Canadian, Irish, French Government-Attempted Speech Regulations Appear Like Desperate Censorship Power Plays

Following in the footsteps of UKs highly controversial Online Safety Act, now law, Canadian and Irish government officials are proposing legislation that would push the boundaries to further stifle online debate.

During the COVID response, the American government chose to erect a massive, top-down censorship industrial complex pulling in key White House officials, CDC heads, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In the UK, it was all-out military psychological operations using the British Army unit’s 77th Brigade and Specialist Group Military Intelligence. Both countries turned their security apparatuses, once used against foreign enemy combatants, to target its own public domestically in an aggressive move to shape public thought and neutralize independent voices.

Now, humanity is at an inflection point. A non-stop blitzkrieg of contentious issues are affecting the lives of many. The failed COVID response taught us that open conversation and investigation is critical to unwind industry talking points, government propaganda, and scientific falsehoods. 

Perhaps more important, the new public square, that is the digital age of social media, serves as a steam valve to debate valid concerns surrounding charged issues like climate change and the net zero push, open migration, vaccine safety, reckless government monetary policy, election meddling, the surgical and pharmaceutical fast track of gender-affirming care for minors, intelligence agency run ‘disclosure,’ and so much more.

Meanwhile, power centers are desperate to take all the above issues and funnel vocal detractors from the dominant narrative into one category – hate. 

Over the years, governments have gleefully began attaching the ‘hate’ label onto any person, topic, or explanation that runs counter to the single, myopic version of events, ideas, information, or even historical events they deem fact – despite valid evidence proving otherwise. 

Socially, the ‘it’s all hateful except for our viewpoint’ worked for corporations, governments, and legacy media operations when they enjoyed narrative control.

Those days are fleeting now and major cracks have formed upon once-settled topics. Now we see the grip tightening from the legislative angle to create more bureaucracy and new powers to punish.      

Canada’s Bill C-63 enacts what’s called the Online Harms Act, amends the Criminal Code, and the Canadian Human Rights Act among other things. It also attempts to define and legislate a human emotion stating:  

“hatred means the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”

Meanwhile, C-63 states that an “Offense motivated by hatred…under this Act or any other Act of Parliament”…carries with a penalty of “imprisonment for life.”

Other goodies written into the bill are the creation of an extrajudicial government tribunal to rule on complaints of threats, intimidation or discrimination from people who can remain anonymous. That’s right, no need to face your accuser says Canada.  

If one is accused by the government’s newly-created, extrajudicial group to be “engaging or to have engaged in the discriminatory practice,” they can be ordered, as the bill states, “to pay compensation of not more than $20,000 to any victim identified” and “to pay a penalty of not more than $50,000 to the Receiver General.”

No room for abuse here. What could go wrong?   

One would think this would be a one-off piece of speech-chilling legislation from a country that has lost its way under poor leadership. Yet Ireland is also attempting a similar move with mirrored legislative language. 

Ireland’s Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill is currently before the upper house of the Irish legislature. The Critic writes the law, if enacted, “…would usher in a dangerous new standard for state-driven censorship. The expression or possession of content or even ideas deemed “hateful” would be illegal under the law, with serious implications for everyday people…”

An opinion piece published in The Hill writes: 

“As per the tentative legislation, people with “protected characteristics” which includes, inter alia, race, color, and nationality are afforded new legal protections against psychical and mentally inflicted harms, in which offenders are motivated by “hatred.””

It continues by stating:

“As such, Ireland’s police force, An Garda Síochána, will have the authority under the bill to raid the home of the possessor of such material, demand their password and seize their devices. Failure to comply could result in a year-long prison sentence.”

The reason for the sudden Orwellian about face given by Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar was that Ireland needed to “...modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.”

Despite the weak cover stories governments are using to capture speech and attempt to regain narrative control, a clear pattern is being seen – open debate is dangerous to the dwindling control of power centers. 

The fun doesn’t stop there.

Article 18 of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty also stipulates that all countries signed onto the power-centralizing agreement are mandated to “…combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” and “inform policies on factors that hinder adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions.” 

Finally, a bill in the works in France appears to be a special gift for pharmaceutical company. Article 4 of the bill specifically states: 

Provocation, by means of repeated pressure or maneuvers, of any person suffering from a pathology to abandon or abstain from following medical treatment is punishable by one year of imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. therapeutic or prophylactic, when this abandonment or abstention is presented as beneficial for the health of the person concerned whereas it is, in the state of medical knowledge, clearly likely to cause for them, taking into account the pathology of which they is affected, particularly serious consequences for their physical or psychological health. 

As written, it appears that any criticism of vaccine products, SSRIs, statins, opioids, drugs and procedures used to transition children, or just about any other product or medical practice that has debatable concerns and unsettled science surrounding it – if currently accepted in ‘medical knowledge’ – is a protected class not to be spoken ill about.  

“When the provocation provided for in the first two paragraphs has been followed by effects, the penalties are increased to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.” states the proposed French law.    

The coincidental timing over the past few years of several pieces of legislation whose effect will be to essentially chill freedom of speech in the end equation must be taken seriously. The good news is that individuals at all levels of society are sounding the alarm to critically analyze and reject all attempts at overarching control over basic human rights – no matter how well packaged and intentioned they may initially seem.