Columnist Responds to Feds’ Attempt to Have His Article Removed From Social Media

Refugees and some of their Canadian supporters mingle outside Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Quebec, on Aug. 5, 2017. (Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)

A Postmedia columnist is criticizing the federal government after learning a bureaucrat asked social media companies to remove links to a newspaper article containing leaked details about Canada’s immigration strategy.

On March 29, The Epoch Times reported that an Inquiry of Ministry document, tabled by the Liberal government, mentions instances where federal departments sought to have online content removed. In one of those instances, the director of communications at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) made a request to Facebook and Twitter that an article by Lorne Gunter be “removed/unpublished” from social media.

On Sept. 27, 2021, according to the inquiry, Immigration took issue with a “post linking to an article on the Toronto Sun website containing serious errors of fact risking undermining public confidence in the independence of the Board as well as the integrity of the refugee determination system.”

Gunter provided further details in an April 11 column in the Toronto Sun. He said the 2021 article detailed a confidential draft document circulated inside IRB, which he alleged “laid out a massive expansion of the reasons under which refugee claimants could be admitted to Canada.”

Online Streaming Act

He said that the attempted censorship shows the dangers of passing Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act.

The new legislation, which is pending review of amendments in the Senate, would allow the government to amend the Broadcasting Act, giving the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) authority over streaming platforms.

The government has promoted the bill as a way to make Canadian content more prominent and to prioritize Canadians’ needs and interests, stating that the last major reform of the Broadcasting Act was in 1991, before the rise of online streaming services.

Federal Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez stated in the fall of 2022 that the legislation will not cover user-generated content. “The bill is quite simple. It is about platforms, it is not about users,” he said.

Rodriguez suggested that the bill is to protect Canadian culture and meet the needs of minority-language viewers. He said the proposed law simply asks streaming platforms to contribute to Canadian culture, by promoting Canadian TV, movies, videos, or music, and helping fund Canadian content.

If companies don’t comply, they could face steep penalties from the CRTC, which will be in charge of enforcing the new provisions.

2021 Article

Gunter’s 2021 article alleged that the Trudeau government was “planning to remove nearly all grounds the Immigration department uses to exclude applicants” in order to increase Canada’s intake of immigrants and refugees.

Gunter said the document told immigration and refugee adjudicators, screening officers, and immigration judges “to accept any applicant who has an ‘intersectional’ claim.”

Gunter alleged the policy would “compel the board to accept any applicant claiming trauma in their lives or anyone possessing two or more problems such as poverty, old age, gender or racial discrimination, Indigenous status, transgender identification or even just the perception of being LGBTQ.”

Gunter said, “This also further points out why the Trudeau government’s impending Bill C-11 is so very, very dangerous to free speech and government accountability in this country. Bill C-11 takes decisions about what is and isn’t ’misinformation' out of the hands of the Big Tech platforms and gives them directly to appointees of the Liberal government.”

The Epoch Times has not viewed the documents containing the draft immigration policy.

The Inquiry of Ministry notes that the social media posts only linked to the Toronto Sun website, and as they were not “original” content, they were not removed as requested.

The Immigration and Refugee Board was contacted for comment but did not reply by press time.

Peter Wilson contributed to this report.