You know what I hate? I hate politicians who try to tell me what I can and cannot say. I hate governments that threaten to lock me up for something I haven’t even said yet but might just be thinking of saying. I hate lawmakers who want to throw me in prison for life as a result of something I wrote. There, is that enough hate for you? Could it be enough to run me afoul of Ottawa’s latest scheme to regulate the Internet and get me arrested under Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? You just never know, and that’s the whole point. The bill was introduced in February to much howling over its proposed measures to combat hate speech, among other things, and it will resume second reading once Parliament reconvenes later this month. Events in the UK, however, should give our MPs pause, as race riots there last month saw more than 1,000 people arrested and swift justice meted out to some who merely encouraged the mayhem online.

“In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious,” noted The Spectator magazine. “Julie Sweeney, 53, got a 15-month sentence for a Facebook comment: ‘Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’” Other outcomes under the UK’s Online Safety Act, a law similar to Bill C-63 that was passed last year, were more Orwellian and have drawn criticism for going too far with disproportionate penalties. One man among at least 30 people charged under the Act was given eight weeks in custody for posting images of South Asians with such captions as “coming to a town near you.” Bill C-63 is so much more extreme than the UK’s law, claimed Joanna Baron of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, that it would likely net Sweeney 10-12 years. “In real life, the bill’s defenders say, cooler heads will prevail,” Baron wrote. “But the UK riots and their aftermath show that exactly the opposite is true during social panics.”

Bill C-63 would also increase the maximum penalty for promoting genocide from the current five years to imprisonment for life. What if I wrote in a column: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” While some might find that a good idea and others could recognize it as satire, a few might say it promotes genocide. I cannot claim authorship, of course, as in addition to it being perhaps the first recorded lawyer joke, it is among Shakespeare’s most famous lines, specifically from Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2 of his 1591 play Henry VI, about which entire books have been written.

Then there’s Bill C-63’s so-called “thoughtcrime” provision, under which anyone who “reasonably fears” that you might be about to publish hate propaganda could go to court for an order forcing you to post a monetary “peace bond” promising not to. The court could also sentence you to house arrest, make you wear a monitoring device, abstain from drugs and alcohol and provide bodily fluids to prove it, or put you in prison for a year if you don’t agree. “Canada is about to make a reality of what George Orwell labeled ‘thoughtcrime’ in his dystopian novel 1984,” quipped Forbes publisher Steve Forbes. “Cuba, North Korea and other tyrannies are applauding.” The Spectator concurred. “If that’s not establishing a thought police,” wrote Jane Stannus, “I don’t know what is.” The Atlantic magazine called Bill C-63 “madness,” adding pointedly: “No one who favors allowing the state to imprison people for mere speech, or severely constraining a person’s liberty in anticipation of alleged hate speech they have yet to utter, is fit for leadership in a liberal democracy.”

Bill C-63 is the third in a trilogy of laws the Trudeau government has devised to regulate the Internet, and as calamitous as the first two have been, this culminating third act threatens to bring down the House. Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, which was passed last year, updated the Broadcasting Act to regulate foreign streamers such as Netflix and Spotify, but Canadian podcasters and YouTubers fear it could also scope them in. Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which was passed at the urging of Big Media, tried to force Google and Meta to pay publishers here an estimated $329 million a year, but it backfired when Meta instead blocked news on its Facebook and Instagram social networks, dealing a death blow to our emerging online media.

With our beleaguered Liberal government now plunging in the opinion polls and facing the final year of its mandate, Bill C-63 could be its final showdown. After an estimate in July that it would create a bureaucracy costing more than $200 million over five years, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre promised if it passes and he is elected prime minister to repeal the Online Harms Act and the rest of the Liberal “three-headed monster.”

More important to some than the cost involved are Bill C-63’s undemocratic provisions and the doubtless chilling effect it would have on free speech. “The broad criminal prohibitions on speech in the bill risk stifling public discourse and criminalizing political activism,” noted the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. It called Bill C-63 “troubling” for the vast authority it would bestow on government appointees to “interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner,” adding: “Granting such sweeping powers to one body undermines the fundamental principle of democratic accountability.” The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms noted that Bill C-63 would give Cabinet the power to censor speech without input from Parliament and it has posted an online petition where you can urge Justice Minister Arif Virani to halt its passage. The Canadian Constitution Foundation has posted a similar petition where you can write directly to your MP.

The problems with the bill seem endless. University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist noted that its proposed Digital Safety Commission “lacks even basic rules of evidence, can conduct secret hearings, and has been granted an astonishing array of powers with limited oversight.” Criminal penalties of up to life in prison for speech offences are “indefensible,” he added. The changes that Bill C-63 proposes to the Human Rights Act, which include an option to award up to $20,000 in compensation to victims of hate speech, according to Geist, could “open the door to the weaponization of complaints.”

A former head of the Human Rights Tribunal predicted that this monetary incentive would see “many, many new hate speech complaints” lodged with the already overworked body by lawyers working on a contingency basis. “Why not?” asked David L. Thomas. “You might get $20,000, you might get a lawyer to take your case at no cost to you, and you might get to do it anonymously. It will cost you nothing.” Compensation awards could skyrocket, he added, depending on the number of victims. “How many victims might be identified if the hate speech is posted online? Is everyone who sees a hate speech message a victim?” Thomas called Bill C-63 is “a terrible law” and charged that it would restrict freedom of expression by design. “That is what the Liberals intend,” he wrote. “By drafting a vague law creating a draconian regime to address online ‘harms,’ they will win their wars without firing a bullet.” Just as in the UK, the problem is with the disproportionate penalties. “The consequences for violating the law are so severe that it should be expected that hardly anyone would risk violating it,” according to Thomas. “Even news media organizations and big tech companies should be expected to avoid the risk.” Robust political discourse in Canada could thus disappear, he claimed. “Criticism of government policies, like immigration policy for example, might suddenly become dangerous. Welcome to a new era of self-censorship.”

In a ludicrous “back to the future” provision, the bill would reinstate hate speech to the Human Rights Act despite it having been removed in 2013 as problematic, especially over a book excerpt published in Maclean’s, which called the episode “one of the most divisive disputes to grip the country since the introduction of the Charter.” Our Criminal Code already includes laws against hate speech, and its Section 319 was updated as recently as 2022 to add a proscription against antisemitism, including “denying or downplaying the Holocaust.” Numerous charges have been laid under Section 319 this year alone. One Toronto man was charged with public incitement of hatred for allegedly waving the flag of a terrorist organization at a demonstration in January against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, while another was similarly charged in June for stomping on an Israeli flag at a Walk for Israel march.

Then there’s “Canadian Girl,” a BC woman who used that online alias in posting videos on X this summer of her harassing South Asians, calling one an “invader” and a “jeet,” according to PressProgress, telling him to ‘go back to his f—ing country.’” A court date has been set, PressProgress reports, for what she says on social media are charges of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred.

Bill C-63, which would extend hate speech laws to the Internet, also includes some laudable measures designed to tackle such online scourges as child pornography and revenge porn, which is why Geist and civil society groups including the CCLA and Amnesty International have urged the government to split off into a separate bill the parts that would amend the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water. That sounds like a good idea.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.