Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a plan to regulate speech on the internet by placing it under the control of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. His bill is so awful that Peter Menzies, a former vice chairman of the commission, said it “doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy.”
Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals claim they merely want to level the playing field between traditional broadcasters and online players such as Netflix and Spotify. Yet on its face the bill goes much further.
To begin with, anyone who makes programs available over the internet would be treated as a broadcaster and under the thumb of the CRTC. While websites wouldn’t need a formal license to operate in Canada, the commission would have open-ended power to impose conditions and require them to “make expenditures to support the Canadian broadcasting system.” Who has to do this and how much do they have to spend? They’ll tell us later.
The legislation also vaguely alludes to the need for the Canadian broadcasting system to “serve the interests of Canadians of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds.” Again, who’d have to do this and what they’d have to do is anyone’s guess.
Steven Guilbeault, whose Ministry of Canadian Heritage oversees the CRTC, has struggled to shed any light on how the measure would work. For a time the bill included specific exemptions for user-generated content. But then this provision was scrapped—a move that was considered essential to capture sites like YouTube, but also because the government claimed the exemption was already addressed elsewhere. It wasn’t.
Then it was only “professional” content that would be regulated; users themselves would be exempt. Except users with a large following who were acting like broadcasters. Or, as Mr. Guilbeault later clarified, not “an individual—a person— who uses social media.” If you have trouble following that, you’re not alone. Before entering politics in 2019, Mr. Guilbeault spent his entire career as an environmental activist. Like many members of the Trudeau cabinet, he has no prior experience in the area of government he oversees. What he lacks in expertise, however, he makes up for in enthusiasm. Having concluded that Trudeau’s government has a sweeping plan to control the internet.
Canada’s hate speech laws aren’t doing a good enough job to police “hurtful” comments online, for instance, he is working on another bill setting up yet another regulator to tackle online harms.
Granting bureaucrats the power, for example, to require YouTube to silence Jordan Peterson, fine Spotify for something Joe Rogan says on a podcast, or impose on independent podcasters such as Sam Harris an obligation to contribute to the production of Canadian content is as dangerous as it is absurd. More likely, harassed independent voices would simply geoblock their content to avoid the headache of dealing with Canada at all—a way for the government to set up a Chinese- style firewall without having to go to the trouble itself.
Mr. Cooper is a Toronto based media lawyer.
