Opinion
editorial

Canada and Trudeau go full Orwell behind anti-speech bill: Fear the Maple Curtain

By
Post Editorial Board
Published May 18, 2024, 12:12 p.m. ET

When it comes to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s Orwellian Online Harms Act, tech titan Elon Musk gets it: “This sounds insane.” 

Insane is putting it mildly; look at some of the law’s provisions.

  • Rewarding people who snitch on their “hateful” neighbors up to $20,000 and making the thought criminals pay up to $50,000. 
  • Allowing the possibility of a literal life sentence for online hate crimes, including speech.
  • Letting judges, based on snitch testimony, jail people for up to a year because someone thinks they might commit a hate crime.

The law would also empower the cops to comb through your old posts — including those made before the law even passed — and punish you. 

And if social-media companies or other platforms don’t take down your hate speech, they can be fined astronomical sums, up to 6% of gross global revenue.

In other words, the law is the end of online speech, period, and a giant step toward ending any public free speech anywhere in Canada. 

Like so many other authoritarian policies, this one was brought into the daylight in the name of “safety.”

Justice Minister Arif Virani, ludicrously, has compared it to product regulations for toys. 

No: Playing with your GI Joe wrong never landed anyone in prison. 

But the “safetyism” doesn’t stop there. 

In a bid to hide the ugly ideas at the heart of the bill with appeals to emotion, the Trudeau government is cruelly exploiting the deaths of actual teens as cover — the tragic suicides of kids caught up in sextortion schemes and victimized by bullies. 

It’s unclear why all Canadians should be muzzled in order to punish a few psychopaths, of course. 

But that was never the real purpose of the law, only the window dressing. 

The real meaning can be found in Trudeau’s wholesale crackdown on any and all ideological opposition. 

He froze the assets of Canadian citizens for supporting the trucker protests against his crazy and harmful COVID response.

The proposed new law is simply the next logical step in nakedly, directly outlawing criticism of him and his policies. 

The Online Harms Act is one of those Euro-style civil liberties horror-shows that should make Americans wrap their arms as tightly as they can around their own Constitution. 

If it passes, a Maple Curtain will descend and stretch across our northern border, from Lubec, Maine, to Cape Flattery.