Peter Menzies: Government Has No Business Making Itself the Editorial Board of the Internet

Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

Commentary

Many years ago, while toiling away on the Calgary Herald’s night news desk, I was fussing around trying to find room in the next day’s final edition for a story I thought deserved space on its pages.

My superior encouraged me to relax.

“Don’t worry, Peter,” he said with a jaded drawl. “No one knows what doesn’t get in the paper.”

And he was right. Back then the World Wide Web was just a nascent distraction and no one had a clue. We kept the gates. Of the hundreds of stories and images provided to us daily, we decided which were important enough to pass along to our readers.

Later, I became an editorial page editor, overseeing a department dedicated to curating opinion. There was a “Letters to the Editor” editor who decided who got a voice and who didn’t. Regularly, we met with representatives of political, corporate, and community interests in editorial board meetings which we used to deepen our knowledge. Our guests used them to try to influence how we saw the world.

They ran the spectrum and included, for example, David Suzuki, the Fraser Institute, Paul Martin, Gilles Duceppe, Ralph Klein, Joe Clark, Police Chief Christine Silverberg, the Friends of Medicare, and Lanny McDonald. Typically, they were far more deferential than we deserved but it made us feel important. From time to time, select community leaders would invite me for quiet off-the-record lunches during which they would gently suggest and “advise.”

Being a gatekeeper was inside work, fun, paid decent money, and no heavy lifting was involved. We answered only to the community.

Then everything changed. First through Facebook, then Twitter, anyone could tell the world exactly what they thought about this or that without our endorsement. Gatekeepers were no longer needed. Thanks to the internet, people knew what didn’t get in the paper and it was a wonderful thing.

Everyone cheered the arrival of social media as it gave power to the people and fuelled events such as the Egyptian uprising and the Arab Spring.

A free and open internet was so dreamy and democratizing a decade ago that one of then-U.S. secretary of state Hilary Clinton’s senior advisers, Alec Ross, described the internet as the “Che Guevera of the 21st Century”—notwithstanding that he didn’t mention the communist revolutionary was himself the chief executioner of the Castro regime.

“Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part – but not entirely – because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual,” he said.

“One thesis statement I want to emphasize is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state – from governments and large institutions – to individuals and small institutions. The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions.”

Of course, this was all great stuff when someone else’s grip on power was being disrupted. But the next thing you knew, Canada’s government-endorsed creative/media classes were feeling threatened by free-as-a-bird online creators/innovators, Britons were voting to leave the insufferable bureaucracy of the European Union, and Donald Trump became president of the United States by gathering the votes of the frowned-upon.

Unable to imagine that they could be at fault in any way for their own demise, those disempowered by these events laid all the blame on “Che Guevara” and began to form firing squads.

Ever elegant as a spokesperson for the ruling class, CBC president Catherine Tait blamed the public’s declining faith in her and other public institutions not on their own insufferable upper-class hubris but on—you guessed it—social media. The same platforms that liberated Egypt and Libya are responsible for letting baskets of uncouth Canadian yobs run amok.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while a masterful purveyor of both, complains endlessly—just as I expect the boys in Tunis and Cairo did—about online misinformation and disinformation.

He’s also made the nation he controls a leader in returning power to the entitled cultural and political establishment.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) now has authority over the internet through the Online Streaming Act. Flush since the spring with the power to censor speech, dictate viewing preferences, and funnel money to those it prefers, the CRTC is moving apace to return control of film and television production to vested interests whose status is threatened by thousands of disparaged internet creators viewer as mere “cat video people.”

The Online News Act allows government appointees to decide which news organizations are “qualified” to belly up to the bar from which the CRTC intends to serve shots of Big Tech cash while keeping a watchful eye on the nation’s publishers and approving their “standards.”

Not surprisingly, it is the journalism establishment that begged for the bill that has the most to gain. Those who threaten the status quo with fresh ideas and independence are the biggest losers. Meta’s shutdown of news hurts them the most.

Coming soon will be the Online Harms Act which is expected to install an internet speech czar with the chillingly Orwellian title of Digital Safety Commissioner.

The gates are coming back. So are their keepers. This time, though, they’ll all be controlled by the government.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.