The Bill C-11 debate at the government stages could be ending like how it more or less started: with government silencing its critics.
From nearly the beginning, the Bill C-11 debate has seemingly been made up of two sides.
On the one side, you have Canadian creators raising legitimate concerns about the bill, citing actual sections of the legislation, explaining the impacts and why it hurts Canadians. This along side ordinary Canadians who will soon be potentially force fed government certified content which overrides their personal choices about what they like seeing and what they don’t like seeing.
On the other side is the government who repeatedly shuts down debate, issues “gag orders” on government proceedings, demands politically motivated “investigations” into those who dare criticize their bill, launches personal attacks on academics who speak out, censors the media, gaslighting creators, and stalking critics on social media. They are backed by a handful of media organizations who have actively promoted disinformation where seemingly every talking point wound up being demonstrably false in the end. The Aristocrats!
So, with what more or less began as a campaign to silence criticisms within the halls of government, it seems almost fitting, in a rather perverse way, that the government is attempting to end the debate by silencing debate once more. Apparently, the government is moving to, once again, shut down debate. The move was noted by Michael Geist:
Last night, @SenMarcGold announced he will moving today to cut off debate on Bill C-11. It astonishing how a bill with significant implications for freedom of expression has had debate continuously cut short: at committee, in the House, and now the Senate.
To be fair in all of this, a lot of expectations were that the Senate was just going to throw creators under the bus by pushing to pass Bill C-11 quickly. After all, the Senate did come back on Tuesday and almost immediately began debating Bill C-11. The expectations were seemingly that it would be passed on Tuesday or Wednesday. When that didn’t happen, expectations were that, by the end of the week, that the Senate would simply pass the bill without fix. Well, here we are on Friday and the bill hasn’t been passed.
The delays no doubt made the government angry because they can’t get to the business of destroying peoples lives sooner. What’s more, they can’t get to destroying the lives of journalists sooner by moving Bill C-18 forward as quickly. Some had thought that the committee process would begin in February, yet, here we are in late April and only recently did it pass second reading and get moved to committee for study. No doubt, things are getting delayed which is probably the silver lining in all of this. With the latest move, however, it appears that these delays may be short lived, much to the dismay of Canadians and Canadian creators.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
