Things you're not allowed to know. . .

. . . and things you're not allowed to say.

This might seem a heavy subject for a Sunday Real Story edition, and I guess it is.

I’ve never been a “free speech absolutist.” I recoil from the hyperbolic and hyperpartisan critiques of the governing Liberals in Ottawa. But I’m warning you. Bill C-63 is worse than you might think.

It’s worse than I made out in the National Post, here: Under hate speech bill, wouldn't Trudeau be guilty of vilifying Catholics? Who would trust a digital safety commission appointed by this government? It’s even worse than I made out in this closer look, for Real Story subscribers, here: Take this as a thought experiment, if you like.

As usual, come back to the links once you’re done here.

Things you’re not allowed to say

I’m going to get into the weeds about this in later pieces for the Post and in Real Story newsletters. For now, I want to draw attention to where I was wondering out loud in that Thought Experiment newsletter about whether Bill C-63 is a deliberate throttling of free speech and the free flow of ideas and debates in Canada, or rather that it’s accidental, just another case of the gaping incompetence that has come to characterize this government.

It’s deliberate. That’s the conclusion I’ve reached about Bill C-63 based on my own closer reading of the powers it extends to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, and based on my own familiarity with this government’s track record, and because of the conversations I’ve been having lately with David L. Thomas, who served as the chairperson of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal from 2014 to 2021.

You’ll soon be hearing directly from Thomas in the Real Story or in the National Post, or both, but for now ,this is what he says about the law:

It’s deliberate. With Bill C-63, the Liberal government intends to restrain our Charter right to free expression. It’s on purpose. The point of the law is to silence the government’s adversaries without even having to invoke the law’s provisions or drag anyone in front of its star chambers.

The point is to preempt speech the Liberals deem to be beyond the pale, owing to the onerous and extreme consequences of speech that could so easily be found to fall outside what the laws’s expanded, cabinet-appointed bureaucracy deems permissible. Robust political discourse of the kind the Trudeau government does not like will be shut down, Thomas says, even before it comes before the Tribunal’s apparatchiks.

To get something out of the way, here’s my advice to anyone currently engaged in those sorts of robust conversations:

The pattern is so predictable you can set your watch by it

it’s long been evident to the politically literate that whatever one might make of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he is not a liberal democrat, and you should not count on him to defend liberal-democratic values.

This observation became more commonplace after his government’s unwarranted invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022. But quite a few of us have been pointing this out ever since Team Trudeau came to power in 2015.

The Trudeau Liberals’ sunny-ways attitude towards police states and the dirty money in “investment” and campaign donations that this attitude has invited have been defining features of this government from the start. So has Trudeau’s routine reliance on hysterical speech-policing, habitually (I regret to say) aided and abetted by certain sections of the news media, of a kind most recently at work in the Selina Robinson case.

I don’t want to get into the Liberal cabinet’s many lies about the Truckist bedlaming here because any such discussion tends to turn to hyperbolic and hyper-partisan polemics of the kind I prefer to avoid, and besides, that’s not what this newsletter is about. But I’ll say this much.

I’ve been on Team CCLA from the outset, and the Federal Court of Canada is on our side, I’m happy to say. Two months ago, Judge Richard Mosley found that “there was no national emergency” to justify the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergences Act; that the enactment of the law’s associated regulations was unreasonable; and was not justified on the facts; and was not justified by the law. And the Emergencies Act’s invocation violated rights to freedom of expression enshrined in the charter, along with the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

Being the reasonable guy I am, I think a case might have been made that the Emergencies Act could have been warranted in light of the “national emergency” involved in the incompetence and months-long paralysis of the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police and Ottawa Police Service during those events two years ago. In that hypothetical scenario, no infringement of anybody’s Charter rights would have necessarily followed.

In any case, in this newsletter I wanted to draw the direct connection between what we’re not allowed to say and what we’re not allowed to know.

Things you’re not allowed to know

In my National Post column this week, Liberals doing all they can to hide China's ever-expanding influence, this is the observation I make: Ever since coming to power in 2015, the Liberals have chosen to hide the scope and extent of Beijing’s ever-expanding influence, interference and infiltration operations in Canada. By acts of obstruction, distraction and filibuster, the pattern is by now easily predictable. There’s nothing surprising about it anymore.

The pattern played out exactly as you would imagine in the case of Beijing’s infiltration of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, in the extraordinary and historic barricades the Liberal government erected over three years to prevent the public from knowing about Beijing’s intrusions there, the shocking details of which I barely canvassed in my column.

That pattern repeated itself last week at an emergency meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, where the Liberals enlisted their New Democratic Party guarantors to foreclose the Conservatives’ proposed committee investigation of the affair. The Conservatives say the public should be allowed to know why it took 10 months to secure the laboratory in 2019, and why it took three years for Parliament to see the documents the House Speaker ordered in 2021.

You’re not allowed to know.

The government has not wanted you to know about Beijing’s monkeywrenching of the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, or about Beijing’s allied Mandarin bloc’s intrusions into Canada’s institutions, its strongarming of various Chinese diaspora communities, its ubiquity in this country’s corporate sector and investment markets, or the active role it plays in the Liberal Party’s fundraising, candidate-selection and policy-development processes.

You just watch.

How long will it be before Senator Yuen Pao Woo gets his way and secures to Beijing’s influence-peddlers in Canada the same protections the Foreign Interference Inquiry Commission is holding out to Beijing’s victims of transnational oppression in the effort to maintain the inquiry’s credibility?

How long will it be before the “stigmatization” of Beijing’s proxies in Canada that Senator Woo so consistently complains about will be an offence in a case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal?

I’ll leave with the seminal 2017 essay by the great Timothy Snyder. Rule Number One:

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Rule Number Ten:

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

No surrender.