but there are of people who use it to harass and bully as shown by the Amanda Todd case. It is incidents like Amanda's that will lead to so called censorship. There are truly evil people about and good manners will not stop them so we must have laws. If people were inherently good we would not need any laws would we. But people are not and so we have millions of laws for exactly that reason.
So - where does the CPC fall on this? We've seen how states will shape the definition of misinformation to favour themselves in the past. That is my biggest concern - if truth-telling is then labeled as misinformation, it is truly an Orwellian world we would be looking at.
Pierre has said repeatedly he wants to "make Canada the free-est Nation on Earth"... we know the current collection want to put everything under their boot so I'll take the one that actually articulates freedom and give him a shot at proving it. The other side is a guaranteed and continuing abyss of institutionalized abuse and repression.
I'm afraid the only freedom that PP cares about is freeing rich people from taxes and big business from regulations. He's spent his whole career working for that but you can't campaign on those things so he riles people up by telling them absolutely every problem they have was caused by JT and they will go away as soon as he is out of office.
If you genuinely believe that and are not purely gas lighting the group, you are nieve at best. Rich people manage their taxes and do not care about you or your rules, they move their money where they want it to be. Poor people don't care because they basically don't pay taxes anyway. The ONLY people that Pierre's tax reform will substantially impact are the middle class. They pay taxes - unlike public and government employees - middle class wealth generators actually do pay taxes and they pay for substantially EVERYTHING in this country. THOSE are the people PP will help out. And if you don't get that, you will never understand why honest working Canadians identify with him.
I find him to be very dishonest. His manner is phony and a lot of what he says seems to be nonsense. Trudeau isn't half as powerful as PP makes him out to be. This is a pretty good fact check on his Thanksgiving complaints:
When politicians talk tax cuts you have to think about what services they are going to cut to pay for it. The Walkerton tragedy is a famous example of that. Also, are you saying that civil servants don't pay taxes?
Civil servants do not "pay" taxes. They get a feel good calculation to determine how much TAX REVENUE they are paid. It is impossible to "pay" tax when 100% of your remuneration comes from tax revenue.
Great article Mr. Menzies. Allegations of mis/disinformation have been weaponized by liberals to demonize their opponents and suppress opinions they disagree with. The end game is to increase government regulations and restrict speech to their political advantage.
I am in favor of freedom of expression. Limits already exist in the Criminal Code, e.g. child pornography, fraud, incitement to violence, or in other legislation, e.g. copyright infringement. If we need more limits, they should be very narrowly tailored and they must be justified.
"Misinformation" is not an adequate justification. It is much too broad a concept. Does it extend to anything that turns out to be false? Then a lot of government pronouncements would be misinformation. (For examples, take many of former Minister Mendicino's pronouncements.) How about things that are true but taken out of context? Again the government would be a major offender. (Think of the way the PMO cherrypicks economic indicators.)
What about the things politicians say during election campaigns? There is a Supreme Court Decision that these are not to be taken seriously -- there is no remedy at law if the government reneges. What about promises more generally?
In any case, centuries of censorship have shown that it does not eliminate unwanted views, it merely drives them underground. There, they spread without anyone challenging them, or being able to. We need to hear these views which we find hateful, so that we can counter them, or at least know how widespread they are.
Or we could go back to the Quebec of my youth, where the Catholic Church maintained an Index of prohibited works, where we could not watch a movie on the life of Emile Zola, and where some of my classmates made money smuggling in copies of Playboy from Ontario, that libertine province!!!
"... the conflict at hand is between the right to freedom of expression and the “right” not to be misinformed — even though the latter right doesn’t actually exist."
I could be wrong, but I'm going to presume that Menzies isn't advocating for the unrestricted right to say whatever one wants to say, wherever and by whatever medium one desires, and to force the sole burden of discernment onto the ill-equipped listener at home (especially in social media, where the listener often has little to no right of refusal if "The Algorithm" has deemed them to be an appropriate receptor of a given message). But he comes close in describing this ""right" to not be misinformed" as he does.
I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener. Rights do not exist in a vacuum: they exist in a paired relationship with responsibilities. It's the juvenile expectations from the Meta/Google/X's of the world, paired with the truly juvenile desires of those on the far ends of the spectrum to blather whatever they want without adult supervision, that ignore that fundamental moral philosophical relationship.
Based on Menzies' article, I'm actually looking forward to the Online Harms Act. Given that it establishes new responsibilities, I'm now looking forward to watching the SCC and others as they finally have the tools to clarify how the rights of self-expression in the hottest age of media yet devised should be tempered by appropriate and legal, civil codes of self-restraint.
I have a very simple concern. How does one define misinformation? I don't think anyone has the "right to not be misinformed" - advertising misinforms all the time. Governments misinform, politicians misinform, doctors misinform. I would put forward the definition of misinformation as being anything which has not been subjected to the scientific method repeatedly and rigorously and proven it's ability to remain true in the face of challenge. Facebook deleted posts about the "lab leak theory" because it was misinformation. Now it is widely considered to be one of a few possible options, and many professional bodies consider it to be more likely than the natural evolution/animal transfer theory.
Are we, as a society, ok with having theories and untested hypothesis broadly deleted because it's not yet proven? Or do we value the free exchange of ideas and the ability to test a broad base of ideas in hopes of determining what the actual truth is? Personally, I don't actually care about the origin of covid - it's just a great example of what may be called misinformation at one point, but is later proven to not be misinformation.
Any misinformation/censorship bill, runs the risk of censoring legitimately TRUE and VALID information, and ruining the reputations of those scientists who dared to put it forward without realizing that the political establishment would cancel them for it via the labeling of it as misinformation.
MOST people are not out there trying to sway people with false information. Rather than censorship, I would favor education of the masses to learn how to validate information. Teach critical thinking.
And really? I don't think anyone other than a select few groups of individuals is voting based on social media. I read a party's PDF document that states their entire platform before deciding who I will vote for. In my opinion, it's the only way to remove the bias that is inherent in legacy media as well. We need to remove this idea that there is a "right way to vote" - the whole nature of a democracy is that we each get a vote and we each vote based on the things that we view as important. Government and media and certain swaths of society need to stop thinking in terms of "wrong-think" and blaming misinformation, when the reality could be that citizens have decided they no longer trust the current government and instead they are changing who they vote for. I don't use social media a lot, and I certainly don't use it as a source of information about who I'm going to vote for. But if politicians are so asleep behind the wheel that they're missing the reality that they're busy working on things that are meaningless to the general population while ignoring the things that matter to the general population - well, they can and SHOULD lose. And the government should take note of that and accept that their ideas and prior actions were unacceptable to the population rather than blaming misinformation.
I will not vote liberal, and I have a dozen different reasons for why that is the case that are pretty factual such as the SLC Lavalin affair, the WE scandal, Trudeau's general ineptness at managing crown corporations, the lack of seriousness they've shown towards the CCP interfering in election integrity, their poor handling of the economy, the debt practices they have, and quite frankly - I just don't think any of their leadership are serious politicians. The whole party has turned a blind eye to numerous ethical issues that should have had Trudeau unseated as leader of the party, so even IF I agreed with their policies, I still wouldn't vote for them because their actions have told me everything I need to know about them. (That they lack ethics as a party, will do what they want, and don't care who they run over in the process.) These are my personal reasons. I know that these things have factually happened, and personally? I don't want to live in a country where a ruling party could decide to label whatever actual truths it wanted to, as misinformation, just to make inconvenient truths disappear.
Peter, you say in part, "... Given that it establishes new responsibilities ..."
I absolutely do understand that it appears that we will be saddled with "new responsibilities" but why is it that we will not receive any new rights? In fact, it certainly appears that our existing rights will be severely abridged.
Further, my ultimate issue is simply the question of who will "judge" whether I properly exercise my "new responsibilities?" The answer, of course, is that "the government" will be the judge (and jury and executioner), which then brings up the question of just whom will judge the judges? Ultimately, it is the Orwellian answer of "why they are above reproach and will judge themselves."
No, you miss the point: the responsibilities always existed morally, but the legal and civil justice system had no tools to enforce them. The new responsibilities are now simply new civil responsibilities; they always existed in a moral sense. Your "right" to speak carries with it a moral obligation to consider its consequences - a fact regularly ignored by anyone who spouts off about hot button issues. But without any enforcement mechanism, we rely solely on personal judgement and self awareness to ensure those responsibilities are met - and on the impersonal, if not anonymous realms of the internet, I think we can all acknowledge that relying on individual self-awareness has been a failed experiment.
Or maybe you don't view it as such: in which case I think the rest of us have a separate right - that is, the right to exist in a civil society - to demand of you that you justify the ongoing screech of those on the far right, far left, and lunatic fringe all over to say what they want, when they want, on any forum they want, and to do so without consequence. That right to exist in a civil society must predate your right to free expression - because free expression depends on a civil society, of laws and norms and basic human kindness, to prevent the devolution to a Hobbesian natural state which otherwise inevitably will occur.
Orwell was nervous - rightfully so - about government acting as its own judge. But before that, he recognized in Wigon Pier that society requires empathy, respect, and, indeed, an enforced kind of self-awareness. Government isn't as good as family, or clan, or even class in such enforcement - but when the rest falls by the wayside, it's essential to have something to rely upon while we rebuild the rest. Goodness knows now is such a time.
Peter, with respect, I did not miss the point. You are the one who said that "... it establishes new responsibilities ... "
I absolutely agree that we have always had the moral requirement to be responsible. It appears that now we will have new LEGAL obligations. In the normal course of matters I have no problem with the idea that I must be responsible. In this instance, however, I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea that some unnamed and (apparently) unaccountable entity will be able to judge me but will itself (apparently) be exempt from judgement or such responsibility of the new entity will be so cumbersome as to effectively be unaccountable.
It was the idea that we have this new mechanism to police us that I found Orwellian. In no way do I find out moral need for responsibility to be unwelcome; such personal responsibility is an absolute necessity. It is simply that I don't trust the government. Period.
As for lunatic fringes, your lunatic is my sensible individual and vice versa. I am not at all a Trumpian but I do support his right to be stupid. Similarly, I am absolutely not a supporter of Stephen Guilbeault but I support his right to be incredibly stupid (he is!), even as I support my right to speak up in opposition to his madness. My worry is that in a zeal to shut down the stupidity of Donald these new legalities will shut down my right to oppose the enviro madness. Or have I now breached "correct" speech?
"I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener." I like that phrase.
The thing is, lying isn't illegal. Being wrong isn't illegal. Lying to extract a benefit is fraud, and that is illegal. Lying in a court of law is perjury, and that's illegal. Even in those cases, the challenge is *proving* that the accused was knowingly lying. Considering how subjective that gets for anything other than fairly simple factual assertions, I think trying to extend stricter obligations beyond the legal sphere could lead to a nightmarish Orwellian bureaucracy. I understand what you want - I don't think it's feasible.
"But then along came the bots and the algorithms. Lots of Ross’s free individuals — little Che’s, if you will — voted for Brexit and started electing the likes of Boris Johnson, Giogia Meloni and Donald Trump. The fault for this was laid squarely at the door of social media and its ability to spread “#fakenews” faster than an Okanagan wildfire. Faced with declining societal trust indices and baskets of deplorables making unsupervised decisions, the Nation State started to fight back."
This is an interesting paragraph. How free are people who have been conned? A significant portion of Brexit and Trump voters were gamed by sophisticated campaigns to harvest their votes by playing on their very real discontent. Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon (in the UK and the US) found new ways for people to vote against their own interests. How do we protect people from scammers who couldn't care less about them and not lose crucial freedoms? The demons who run social media companies care about money and power...democracy and teen suicide? Not so much. This is a tough problem.
God spare me from the bureaucratic and political “ zealots “ and the “woke” activists who hang on every word with Orwellian glee. Am I allowed to say “ God” or did I just offend somebody?
So the government is more or less putting a law into play that lets them decide what truth your allowed to see/hear ?? Just how far are things like this going to go before there is a backlash ?
Best piece you have posted in ages. Concise and to the point. Nice work. Will we see you at the Conservative Party convention in Quebec City this weekend? Love to buy you guys a beverage. Phil O'Dell
Respectfully put and appreciated - and you're right, I had to backpedal my words due to poor wording. What I meant was that no new personal responsibilities are created: given that the moral responsibility was always there, establishing them in civil code is just belts and braces, nothing new. But point taken, and I'm always happy to be held to what I wrote.
Sounds like you're built of the same stuff, but you fear the state more than you fear the kinds of folks who currently hold the crayons and are writing the garbage on both sides of the spectrum. (Left? See recent The Line piece from Jen on how the trans folks are jumping the shark; Right? See the response of any red state US governor; Lunatic? The Donald.) I'm actually at the point where I think the tide has turned, and I'm willing to take my chances with the known incompetence of the federal government versus the consequences of letting the trucker convoys and First Nations hijackers run the table on what is and must be reported on any given day (and I'll join you in wondering whether I've now breached the correctness line).
Definitely appreciate your perspective - mine is, essentially, that government at least has some control points (elections, auditors), and has proven over time it can almost never pull off a decent information conspiracy - whereas the private sector of right, left, and sideways horror stories don't have any equivalent control points whatsoever. The new law creates some - and while, pace Hobbes, it naturally will be an extension of the Leviathan - it feels in 2023 like the right thing at the right time.
So, you are inferring that the contents of draft legislation you have never seen will be similar to that passed in a number of countries that don't have a Charter? This is fact based opinion weiting? Pardon me if I wait for confirmation before clutching at my pearls.
This reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Cage": the Talosians, a dying and physically diminished race yet in control due to their telepathic powers, admonish human Captain Pike "Right thinking will be rewarded. Wrong thinking will be punished!" It doesn't occur to the Talosians that their mental powers aren't sufficient to maintain domination over humans, nor that they will be utterly at the humans' mercy once Pike and crew figure out how to overcome them.
The Liberals have brought in this legislation in an effort to squelch out the "wrong thinking" of their opponents, and seem to be working from the assumption that only they will be able to make use of the powers provided by the online harms act. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that these powers could soon be at the disposal of their political opponents, and they could soon be the people condemned for "wrong thinking." In the more robust free speech rights of the US, this act would be quickly struck down by the courts. It could potentially face a similar fate in Canada, but unfortunately I suspect many of the current Supreme Court justices will be susceptible to the progressive idea that some speech must be banned because it's inherently harmful, stretching current provisions aimed at neo-Nazis to progressive bugbears.
Will you give her back her illusion of beauty?
I’m struggling to figure out who Vina is in this scenario. Would that be the NDP and their self-image as Canada’s progressive vanguard?
And going to Talos IV was punishable by the death penalty!
The parallels between the Talosian powers of projecting illusion and images and the Liberal emphasis on messaging and comms seems a bit on the nose...
The thought of some appointed, beholden federal bureaucrats deciding what constitutes "misinformation" frightens me. Hell, this article could be considered misinformation if the head of right-speech decides it misrepresents the risk of the legislation.
This seemingly international impulse falls under the heading "Bureaucrats out of control," and the hidden major premise is evidently "Bureaucrats speak for the nation-state." I thought the people spoke for the nation-state, or at the very least for themselves in supposedly democratic nation-states. But hats off to Kafka, who foresaw with preternatural clarity in the 1920s just what a world run by bureaucrats would be like. Remember that Himmler, the Holocaust's principal architect, wasn't a philosopher or even a minor-league thinker, simply an out-of-control bureaucrat with social engineering fantasies.
You have always had the right to say whatever you want and you still have that right. But rights have responsibilities, something we all forget.
We have lots of sites that do not let you comment at all, take 𝙏𝒉𝙚 𝘼𝒕𝙡𝒂𝙣𝒕𝙞𝒄 for example. The 𝙉𝒆𝙬 𝙔𝒐𝙧𝒌 𝑻𝙞𝒎𝙚𝒔 strictly moderates as does the 𝙏𝒐𝙧𝒐𝙣𝒕𝙤 𝙎𝒕𝙖𝒓. The 𝙂𝒍𝙤𝒃𝙚 𝙖𝒏𝙙 𝙈𝒂𝙞𝒍 says they do but you can put just about anything there and it only gets moderated if someone complains. The toilet paper rag called the 𝑵𝙖𝒕𝙞𝒐𝙣𝒂𝙡 𝙋𝒐𝙨𝒕 just lets anything go.
There is way to much abuse, way to much misinformation and way to much intolerance done by anonymous posters to let it continue like it is. Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better but then the black sites would not enforce this. The Donald Trumps will always tell lies.
I am not too worried about censorship, I am much more worried about people like the proud boys and our very own convoy people.
I subscribe to both the Globe and the Post and like to read the different articles and takes on things that they have. . The Post does moderate, not as strictly, but does not deserve to be called a toilet paper rag.
Groups like the proud boys are despicable but I don’t view the convoy people that way and an insurrection they were certainly not.
You should be worried about censorship; it could easily happen to you.
I’ve been left of centre most of my life (73 age), and am very uncomfortable with the growing trend of wanting to shut down freedom of speech from across the spectrum but most disturbing, from the left as it is now.
I would suggest that you don't know who the "convoy people" are if you're lumping them in with the proud boys. Also, when you have Health Canada and politicians telling outright lies (they were known to be false at the time,) how can you possibly hold citizens to a higher standard than that? Disagreeing about whether electric vehicles are the way forward or not isn't misinformation - there is actual legitimate information on both sides of the debate. When any opposing viewpoint is labeled misinformation by people with inherent biases (which EVERYONE has - including both you and me,) then that makes any legislation nothing than another arm of the state to control the people. I don't see any positive coming from that.
Thank you for your very reasonable and articulate response. I am of an age where in a discussion you could “agree to disagree” and still remain friends. The total censorship of different view points has grown to a point where it is making Canadians take sides and is creating a division in Canadians. I don’t see a way forward and feel sorry for younger generations that will not know that dissenting points of view can broaden your mind and expand your view point.
The Ottawa Convoy protestors were surprised by their own success, so they partied until the music was turned off. They didn't precisely know what they wanted except that they were sick and tired of a lot of things they wanted their government and fellow Canadians to acknowledge and to fix.
An important function of protesting is to diffuse tension. Few protests used to result in instant monumental policy changes, and most probably shouldn’t for the sake of peace, order and good government. If you live in Ottawa a protest now and then comes with the landscape. There's not much point in setting up a national protest park on Ellesmere Island.
The Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is historically not a shrinking violet when it comes to a good donnybrook that raises his polling. So why didn't he sit down to a beer with the Ottawa Convoy? That would have surprised the protestors into as much passivity as their novel and creative protest froze the surprised government.
Am I missing something here? This is Canada. We used to settle things over sport and beer. It's cost effective. Instead we're putting on a big, expensive, choreographed show that's going to have repercussions and entrench beliefs.
Going by the excellent comments in The Line we are better off to use our taxes to renew our subscriptions.
Colin, you say in part, "... Perhaps if we made everyone post under their real name it could be better ..." but you have offered up only your given name (which, I presume is actually you) but you have not offered up your surname.
The result is that I have no idea of whom you really are. I point out that both my given name and surname is part of this post; in fact, that is the case whenever I choose to post a comment in whatever forum for I believe that I MUST take responsibility for anything I post. Perhaps, you might consider the same concept, particularly given that you have just endorsed it!
If you still think that comment sections are anything but a cesspool of anger-inducing trolls in 2023, you sir have a problem.
It's good practice to treat as the low-brow entertainment that it is and conversely, giving it the same weight as the serious articles it lives under, is an error on your part, not that of the commenters.
Whatever happened to good judgement? Do you really need the nanny state to tell you what's appropriate or not? Isn't being a functioning adult having the ability to discern bullshit from the rest?
I don't need anyone to tell me how to behave but there are of people who use it to harass and bully as shown by the Amanda Todd case. It is incidents like Amanda's that will lead to so called censorship. There are truly evil people about and good manners will not stop them so we must have laws. If people were inherently good we would not need any laws would we. But people are not and so we have millions of laws for exactly that reason.
Amanda Todd wasn't the victim of a newspaper comment section.
It seems from the replies you've already been convicted of "wrong think".
That is okay. I am a big boy and can take it.
When one has nothing of substance to say, gaslighting is a very transparent way of going about hiding it...
So - where does the CPC fall on this? We've seen how states will shape the definition of misinformation to favour themselves in the past. That is my biggest concern - if truth-telling is then labeled as misinformation, it is truly an Orwellian world we would be looking at.
He's on record as wanting to remove all these bills from law and for the de-funding of the CBC.
Pierre has said repeatedly he wants to "make Canada the free-est Nation on Earth"... we know the current collection want to put everything under their boot so I'll take the one that actually articulates freedom and give him a shot at proving it. The other side is a guaranteed and continuing abyss of institutionalized abuse and repression.
I'm afraid the only freedom that PP cares about is freeing rich people from taxes and big business from regulations. He's spent his whole career working for that but you can't campaign on those things so he riles people up by telling them absolutely every problem they have was caused by JT and they will go away as soon as he is out of office.
If you genuinely believe that and are not purely gas lighting the group, you are nieve at best. Rich people manage their taxes and do not care about you or your rules, they move their money where they want it to be. Poor people don't care because they basically don't pay taxes anyway. The ONLY people that Pierre's tax reform will substantially impact are the middle class. They pay taxes - unlike public and government employees - middle class wealth generators actually do pay taxes and they pay for substantially EVERYTHING in this country. THOSE are the people PP will help out. And if you don't get that, you will never understand why honest working Canadians identify with him.
I find him to be very dishonest. His manner is phony and a lot of what he says seems to be nonsense. Trudeau isn't half as powerful as PP makes him out to be. This is a pretty good fact check on his Thanksgiving complaints:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/10/10/Please-Advise-Trudeau-Turkey-Dinner
When politicians talk tax cuts you have to think about what services they are going to cut to pay for it. The Walkerton tragedy is a famous example of that. Also, are you saying that civil servants don't pay taxes?
Civil servants do not "pay" taxes. They get a feel good calculation to determine how much TAX REVENUE they are paid. It is impossible to "pay" tax when 100% of your remuneration comes from tax revenue.
Great article Mr. Menzies. Allegations of mis/disinformation have been weaponized by liberals to demonize their opponents and suppress opinions they disagree with. The end game is to increase government regulations and restrict speech to their political advantage.
And they are winning.
I am in favor of freedom of expression. Limits already exist in the Criminal Code, e.g. child pornography, fraud, incitement to violence, or in other legislation, e.g. copyright infringement. If we need more limits, they should be very narrowly tailored and they must be justified.
"Misinformation" is not an adequate justification. It is much too broad a concept. Does it extend to anything that turns out to be false? Then a lot of government pronouncements would be misinformation. (For examples, take many of former Minister Mendicino's pronouncements.) How about things that are true but taken out of context? Again the government would be a major offender. (Think of the way the PMO cherrypicks economic indicators.)
What about the things politicians say during election campaigns? There is a Supreme Court Decision that these are not to be taken seriously -- there is no remedy at law if the government reneges. What about promises more generally?
In any case, centuries of censorship have shown that it does not eliminate unwanted views, it merely drives them underground. There, they spread without anyone challenging them, or being able to. We need to hear these views which we find hateful, so that we can counter them, or at least know how widespread they are.
Or we could go back to the Quebec of my youth, where the Catholic Church maintained an Index of prohibited works, where we could not watch a movie on the life of Emile Zola, and where some of my classmates made money smuggling in copies of Playboy from Ontario, that libertine province!!!
Menzies plays his hand with the following:
"... the conflict at hand is between the right to freedom of expression and the “right” not to be misinformed — even though the latter right doesn’t actually exist."
I could be wrong, but I'm going to presume that Menzies isn't advocating for the unrestricted right to say whatever one wants to say, wherever and by whatever medium one desires, and to force the sole burden of discernment onto the ill-equipped listener at home (especially in social media, where the listener often has little to no right of refusal if "The Algorithm" has deemed them to be an appropriate receptor of a given message). But he comes close in describing this ""right" to not be misinformed" as he does.
I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener. Rights do not exist in a vacuum: they exist in a paired relationship with responsibilities. It's the juvenile expectations from the Meta/Google/X's of the world, paired with the truly juvenile desires of those on the far ends of the spectrum to blather whatever they want without adult supervision, that ignore that fundamental moral philosophical relationship.
Based on Menzies' article, I'm actually looking forward to the Online Harms Act. Given that it establishes new responsibilities, I'm now looking forward to watching the SCC and others as they finally have the tools to clarify how the rights of self-expression in the hottest age of media yet devised should be tempered by appropriate and legal, civil codes of self-restraint.
I have a very simple concern. How does one define misinformation? I don't think anyone has the "right to not be misinformed" - advertising misinforms all the time. Governments misinform, politicians misinform, doctors misinform. I would put forward the definition of misinformation as being anything which has not been subjected to the scientific method repeatedly and rigorously and proven it's ability to remain true in the face of challenge. Facebook deleted posts about the "lab leak theory" because it was misinformation. Now it is widely considered to be one of a few possible options, and many professional bodies consider it to be more likely than the natural evolution/animal transfer theory.
Are we, as a society, ok with having theories and untested hypothesis broadly deleted because it's not yet proven? Or do we value the free exchange of ideas and the ability to test a broad base of ideas in hopes of determining what the actual truth is? Personally, I don't actually care about the origin of covid - it's just a great example of what may be called misinformation at one point, but is later proven to not be misinformation.
Any misinformation/censorship bill, runs the risk of censoring legitimately TRUE and VALID information, and ruining the reputations of those scientists who dared to put it forward without realizing that the political establishment would cancel them for it via the labeling of it as misinformation.
MOST people are not out there trying to sway people with false information. Rather than censorship, I would favor education of the masses to learn how to validate information. Teach critical thinking.
And really? I don't think anyone other than a select few groups of individuals is voting based on social media. I read a party's PDF document that states their entire platform before deciding who I will vote for. In my opinion, it's the only way to remove the bias that is inherent in legacy media as well. We need to remove this idea that there is a "right way to vote" - the whole nature of a democracy is that we each get a vote and we each vote based on the things that we view as important. Government and media and certain swaths of society need to stop thinking in terms of "wrong-think" and blaming misinformation, when the reality could be that citizens have decided they no longer trust the current government and instead they are changing who they vote for. I don't use social media a lot, and I certainly don't use it as a source of information about who I'm going to vote for. But if politicians are so asleep behind the wheel that they're missing the reality that they're busy working on things that are meaningless to the general population while ignoring the things that matter to the general population - well, they can and SHOULD lose. And the government should take note of that and accept that their ideas and prior actions were unacceptable to the population rather than blaming misinformation.
I will not vote liberal, and I have a dozen different reasons for why that is the case that are pretty factual such as the SLC Lavalin affair, the WE scandal, Trudeau's general ineptness at managing crown corporations, the lack of seriousness they've shown towards the CCP interfering in election integrity, their poor handling of the economy, the debt practices they have, and quite frankly - I just don't think any of their leadership are serious politicians. The whole party has turned a blind eye to numerous ethical issues that should have had Trudeau unseated as leader of the party, so even IF I agreed with their policies, I still wouldn't vote for them because their actions have told me everything I need to know about them. (That they lack ethics as a party, will do what they want, and don't care who they run over in the process.) These are my personal reasons. I know that these things have factually happened, and personally? I don't want to live in a country where a ruling party could decide to label whatever actual truths it wanted to, as misinformation, just to make inconvenient truths disappear.
Bingo.
I think that most news, editorial, and opinion pieces will be cut by about 99% if they actually had to verify their own work!!!
Peter, you say in part, "... Given that it establishes new responsibilities ..."
I absolutely do understand that it appears that we will be saddled with "new responsibilities" but why is it that we will not receive any new rights? In fact, it certainly appears that our existing rights will be severely abridged.
Further, my ultimate issue is simply the question of who will "judge" whether I properly exercise my "new responsibilities?" The answer, of course, is that "the government" will be the judge (and jury and executioner), which then brings up the question of just whom will judge the judges? Ultimately, it is the Orwellian answer of "why they are above reproach and will judge themselves."
Like I say, Orwellian.
No, you miss the point: the responsibilities always existed morally, but the legal and civil justice system had no tools to enforce them. The new responsibilities are now simply new civil responsibilities; they always existed in a moral sense. Your "right" to speak carries with it a moral obligation to consider its consequences - a fact regularly ignored by anyone who spouts off about hot button issues. But without any enforcement mechanism, we rely solely on personal judgement and self awareness to ensure those responsibilities are met - and on the impersonal, if not anonymous realms of the internet, I think we can all acknowledge that relying on individual self-awareness has been a failed experiment.
Or maybe you don't view it as such: in which case I think the rest of us have a separate right - that is, the right to exist in a civil society - to demand of you that you justify the ongoing screech of those on the far right, far left, and lunatic fringe all over to say what they want, when they want, on any forum they want, and to do so without consequence. That right to exist in a civil society must predate your right to free expression - because free expression depends on a civil society, of laws and norms and basic human kindness, to prevent the devolution to a Hobbesian natural state which otherwise inevitably will occur.
Orwell was nervous - rightfully so - about government acting as its own judge. But before that, he recognized in Wigon Pier that society requires empathy, respect, and, indeed, an enforced kind of self-awareness. Government isn't as good as family, or clan, or even class in such enforcement - but when the rest falls by the wayside, it's essential to have something to rely upon while we rebuild the rest. Goodness knows now is such a time.
Peter, with respect, I did not miss the point. You are the one who said that "... it establishes new responsibilities ... "
I absolutely agree that we have always had the moral requirement to be responsible. It appears that now we will have new LEGAL obligations. In the normal course of matters I have no problem with the idea that I must be responsible. In this instance, however, I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea that some unnamed and (apparently) unaccountable entity will be able to judge me but will itself (apparently) be exempt from judgement or such responsibility of the new entity will be so cumbersome as to effectively be unaccountable.
It was the idea that we have this new mechanism to police us that I found Orwellian. In no way do I find out moral need for responsibility to be unwelcome; such personal responsibility is an absolute necessity. It is simply that I don't trust the government. Period.
As for lunatic fringes, your lunatic is my sensible individual and vice versa. I am not at all a Trumpian but I do support his right to be stupid. Similarly, I am absolutely not a supporter of Stephen Guilbeault but I support his right to be incredibly stupid (he is!), even as I support my right to speak up in opposition to his madness. My worry is that in a zeal to shut down the stupidity of Donald these new legalities will shut down my right to oppose the enviro madness. Or have I now breached "correct" speech?
"I may not have a positive right to not be misinformed, but surely I can ask of those to whom the right of public expression is given to exercise a positive responsibility to me, the potential listener." I like that phrase.
The thing is, lying isn't illegal. Being wrong isn't illegal. Lying to extract a benefit is fraud, and that is illegal. Lying in a court of law is perjury, and that's illegal. Even in those cases, the challenge is *proving* that the accused was knowingly lying. Considering how subjective that gets for anything other than fairly simple factual assertions, I think trying to extend stricter obligations beyond the legal sphere could lead to a nightmarish Orwellian bureaucracy. I understand what you want - I don't think it's feasible.
Judging from the many perceptive comments, Line readers aren’t yet ready to shut up. Good piece.
"But then along came the bots and the algorithms. Lots of Ross’s free individuals — little Che’s, if you will — voted for Brexit and started electing the likes of Boris Johnson, Giogia Meloni and Donald Trump. The fault for this was laid squarely at the door of social media and its ability to spread “#fakenews” faster than an Okanagan wildfire. Faced with declining societal trust indices and baskets of deplorables making unsupervised decisions, the Nation State started to fight back."
This is an interesting paragraph. How free are people who have been conned? A significant portion of Brexit and Trump voters were gamed by sophisticated campaigns to harvest their votes by playing on their very real discontent. Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon (in the UK and the US) found new ways for people to vote against their own interests. How do we protect people from scammers who couldn't care less about them and not lose crucial freedoms? The demons who run social media companies care about money and power...democracy and teen suicide? Not so much. This is a tough problem.
God spare me from the bureaucratic and political “ zealots “ and the “woke” activists who hang on every word with Orwellian glee. Am I allowed to say “ God” or did I just offend somebody?
Is Mr. Menzies in favour of any regulation I wonder? He treats misinformation like it’s some kind of urban myth.
So the government is more or less putting a law into play that lets them decide what truth your allowed to see/hear ?? Just how far are things like this going to go before there is a backlash ?
Best piece you have posted in ages. Concise and to the point. Nice work. Will we see you at the Conservative Party convention in Quebec City this weekend? Love to buy you guys a beverage. Phil O'Dell
Respectfully put and appreciated - and you're right, I had to backpedal my words due to poor wording. What I meant was that no new personal responsibilities are created: given that the moral responsibility was always there, establishing them in civil code is just belts and braces, nothing new. But point taken, and I'm always happy to be held to what I wrote.
Sounds like you're built of the same stuff, but you fear the state more than you fear the kinds of folks who currently hold the crayons and are writing the garbage on both sides of the spectrum. (Left? See recent The Line piece from Jen on how the trans folks are jumping the shark; Right? See the response of any red state US governor; Lunatic? The Donald.) I'm actually at the point where I think the tide has turned, and I'm willing to take my chances with the known incompetence of the federal government versus the consequences of letting the trucker convoys and First Nations hijackers run the table on what is and must be reported on any given day (and I'll join you in wondering whether I've now breached the correctness line).
Definitely appreciate your perspective - mine is, essentially, that government at least has some control points (elections, auditors), and has proven over time it can almost never pull off a decent information conspiracy - whereas the private sector of right, left, and sideways horror stories don't have any equivalent control points whatsoever. The new law creates some - and while, pace Hobbes, it naturally will be an extension of the Leviathan - it feels in 2023 like the right thing at the right time.
So, you are inferring that the contents of draft legislation you have never seen will be similar to that passed in a number of countries that don't have a Charter? This is fact based opinion weiting? Pardon me if I wait for confirmation before clutching at my pearls.