Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre is laying the blame for the decision of Facebook’s parent company Meta to begin eliminating Canadian news sites from its social media platforms squarely on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau..Speaking outside the House of Commons in Ottawa on Tuesday, the Conservative leader compared the prime minister to George Orwell’s Big Brother’s nefarious attempts to literally erase history..“It’s like Nineteen Eighty-four,” he said. “You have a prime minister passing a law to make news articles disappear (emphasis his) from the internet. Who would have ever imagined, in Canada, that the federal government would pass laws banning people from effectively seeing the news?”.George Orwell’s ominous dystopian narrative needs no introduction and has become synonymous in Western culture, with government repression of free thought and censorship. It has spawned several idioms that have passed into popular culture, such as ‘thought-crime’ and ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ summed up in a single slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”.Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, Orwell eerily portends the rise of technologies like the internet that are used to erode freedom of thought and even erase it. The main character, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth whose sole task is to literally, rewrite history and replace it with propaganda..“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” is its motto. .That’s exactly what critics of the C-18 Online News Act accuse the Liberal government of doing: manipulating and distorting reality in a vain attempt to control the mainstream news media with lavish subsidies and requirement of tech giants like Meta to pay them for news..Meta announced on Tuesday it is taking the final steps to permanently remove news on its platforms in response to C-18 which was passed into law in June..If elected prime minister, Poilievre vowed to promote free speech “online, on campus and anywhere else in this country.”.“Whether it’s Big Tech, or Trudeau’s Big Government, censorship is always and everywhere, wrong,” he continued. “Because I believe I can win an open debate anywhere in this country, and unlike Trudeau, I will not need to censor.”
