You have to understand: the Online Harms Act was supposed to be the “good” bill, the one part of the Trudeau government’s three-pronged effort to regulate the internet that was addressed to a real problem.
But online harms – such things at least exist! The internet pullulates with every conceivable product of the human mind, for good or ill – and the ills are awful indeed, from child pornography to hate propaganda to snuff films to bullying and harassment campaigns and beyond. Most of this stuff is already illegal, and most of it will nevertheless probably elude national regulators. There is just too much of it, too easily secreted, from too remote origins.
So there was some readiness to give the Trudeau government the benefit of the doubt in this regard, even after the travesties of C-11 and C-18, and even after it bollixed its first attempt: The ill-fated Bill C-36, plus a draft regulatory proposal that would have, inter alia, required platforms to take down content on 24 hours’ notice – not just unambiguously harmful material such as child pornography, but a much wider range of objectionable content, where free speech concerns are more clearly...
Most obviously out of bounds are a suite of amendments to the Criminal Code. Any attempt to criminalize speech ought to be viewed with extreme suspicion, and kept to the narrowest possible grounds. The onus should always be on the state to prove the necessity of any exception to the general rule of free speech – to prove not merely that the speech is objectionable or offensive, but demonstrably harmful.
The most remarkable part of this is the timing.
The overkill does not stop there. The bill also proposes to punish people for speech crimes they have not yet committed, but that someone fears they might. Any person, that is, who “fears on reasonable grounds” that someone else will commit an offence under the hate laws can apply to a court to shut them up – or in the words of the legislation, to order “the defendant to enter into a recognizance to keep the peace.