Pierre Poilievre Touts Internet Censorship As Common Sense As He Condemns Trudeau’s Internet Censorship Bill

Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilivre, is finding himself in a bit of political hypocrisy as he touts censorship while condemning the Liberal version.

This week, Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre found himself in a bit of political hypocrisy over internet censorship. Poilivre and members of the Conservative party have long touted as Bill S-210 as “common sense” and a “no brainer”. This despite the legislation being flatly unconstitutional on multiple levels.

Simply put, Bill S-210 is a censorship bill. As we noted in our analysis of the legislation, the bill scopes in all websites whether foreign or domestic. Anything deemed “explicit” (which is very frequently a vague definition used to crack down on LGBT+ content) found anywhere on a given website could see websites run afoul of the law. It doesn’t matter what the website is actually about, there is generally a presumption of guilt.

In a nutshell, a website could get a notice of supposedly what was wrongly posted online. Once the notice is given, then there is 20 days to comply. Is there specific instructions for removal? Who knows? What if the notice of complaint was clearly made up nonsense? Oh well. Does the website have grounds to dispute such a complaint? Heck no. A website owner could theoretically remove what they think is the offending material and whoever filed the notice can go ahead and submit a complaint to court.

Now, at this point, supporters of the legislation will come out of the woodwork and say, “Hey, Section 6(2) is a viable defence to that! You could argue that your content is for, say, educational purposes!”

Unfortunately, as David Fraser pointed out, that is not a defence that can be used in this situation. For offshore websites, this is thanks to Section 9(4) which clearly states “The Federal Court must order any respondent Internet service providers to prevent access to the sexually explicit material”. In other words, to borrow from Fraser’s explanation, “tough”, that’s not a defence. For domestic websites, owners will be facing $250,000 and $500,000 fines accordingly – enough to essentially bankrupt 99.9% of any operation out there. Essentially, your getting shut down once the paperwork is filing regardless of whatever defence you come up with.

In short, the legislation does two things. First, it shuts down domestic websites by threatening them with millions of fines and putting the financial burden on the website operator. Second, it blocks pretty much every foreign website out there at the ISP level, erecting the “Great Firewall of Canada”. This isn’t even getting into the cluster that is the privacy issues which is worthy of its own article on how horribly wrong that aspect it.

For Conservatives, though, they treated this bill as another notorious “save the children” bill, falsely proclaiming that this is simply about preventing minors from accessing pornographic material. Recently, Poilievre doubled down on his support and said that this mass internet censorship bill would become a promise if he was ever elected. From CityNews:

Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre says a future Conservative government would change the law to require that porn websites verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the content.

The Tories currently back a Senate bill that promises to do just that.

Bill S-210 passed the Senate in the spring and is set to be studied by a House committee, but no meetings have been scheduled yet.

So, ultimately, the Conservative leader is very pro internet censorship. Instilling internet censorship is a campaign promise.

Yet, ironically, when the Liberals said that they were going to come up with their own internet censorship bill, suddenly, the Conservative leader is striking a very different tone. As we noted yesterday, the nightmare fuel that is the Online Harms bill – a piece of legislation that has received near universal condemnation from experts and stakeholders alike for being a blatant attempt to crack down on free speech and increasing RCMP surveillance of minority communities among other things. Simply put, almost everyone doesn’t like this bill for very VERY good reasons. Yet, apparently, this bill is expected to be tabled next week.

The effort is likely another instalment to the long running series of the Canadian government ignoring the experts, faking an open and transparent process, and ramming the legislation through despite a massive outcry from the Canadian public. Hey, it already happened with Bill C-11 and Bill C-18. The problems of those bills are happening or are about to happen as the experts have warned (huge emphasis on the former these days). With the dumpster fire rising on those bills, the Liberals are doing anything and everything they can to ignore it so they can light the next major dumpster fire that is the Online Harms bill.

Simply put, as of the fake “consultation” that was held earlier, the legislation would target websites that have been accused of posting anything that is deemed “harmful”. What do you mean by “harmful” you might ask? Anything any anonymous troll can think of in the end. ISPs would be ordered to block foreign websites and domestic website owners would get prosecuted and forced to shut down. It’s essentially a massive internet censorship sledgehammer to stamp out anything that the government might disagree with among other things.

How does Poilievre respond? Well he condemned the legislation. From the CBC:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Wednesday his party is vehemently opposed to the government’s forthcoming online harms legislation, a bill designed to combat hate speech, terrorist content and some violent material on the internet.

Saying he won’t accept “Justin Trudeau’s woke authoritarian agenda,” Poilievre said the prime minister and his government shouldn’t be deciding what constitutes “hate speech” online and called the legislation an “attack on freedom of expression.”

“Justin Trudeau said anyone who criticized him during the pandemic was engaging in hate speech,” Poilievre said, citing Trudeau’s COVID-era comment that trucker convoy protesters were “a small fringe minority” who were “holding unacceptable views.”

“What does Justin Trudeau mean when he says the words ‘hate speech’? He means the speech he hates,” Poilievre said. “You can assume he will ban all of that.”

The Conservative leader went on to launch political attacks against Trudeau (which is pretty normal for him). At any rate, the Conservative leader has made it very clear: their brand of mass internet censorship is the just and holy approach while Trudeau’s brand of mass internet censorship is authoritarian and shameful. In other words, it’s the classic “it’s only OK when we do it” approach. If you think that Poilievre is the only one guilty of that, Trudeau was also doing his own “it’s only OK when we do it” when he attacked the Conservatives over Bill s-210. From CTV:

Trudeau accused Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of “spreading lies” about the Liberal government’s upcoming online harms legislation — even while supporting a bill that would create online restrictions.

“Instead of stepping up to stand for protecting our kids through responsible, serious legislation, he’s proposing that adults should instead give their ID and personal information to sketchy websites, or create a digital ID for adults to be able to browse the web the way they want to,” Trudeau said after a press conference in Nova Scotia.

“That’s something we stand against and disagree with.”

In short, “no, my brand of mass internet censorship is the holy and just way of moving forward! It’s the Conservative parties version of mass internet censorship that’s the real villain here!”

Yeah, uh, how about this idea: DON’T IMPLEMENT MASS INTERNET CENSORSHIP LEGISLATION PERIOD!!! Is this really too freaking much to ask here???

To make matters worse, the NDP and the Bloc have a history of supporting BOTH mass internet censorship bills. If you support freedom of expression and are against mass internet censorship, you have absolutely no representation from lawmakers at all at this stage. The political parties want to crack down on internet freedom and the only fight is over what method is the just and right way of destroying freedom of expression in this country. Fucked up doesn’t even begin to describe this political embarrassment.

Now, if you think I’m the only one exasperated at the situation, you would be mistaken. Michael Geist is equally throwing his hands up at this situation with an overall “WTF?” reaction:

This sets up a head-shaking dynamic of the government opposing the bill and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre supporting it. Yesterday, Poilievre reiterated his support for legislated age verification for pornography access, a decidedly off-brand approach in which the party that has championed Internet freedoms suddenly now finds itself supporting a bill that features website blocking of lawful content, subjects millions of Canadians to privacy-invasive age verification technology requirements overseen by a government agency such as the CRTC, and institutes regulations that apply to broadly used search and social media services. That can’t possibly meet the definition of common sense for many Canadians.

Geist is right. There is nothing common sense about any of this.

When Trudeau was first Prime Minister, there was hope that we would get some semblance of common sense policy. There was the promise of common sense privacy reform that finally catches Canada up in a reasonable manner to the European Union. There was a call to solidify network neutrality rules. What’s more, there was a promised digital charter that ultimately never surfaced. For a brief period of time, the Canadian government actually had reasonably good ideas, but when the lobbyists came knocking, all of this was shelved, only to see the light of day when an election is called (and it quickly gets shelved afterwards anyway).

Now, we got complete nonsense legislation that is in the process of completely gutting Canada’s digital future for, really, no good reason. The only people who could possibly be happy are the ones that hate the internet entirely and wish to see it end so we can all go back to the 70’s again. It’s enormously destructive and I can only hope that the government pumps the brakes on all of this and asks itself, “What the heck is our problem?” Sadly, I know that is wishful thinking since I can only expect this insanity to continue.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.