Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, right, looks on as Ahmed Hussen, minister of housing and diversity and inclusion, is sworn-in at a cabinet swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Canada, October 26, 2021. (Photo by ADRIAN WYLD/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Commentary
Canada’s Liberal government has been focused for some time now on finding ways to regulate the internet. The Department of Canadian Heritage, in particular, has targeted online content and what it believes should be classified as hate speech.
Based on the recent controversy surrounding the hiring of an anti-racist consultant who turned out to be anything but, maybe Ottawa should clean its own house first.
Then-heritage minister Steven Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts,” on Nov. 3, 2020. It was an attempt to regulate online speech through the auspices of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Opposition parties on the right and left simultaneously pushed back against these draconian measures to limit free expression. Many Canadians sided with them, too.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who leads a minority government, was forced to make small adjustments to ensure the NDP and Greens would back Bill C-10. This effort succeeded on June 22, 2021, and the bill moved to the Senate for further discussion and debate.
The next day, mere hours before Parliament adjourned for the summer, Trudeau introduced Bill C-36 completely out of the blue (or Liberal red, as the case may be). This bill would have amended the Criminal Code and Canadian Human Rights Act to supposedly protect Canadians from “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech.”
Senators, like many Canadians, weren’t impressed with this attack on free speech and would have likely rejected Bill C-10 and Bill C-36. As it happens, both bills died on the upper chamber’s order paper when the 43rd Canadian Parliament was dissolved on Aug. 15, 2021, and a new election was called.
The Liberals dogmatically returned to this issue after being re-elected. In place of Bill C-10, Guilbeault introduced the equally draconian Bill C-11, or Online Streaming Act, on Feb. 2, 2022. This proposed bill would “amend the Broadcasting Act and … make related and consequential amendments to other Acts.” It would add “online undertakings—undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet—as a distinct class of broadcasting undertakings.” The bill would also “replace the Commission’s power to impose conditions on a licence with a power to make orders imposing conditions on the carrying on of broadcasting undertakings” to “serve the needs and interests of all Canadians.”
Bill C-11 passed by a vote of 208–117 in the House of Commons on June 21, with only the Conservatives opposing it, and was sent to the Senate. Its fate, along with Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen’s offhand comment in February that the failed Bill C-36 would be reintroduced “as soon as possible,” means online speech and so-called hate speech will be topics of conversation for the foreseeable future.
Anyone who believes in free speech, and the importance of intellectual discourse and healthy debate in a free society, would naturally be opposed to the Liberals’ infatuation with online regulation. Nevertheless, Canadians who may mildly support these measures should be extremely concerned that this government is the one overseeing it.
This was made abundantly clear quite recently.
Ottawa gave a grant of $133,800 in 2021 to a supposedly anti-racist group, Community Media Advocacy Centre, to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting. One of the group’s senior consultants, Laith Marouf, turned out to be a racist and rabid anti-Semite who’s been espousing disgusting comments about Jews, blacks, and white people in general on social media for years. Here’s one of his offensive tweets: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of [their] Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.”
Other details about Marouf have popped up. He was banned by Concordia University in 2001 for attacking security and spraying anti-Israel graffiti on the campus walls during then-Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. He described the late Gen. Colin Powell, a former U.S. secretary of state, as a “Jamaican house-slave of the Empire.” He posted photos of himself giving the middle finger at the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial and President Abraham Lincoln’s statue.
With all these red flags of anti-hate waving around Marouf’s presence, how did this hiring come to pass? It’s one of two things. There’s either no vetting process within the Liberal government, or ministers, staffers, and bureaucrats ignored or sloughed off anything that looked problematic. Both scenarios are embarrassing and irresponsible.
Before the Liberals unnecessarily police the internet for online hate speech, maybe they should police themselves to ensure they actually know what this concept entails.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.