A Prime Minister who turns every possible moment into a chance to divide Canadians and gain a partisan advantage, while turning a blind eye to real problems in our country, does not have the goodwill necessary to greatly expand government power the way Bill C-63 does.
One of the more disturbing things we’ve learned in recent years is that the government has as much power as the government believes it does.
Sure, there are rules on the books, and there are limits, but those limits can often only be imposed after the fact.
In the short-term, governments have much more latitude than it may seem.
After all, who would have thought the government could shut down the bank accounts of Canadians?
Who would have thought the government could use vaccine mandates as a political wedge issue to try and win an election?
And who would have thought the government could give a carbon tax exemption to areas of the country that were more likely to vote for them while refusing to give an exemption elsewhere?
All of those actions were almost unthinkable, until they happened.
And that brings us to Bill C-63.
Some parts of the legislation are important. For example, measures seekign to address the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and measures to protect children are certainly a step in the right direction.
But of course, the good is purposely mixed in with the bad to make voting against the legislation politically perilous.
That political peril doesn’t change the fact that aspects of the legislation are quite dangerous.
As noted by Michael Geist, the legislation combines some very unrelated areas into one bill:
“Bill C-63 is effectively four bills in one: (1) the Online Harms Act, which forms the bulk of the bill and is focused on the duties of Internet platforms as they respond to seven identified harms, (2) the expansion of mandatory ‘cp’ reporting requirements to include those platforms, (3) the Criminal Code provisions, which opens the door to life in prison for committing offences that are motivated by hatred of certain groups, and (4) the changes to the Canadian Human Rights Act, which restores Section 13 involving communicating hate speech through the Internet as a discriminatory practice. The difference between the first two and the latter two is obvious: the first two are focused on the obligations of Internet platforms in addressing online harms, while the latter two have nothing directly to do with Internet platforms at all.”
The first two parts are quite reasonable.
The second two are concerning, and really should have been left out, or put in another piece of legislation and addressed seperately.
So, why would the Liberals combine them?
For the same reason they promoted a carbon tax in an updated trade deal with Ukraine, because it gave them a line of attack and created a new wedge issue where one didn’t exist.
When the Conservatives oppose the latter two parts of Bill C-63, the Liberals will attack them and claim they are opposing the two former parts.
There is also a deeper issue here, which gets at the point made at the outset.
The government claim all they want that the new authority and power they grant themselves in Bill C-63 will be used fairly and responsibly, but who would believe them at this point?
Justin Trudeau has done absolutely nothing to generate the kind of trust and goodwill that would cause Canadians to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
Instead, he has done just the opposite.
Trudeau has repeatedly demonstrated that he is desperate to hold on to power, that he enjoys exercising the power of the state against his political opponents, that he is hostile to freedom of expression, that he is far too sympathetic to Communist regimes, and that he has no conception of the broader national interest seperate from his own political interests.
Therefore, he and his enablers simply cannot be trusted to implement Bill C-63 in any kind of fair and reasonable manner.
Spencer Fernando
