Those who avoid dinosaur media and, instead, get their information from alternatives, likely are aware of the shocking revelation that the Canadian government just interrogated Rebel News publisher and reporter Ezra Levant for having the temerity to write an actual BOOK about leftist pinup Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during an election cycle.
They also are likely aware that Canada has no constitutional prohibition against its politicians attacking the freedom of speech, the press, and other forms of expression, offering fines, jail, and other punishments to people as incentives to shut their damn mouths.
Now, it seems clear that the Trudeau Administration is intent on becoming known as the most intensely censorious gang of Canadian politicians and bureaucrats in over half a century. As Chris Tomlinson reports for Breitbart, Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s “Canadian Heritage Minister” (because we all know it’s key to tax people so bureaucrats can control the narrative about their “heritage”) is “recommending” that anyone wanting to run a website out of Maple Leaf Nation be required to obtain a “license” from the people in the government:
The minister, who has been tasked with updating Canada’s broadcasting laws using the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), stated that internet news sites will be “asked” to obtain a government-approved licence (sic)…
How strange: a call for censorship from the “Heritage Minister” for a Canadian Prime Minister slammed with financial scandal inside his Administration and personal scandal for projecting a “social justice warrior” persona in office despite his own donning of “brownface” in private.
All while the government persecutes a writer for mentioning some of these things in a book.
But have no fear!! The potential Speech Police -- who’ve already told Canadian university professors like Jordan Peterson and private business employees who are “regulated” by the government that they MUST use pronouns that others prefer they use – is magnanimous in the use of tyrannical power. They’ll be kind to “small” publishers.
'If you’re a distributor of content in Canada and obviously if you’re a very small media organisation the requirement probably wouldn’t be the same if you’re Facebook, or Google. There would have to be some proportionality embedded into this,' he (Guilbeault) said during a CTV interview.
How nice.
The astounding thing about this is that many Canadians – mostly leftists – actually believe this threatening approach to interpersonal existence is laudable.
Did it ever occur to any of these harridan-behaving folks that people have an inherent right to express themselves? Did it ever trouble them that their authoritarian ideas are along the lines of tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro?
How about the idea that engaging in speech does not take away the ability of others to do the same, the fact that it is universalizable, as philosopher Emmanuel Kant once proved? Have they never read his words?
[F]reedom of the pen…is the sole palladium of the people’s rights. For to want to deny them this freedom is not only tantamount to taking from them any claim to a right with respect to the supreme commander (according to Hobbes), but is also to withhold from the latter… all knowledge of matters that he himself would change if he knew about them and to put him in contradiction with himself.
And what Kant meant by the latter was that, even if a politician were to claim “sovereign power” over the so-called “body politic” because that politicians supposedly represents the “will of the people”, such a “will” cannot be fathomed UNLESS PEOPLE CAN EXPRESS THEMSELVES.
From an American perspective, many US politicians and citizens feel the same as these censorious Canadians and Brits. Liz Warren just told people that spreading what SHE calls “false information” online should be criminalized. In fact, many like her not only promote the idea that the federal government should engage in this kind of speech control as a matter of new legislation, but also engage in something more nefarious because it often is accepted as a “valid role” of the US government.
In the US, many political machinations against free speech rarely go questioned because they are done under the false popular notion that “we” citizens have the “First Amendment” that allows free speech.
But this is belied by the fact that the bureaucrats and political class engage in an ongoing attack on speech through the euphemistically titled “regulatory” power of the Federal Communications Commission.
Nothing in the US Constitution, and nothing in human ethics, allows for the existence of this political control machine to crush speech. And if anyone tells you it’s there merely to “facilitate” a “level playing field” on the broadcast and internet platforms, they are utterly wrong. Since its inception in the 1920s as the “Federal Radio Commission”, and its later change to the FCC, the body has systematically been used to shut down radio stations, hobble television (we could have had television in the US five years before the FCC allowed it, because radio owners who saw it as competition lobbied the FRC to not issue “licenses”) and bury newspapers who might dare question the political authorities.
In 2004, I ran into then-Congressman, now US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) on a plane, and he offered the same old argument that the radio spectrum is limited, and, therefore, the feds should control it. But this neither addresses the political feedback loop of favoritism that occurs, nor the constitutional prohibition against Congress making any law abridging the freedom of speech. Additionally, I told him that if he wanted to use that logic, one could argue that there were only a given number of useable trees on the planet to make paper, so would he propose government control of books, as well?
When seeing these insane stories from Canada and the UK, we in America ought to check out confidence and stop telling ourselves, “It couldn’t happen here.”
It already does.