It was supposed to be a routine campaign pit stop, the kind of low-stakes political affair where candidates smile like used car salesmen and dish out platitudes thicker than Ontario maple syrup. Instead, Mark Carney found himself dodging verbal bricks in a Hamilton hall, facing hecklers who lobbed Jeffrey Epstein references like Molotovs. No rebuttal, no denial. Just a pivot worthy of an Olympic gymnast, straight to the perils of digital discourse.
“There are many serious issues that we’re dealing with,” he said, ignoring the criticism that had just lobbed his way. “One of them is the sea of misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, and conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States.”
Ah yes, the dreaded digital tide. Forget inflation or the fact that owning a home now requires a GoFundMe. According to Carney, the real catastrophe is memes from Buffalo.
The Ghost of Bills Past
Carney’s new plan to battle the internet; whatever it may be, because details are apparently for peasants, would revive a long-dead Liberal Party obsession: regulating online speech in a country that still pretends to value free expression.
It’s an effort so cursed, it’s been killed more times than Jason Voorhees. First, there was Bill C-36, which flopped in 2021. Then came its undead cousin, Bill C-63, awkwardly titled the Online Harms Act, which proposed giving the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to act as digital inquisitors, sniffing out content that “foments detestation or vilification.”
Naturally, it died too, not from public support, but because Parliament decided it had better things to do, like not passing it in time.
But as every horror franchise teaches us, the villain never stays away for long. Carney’s speech didn’t include specifics, which is usually code for “we’ll make it up later,” but the intent is clear: the Liberals are once again oiling up the guillotine of speech regulation, ready to let it fall on anything remotely edgy, impolite, or, God forbid, unpopular.
“Won’t Someone Think of the Children?”
“The more serious thing is when it affects how people behave — when Canadians are threatened going to their community centers or their places of worship or their school or, God forbid, when it affects our children,” Carney warned, pulling the emergency brake on the national sympathy train. It’s the same tired tactic every aspiring control freak uses, wrap the pitch in the soft fuzz of public safety and pray nobody notices the jackboot behind the curtain.
Nothing stirs the legislative loins like invoking the children. But vague terror about online contagion infecting impressionable minds has become the go-to excuse for internet crackdowns across the Western world. Canada’s Liberals are no different. They just dress it up and pretend it’s for your own good.
“Free Speech Is Important, But…”
Former Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, doing her best impression of a benevolent censor, also piped up earlier this year with a classic verbal pretzel: “We need to make sure [freedom of expression] exists and that it’s protected. Yet the same freedom of expression is currently being exploited and undermined.”
Protecting free speech by regulating it is the sort of logic that keeps satire writers out of work.
St-Onge’s lament about algorithms monetizing debate sounds suspiciously like a pitch from someone who can’t get a word in on X. It’s the familiar cry of technocrats and bureaucrats who can’t fathom a world where regular people might say things that aren’t government-approved. “Respect is lacking in public discourse,” she whined on February 20. She’s right. People are tired of pretending to respect politicians who think governing a country means babysitting the internet.