OLDCORN: Canadian Anti-Hate Network founder on Ottawa’s ‘online safety panel’ is the wrong call

Ottawa has reconvened its Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety, and one name is a cause for concern, Bernie Farber. The announcement from Canadian Heritage says Farber, founding chair emeritus of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), will again help guide federal policy on “online harms.”The same release also says the panel’s 2022 advice helped shape Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which later died in January 2025. That alone should have set off alarm bells in Ottawa. Instead, the government brought back one of the same people from the same policy lane and called it “expertise.”This is the heart of the problem. .Farber is not just some neutral scholar who studies online speech from a distance. He is a longtime activist with a very public point of view on how speech should be policed online. His organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, openly says its work is “inherently political” and describes itself as a “proudly independent and antifascist nonprofit organization.” Those are its words, not mine. A government that is trying to strike a careful balance between safety and free expression should not be leaning on someone from a group that advertises its own political character..Ottawa can appoint whomever it likes. It should not pretend that this is an ideological balance.Farber’s defenders will say the panel is only advisory. Fair enough. Advisory bodies still matter. They shape the questions the government asks, the evidence it prefers, and the assumptions it puts in legislation before the public ever sees a bill. That matters even more here because Ottawa’s own news release says this group’s earlier work fed directly into Bill C-63. That bill would have imposed a duty on platforms to mitigate the risk of exposure to several categories of harmful content, while also reviving Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act and adding serious Criminal Code changes. This was not some tiny housekeeping exercise. It was a major state intervention into online speech and platform governance.The trouble is that serious civil liberties concerns were not coming only from the usual partisan corners. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association warned that Bill C-63 could chill speech, reintroduce a broad speech restriction through the Human Rights Act, and worsen backlogs at the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Law professor Michael Geist, one of Canada’s best-known digital policy experts, argued the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act sections should be removed from the bill altogether, warning they opened the door to life sentences for offences motivated by hatred and to a “tidal wave” of complaints. .When experts of that calibre are raising red flags, Ottawa should be widening the tent, not returning to activists who have spent years pushing for stronger speech controls.Farber’s own institutional record should also give the government pause. In 2022, Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Education said it did not recommend a CAHN toolkit because it did not meet the criteria of being high quality, “free from bias as reasonably possible,” and having an appropriate and significant Saskatchewan context. That does not prove everything CAHN does is wrong. It does prove that concerns about bias are not invented by online trolls or dismissed critics. They have surfaced in the real world, in public policy, and in formal government decisions. If Ottawa wanted an adviser who would reassure Canadians that online safety rules will be narrow, fair, and politically neutral, Farber was the wrong pick.There is another reason this appointment lands badly. It tells Canadians that the federal government still sees online speech mainly through the lens of activist advocacy, not constitutional restraint. The online world is ugly at times. Real hatred exists. Criminal harassment exists. Child exploitation exists. Threats exist. Nobody seriously denies that. .The question is whether Ottawa is building a system aimed at truly unlawful conduct, or one that keeps drifting toward bureaucratic supervision of lawful but unpopular speech. Reappointing Farber does not settle that debate. It does signal which side of it Ottawa feels most comfortable hearing from.A smarter panel would have put more weight on civil liberties lawyers, digital rights advocates, and people with a proven record of defending free expression in hard cases, not just fashionable ones. It would have learned something from the collapse of Bill C-63. It would have recognized that trust is everything when governments start talking about regulating speech.Farber may be sincere. He may be experienced. He may even be useful in a different setting. None of that makes him the right person for this job. On a file as sensitive as online speech, Ottawa should be seeking balance and credibility. By putting Bernie Farber back at the table, it chose neither.

OLDCORN: Canadian Anti-Hate Network founder on Ottawa’s ‘online safety panel’ is the wrong call

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