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TOP STORY
Last week, the NDP’s Leah Gazan tabled a private member’s bill that effectively proposed to jail Canadians for having politically inadvisable opinions.
Bill C-413 prescribes jail terms of up to two years for “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada.”
Notably, Gazan’s bill has been tabled amidst ongoing dispute over one of the most well-publicized details of the Indian Residential School system. In the summer of 2021, Canada was galvanized by news that a ground penetrating radar survey near the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School found “anomalies” consistent with unmarked children’s graves.
Three years later, no graves have been excavated, and the First Nation who first made the announcement has stopped referring to the 215 as “children.” In a U.S. podcast appearance earlier this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was even accused of boosting the “false accusations” of the Kamloops graves.
Gazan’s bill contains several carve-outs. A public statement is deemed to be exempt if it “is relevant to any subject of public interest” or if the accused establishes that their statements are “true.” Nevertheless, it comes after months of judicial bodies, non-profits and government agencies ascribing any questioning of the 215 graves to “residential school denialism.”
But a bill criminalizing controversial speech is not all that unusual for a Canadian Parliament that has actually gotten rather comfortable with devising new limits on what Canadians can say.
Below, a guide to all the speech-limiting bills proposed or passed by the 44th Parliament since it convened in 2021.
The notorious bill to prescribe life sentences for speech crimes
Bill C-63 (the Online Harms Act) is easily the most famous piece of Canadian legislation of the last few years. Although pitched as a way to keep children safe online, some of its provisions were so beyond the pale that it quickly raised eyebrows around the world.
The U.K.’s The Spectator called it an “Orwellian” bill that would jail Canadians for “pre-crime.” The New York Post warned of a “Maple Curtain” of speech repression descending across their northern border.
Bill C-63 is still working its way through the House of Commons. Nevertheless, Justice Minister Arif Virani tabled the bill with a provision to jail Canadians for life if they were caught “promoting genocide.” Bill C-63 would also empower police to mete out preventative detention to any Canadian deemed “likely” to commit an online hate offence in future.
Content controls on Netflix, YouTube, Disney+ and other streaming platforms
The Online Streaming Act has been law since April 2023, although the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is still deciding how far they’re going to go in enforcing it. Last year, the agency began the mandatory registration of every “online undertakings that broadcasts audio or audio-visual content.” Although companies are exempt if they had Canadian revenues of less than $10 million, the order covers basically all of social media, podcast media and any website offering streaming video.
What the CRTC will be able to do with the law is impose content quotas on these services. For any videos or podcasts that do not meet the very specific Government of Canada definition of “Canadian content,” the CRTC could order streamers to rewrite their algorithms to artificially downgrade them in favour of content that does. This would also mean that any independent content creators based in Canada (such as YouTubers) would need to undergo Canadian content certification lest they be punished under the new CRTC-mandated content quotas.
The NDP plan to jail Canadians for speaking well of fossil fuels
In February, another private member’s bill from the NDP also proposed jail terms for saying politically unpalatable things, even if they’re true.
Bill C-372, the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act, was pitched by MP Charlie Angus as a way to criminalize “false advertising” by the oil and gas sector. But the language of the bill is so broad that it could technically apply even to a private citizen who publicly argues the economic benefits of natural gas.
The bill would make it a crime to argue that some fossil fuels are “less harmful than other fossil fuels.” And although Angus said his bill applied only to “Big Oil,” Bill C-372 makes clear that its provisions apply to anybody who makes “representation about a product or service by any means.”
A bill criminalizing anything except immediate “affirmation” for transgender children
Bill C-4 was one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the 44th Parliament, and it passed so quickly because it received unanimous support from the House of Commons — including by every single member of the Conservative caucus. Like every other bill on this list, it purported to address an uncontroversial issue: Bill C-4 banned “conversion therapy.” The term is usually associated with pseudoscientific efforts to reverse an individual’s homosexuality.
But Bill C-4 also criminalized any attempt to “change a person’s gender identity to cisgender” — and even made it a crime to promote or recommend such an attempt.
The bill has never been applied, and it clarifies that it does not apply to “a practice, treatment or service that relates to the exploration or development of an integrated personal identity.” Nevertheless, the text of C-4 is broad enough that if a patient approaches a physician or psychologist with feelings of gender dysphoria, it’s not entirely clear if the physician is breaking the law if they suggest that the feelings could have other causes.
The anti-pornography bill that could allow Ottawa to shut down whole swaths of the internet
This is the only Senate bill on this list, and unlike many of the others it has obtained broad support from Conservatives. Bill S-210 (which passed the Senate last year and is now before the House of Commons) pledges to impose mandatory age verification for pornography websites.
But it’s in how the bill proposes to do so that it gives massive powers to the government to shut down the internet. For starters, it covers every website that makes sexually explicit content available online — a definition which runs the gamut of everything from search engines to most of social media. If any of those are deemed to be violating the tenets of Bill S-210, the sanctions include massive fines and even the mandated blocking of their site in Canada.
It’s also very broad in how it mandates age verification, potentially sealing off whole sections of the internet behind mandatory face recognition programs. All of this is why University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist has called S-210 the “most dangerous Canadian internet bill you’ve never heard of.”
IN OTHER NEWS
The Canadian birth rate remains among the world’s lowest, according to new data from Statistics Canada. In 2023, just 351,477 babies were born. This works out to an all-time low of 1.26 children per woman. The number of births is also now roughly even with the number of Canadians who would have died that year (in 2022, the total number of deaths was 334,081). “Canada has now joined the group of ‘lowest-low’ fertility countries, including South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan, with 1.3 children per woman or less,” wrote Statistics Canada. As to why this is happening, the easy answer is that shelter is too expensive. Prior Statistics Canada surveys have shown that Canadians are very explicitly not having children because they report not being able to afford one.
You’re probably going to be seeing a lot more of Anaida Poilievre in the coming months. The wife of the Conservative leader is turning out to be much more visible than typical Canadian political spouses, who are usually able to avoid the spotlight almost entirely if they so choose. In a recent podcast appearance with personal trainer Tony Greco, Poilievre described her markedly poor upbringing as a Venezuelan immigrant in Montreal, and detailed her and husband’s huge interest in high-protein diets and personal growth books.
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