When governments turn offence into law, liberty collapses into sentiment. Canada risks importing Britain’s mistakes, just as J.D. Vance warned Europe in Munich.
On February 14th of this year (coincidentally, the anniversary of Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act against protestors), in the grand hall of the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance startled Europe’s elites by saying what few of them expected to hear. The greatest threat to their democracy, he argued, was not Moscow. It was their own governments that turned on their citizens in the name of fighting “misinformation” and “hate.” Vance catalogued the evidence with blunt precision: British citizens arrested for jokes on Twitter, preachers detained for quoting scripture, elections tampered with under the smiling banner of progress. The room bristled with discomfort, yet the truth could not be mistaken. Western democracies are abandoning the free expression that once sustained them, and they are doing so under the new morality of emotion.
Canada finds itself in that same trajectory with Bill C-9, Ottawa’s latest legislative foray into the culture war. It is being sold as the Combatting Hate Act, a law meant to protect vulnerable minorities and to defend sacred spaces from intimidation.
Peel back the packaging and its essence appears at once: the codification of subjective feelings into the Criminal Code. What the United Kingdom has lived through for the last decade, police investigating citizens for limericks and memes, Canada now risks importing as law.
The mechanics of the bill are deceptively technical. Until now, prosecutions for so-called hate propaganda required the Attorney General’s approval. That safeguard was in place to ensure that prosecutions were filtered through political accountability rather than triggered by an activist’s complaint. Bill C-9 abolishes that filter, placing the discretion squarely with police officers who will be pressed to act on every allegation. Remember how the cops acted during COVID.
Read the rest of the column in our Substack here.