We’ve had this debate before. The free speech advocates won. But a long time has passed since Canada recognized that it’s not up to the government to police legal things people write and say online, offensive or otherwise.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and so here we find ourselves again having to sound the alarm so that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s problematic Online Harms Act doesn’t become the thing to harm us.
Around the same time, a complaint at the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal against Ezra Levant accused him of the same for re-publishing the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad originally published in Denmark that had spurred worldwide protests.
While some people took the question of the case to be whether or not these articles and cartoons were in good taste or offensive or not, the actual question was whether someone should face serious financial penalties and other repercussions for publishing such content.
For the most part, the complainants lost and the tribunals acknowledged it wasn’t their place to censure people for strong opinions even if they upset people. Because of this national conversation, the controversial Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was ultimately repealed in Parliament.
This section outlawed online content that was “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” It was a phrase considered by legal experts to be so broadly worded that it could ensnare anyone voicing an opinion on a controversial matter.
This is the problem with legislating against “online harms.” It’s near impossible to put together a definition that won’t be too open to interpretation and therefore open to abuse and result in an assault on freedom of speech. That’s the main concern with Trudeau’s Online Harms Act.
The act starts off pledging to target the true scourge of child pornography, introducing new rules to govern the removal of such content from social media platforms. There are few critics of that provision, although given that such vile content is already illegal, perhaps what we need most is greater enforcement of the laws already on the books and more law enforcement officers assigned to tackle it.
What has people rightly concerned with the bill though are things like the Digital Safety Commission and its Digital Safety Ombudsman, who will be tasked with enforcing this new Act and its yet-to-be-unveiled definition of what constitutes “online harm.”
We don’t need this commission or the ombudsman. They could very well be misused from day one. The act has yet to be passed and so any such changes—including a total shelving of the Act—remain possible.
The human rights tribunals were labelled “kangaroo courts” years ago, and the Digital Safety Commission is already giving off the same vibes. If a problem is that serious, it should be dealt with in the real courts, not some quasi-judicial forum. That way real offenders can be appropriately punished and also nuisance complaints can be effectively defended against.
Make no mistake about it, we have a lot of problems with the online world. As the parent of children who will be entering their teenage years in the near future, I’m deeply troubled by the ills of social media and the abuse and exploitation that happens within it.
But this doesn’t mean we should give Justin Trudeau personal discretion to define what is and isn’t an “online harm” and how it should be dealt with.
Parents need to speak with their kids about these matters. We need to become more aware and more savvy to protect ourselves. People need to both learn to be more respectful of others online but also to not be so easily offended when others don’t offer them the same respect. And, when it comes to the evils online that are already illegal, the law needs to be given the tools to do its thing.
It was over 15 years ago that we last had this debate. Freedom of speech prevailed but a lot has changed since then, and a whole new generation is now part of the conversation. Let’s make sure freedom of speech prevails again.
