An “opportunity cost.”That’s how Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner is describing the Trudeau government’s “Online Harms Act” — otherwise known as Bill C-63 — to regulate social media platforms.According to the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) it will cost upwards of $200 million to impose what Rempel Garner is calling a “censorship bureaucracy” to hire 330 people to enforce “yet-to-be defined” regulations regarding the use and management of social media platforms.The bill would establish three separate entities: the Digital Safety Commission, which is mandated to enforce the act and has the power to issue monetary penalties and fines; the Digital Safety Ombudsperson; and the Digital Safety Office, which would manage the day-to-day operations of all three.Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre on Thursday vowed to kill all three on arrival.The bill was ostensibly passed to prevent online harassment, persecution and stalking of vulnerable people in society.But Rempel Garner worries it’s morphed into a law focussed on “banning opinions that contradict Justin Trudeau’s radical ideology.”“Common sense Conservatives believe we must enforce laws that protect children and Canadians from criminal harassment, harm or violence, not push it off to a new, bloated, and costly bureaucracy that does nothing to prevent crimes and provides no justice to victims,” she said in a statement to Western Standard.Even renowned — and liberal — Canadian author Margaret Atwood called the bill “Orwellian.” Noted American progressive news outlet The Atlantic called it “Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech.”In her substack page, Rempel Garner noted “the mind-blowing cost of the bill could grow.” That’s because C-63 doesn’t directly set out any structure that would allow for the recoupment of administrative expenses. “I was told in a briefing by the PBO that department officials suggested the data given to their office were only preliminary estimates of the new bureaucracy's cost,” she continued. “This omission means that Canadian taxpayers will likely be stuck footing the bill for a massive bureaucracy that will allow big tech companies to negotiate favourable terms with non-elected regulators behind closed doors.”.Worse still, the figures included in the PBO report would be in addition to a still-to-be-costed increase to the workload of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), which, under the scope of bill, would be tasked with policing a flood of extra-judicial "prosecutions" over individual user social media posts. The irony is that the new bureaucracy comes at a cost of roughly 204 police officers that could be tasked with the exact same function.“It's unconscionable that the Liberal government would consider dumping $200M and over 300 new staff into an ill-defined new bureaucracy that does little to materially protect Canadians from online harassment when Canada's existing law enforcement officials are begging for support to deal with the crime waves sweeping across our nation,” Rempel Garner said.The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is criticizing the bill. “Today’s PBO report shows the online harms bill will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions and further balloon an already bloated bureaucracy,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “The government must go back to the drawing board.”For the cost of the online harms bill, the government could instead pay the salary of about 375 new police officers, according to the RCMP’s website. “Instead of hiring hundreds of bureaucrats to snoop around social media, the government could hire hundreds of police officers to actually go after criminals,” Terrazzano said. “If the government wants to keep Canadians safe and avoid trampling on free expression, the solution is simple: hire more cops, not online hall monitors.” An open letter signed by 16 public-interest groups warns the online harms bill will “risk creating a serious chilling effect on lawful speech and debate.”.In a statement to The National Post, Sebastian Skamski, the CPC’s director of media relations, said: “Common sense Conservatives oppose Justin Trudeau’s three-headed censorship monster and new $200 million bureaucracy. Should his Liberal-NDP coalition government pass this new censorship law, a Pierre Poilievre common sense Conservative government will repeal it.”
