Randy Crosson is the Executive Director of Freedoms Advocate, a Canadian charity that supports constitutional and human rights litigation.A number of legal scholars and civil liberties advocates in Canada have begun asking whether this country is sliding toward a more authoritarian style of government.In 1933, the Gestapo arrested Hannah Arendt for illegally researching Nazi propaganda, and she fled Germany that same year. That was also the year Germany's government used a fire at the Reichstag to justify an emergency decree suspending civil liberties. It was supposed to be temporary. It stayed in force for the next twelve years.Arendt spent the rest of her life studying how Germany and Stalinist Russia lost their freedom. She suggested that people become ready for totalitarian rule when they're cut off from ordinary community and made to feel unneeded, a state she called superfluousness. She wrote that propaganda works by destroying people's ability to tell fact from fiction, not just by restricting speech. It was her view that terror is the method totalitarian governments use to rule, not just a tool to seize power once. She also wrote about elections in which people vote out of fear of a catastrophic outcome rather than genuine political interest, dissolving the normal parties and classes that structure democratic life.Here in Canada, starting in 2021, the federal government barred unvaccinated Canadians from domestic flights and interprovincial trains. Several provinces went further, separately barring those without their government vaccine "passport" from restaurants, gyms, and concerts. Both were publicly justified, at the time, by blaming unvaccinated Canadians for prolonging the pandemic and spreading a virus. Arendt's superfluousness theory describes exactly this: a group cut off from ordinary participation in society and made to feel responsible for a problem larger than themselves.Canada has its own version of the propaganda fight, with the government getting to decide what counts as truth online. Bill C-11 already gives the CRTC power over what Canadian content gets promoted on streaming platforms. Bill C-18 already shapes what news Canadians can see on social media. Meta, which owns Facebook, simply stopped carrying Canadian news links rather than comply. The new Bill C-34 would create a commission with the power to fine platforms ten million dollars for content it decides is harmful. Bill C-36 would hand that same commission authority over private companies' data as well. Each of these bodies controls what gets shown to you on these platforms..Arendt's sharpest point may be this: she said terror is the actual method totalitarian governments use to keep ruling, not just a tool to seize power once. In February 2022, the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy protests. Banks froze accounts with no judge's order required. Police cleared the protest with pepper spray, stun grenades, and mounted officers; video from that day shows people knocked to the ground, including an elderly woman with a walker.That same February, the federal government began detaining returning international travellers in quarantine hotels. A court later found their Charter rights were violated because they weren't told where they were being taken or that they had the right to a lawyer.The Freedom Convoy bank freezes and the quarantine hotel detentions were both temporary, tied to a declared emergency. Bill C-8 makes that sort of power now ordinary law: it gives a federal minister the authority to order a telecom company to cut off someone's phone or internet, with no warrant required, at any time, emergency or not.Arendt's fourth element is about how people choose their leaders in the first place. She studied Germany's 1932 election, where people voted against a catastrophic outcome rather than for any real platform, which she said dissolves the normal parties and interests that structure democratic life. Mark Carney's 2025 election win has been widely attributed to fear of Donald Trump's threats against Canada, rather than support for Liberal domestic policy.Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard political scientists, built a different, four-point test in their book How Democracies Die, aimed at catching a democracy sliding toward authoritarian rule before it gets there..Their checklist starts with whether a government rejects the normal rules of democratic competition. How does Canada shape up? A previous federal law once made the Ethics Commissioner's rulings immune from court review. It was used to block a legal challenge over the WE Charity affair, until the Supreme Court struck it down, ruling that Parliament cannot pass a law putting a government decision completely beyond a court's reach.Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, lowers the legal bar police need to identify who's behind a phone number or an email account, and compels services like Signal, Gmail, and WhatsApp to hand that information over. It passed the House after what the Conservative public safety critic called the most aggressive programming motion he'd seen in five years.Bill C-15 originally would have let ministers exempt any company from almost any federal law for up to six years; committee amendments narrowed that before passage to the clean tech and financial technology sectors specifically, with a mandatory consultation period added. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who pushed for those amendments, called the result "a lot less awful," but said she'd still have preferred the power removed entirely.Denying legitimacy to political opponents is next on their list. The Emergencies Act invocation against the Freedom Convoy fits here too, from a different angle: the government has invoked it against that one protest movement alone.Whether violence gets tolerated is their third marker. Political scientist Frances Widdowson was at a campus event in Winnipeg in September 2025 when it turned violent. She says at least eight calls went to police over ninety minutes, and no one arrived before the event ended. She's pursuing a legal challenge arguing the response amounted to differential treatment based on her political views. Manitoba's police oversight agency has declined to investigate..Around the same period, Ontario's own Solicitor-General publicly criticized Toronto police for not acting decisively enough against what he called mob intimidation and harassment at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.Curtailing civil liberties, including the media's, rounds out the checklist. Bill C-25 extends election speech restrictions to cover "potential candidates" year-round, a term Parliament has never defined.That's eight tests altogether, four built from countries that already became totalitarian. Four built to catch one before it gets there. Each one showed up on its own, spread across several years, each one defensible by itself at the time.Count how many of the eight genuinely apply to Canada right now. Then count how many you'd have said applied ten years ago.The gap between those two numbers is the actual measure of the creep toward the loss of freedom.Randy Crosson is the Executive Director of Freedoms Advocate, a Canadian charity that supports constitutional and human rights litigation.
