Over the past three years, the Government of Canada has passed six new laws to restrict and diminish your freedom to say out loud what you think and believe.This is not opinion. This is fact. Every one of these new laws promises something good. But, hidden in every bill is something you should never see in Canadian democracy. It is classic bait-and-switch..Bill C-11, The Online Streaming Act – ‘Helping’ you see what Ottawa wants you to seeBill C-11 was sold as modernizing broadcasting rules for the streaming era. Ostensibly, it was to force US companies like Netflix, which were scooping up the Canadian pay-to-view market, to help fund production of Canadian content.However, they also slipped into the legislation authority for the CRTC to impose discoverability requirements on platforms. In plain English, something is easily ‘discoverable’ if it’s near the top of your Google search. This allows the CRTC to quietly promote government-approved content and pushes the rest down the list.You search for syrup, you get maple syrup first.It’s subtle and by comparison with the big leagues of Orwellian persuasion, not hard to live with. However, it is the thin end of a wedge and meanwhile, an unobtrusive way of nudging public opinion, when so many people go with the first thing their search engine throws up.Royal assent April 27, 2023..Bill C-18, The Online News Act – Less Canadian newsMeanwhile, C-11’s companion piece Bill C-18, The Online News Act, was sold as ensuring fair compensation for Canadian newspapers, because services like Meta were reproducing their content at no cost to the consumer. Meta and Google should pay, went the argument.What was not fully appreciated was that when readers couldn’t find Canadian news on line, they did not renew their newspaper subscriptions. They simply did without. At no cost to Canadian newspapers, Meta had become their unpaid paper boy and were not about to pay for the privilege.The consequence? A smaller readership and increased financial troubles for newspapers, as Meta blocked news links in Canada, reducing incidental public access to news reporting while increasing media dependence on mechanisms shaped by CRTC rules, cabinet regulations and political priorities. (And on government subsidies.)That wasn’t a free speech win.Royal assent June 22, 2023..Bill C-22 The Lawful Access Act and Bill C-8, An Act Respecting Cybersecurity – Making it easier for Ottawa to read your e-mails, scrutinize your Internet use and kick you off the Internet.National security is also an excuse to deliver something poisonous under cover of an apparent benefit. C-22 is one such.Border security is a good thing. Past Canadian insouciance about who entered and left Canada and whether they were carrying drugs, was a major irritant in our relations with the US. Ottawa’s first attempt to deal with it (Bill C-2, The Border Security Act) crashed. However, the recently passed Bill C-22, The Lawful Access Act, returned some of its worst aspects. In the name of security, the bill lowers thresholds for government access to subscriber data held by electronic service providers. It also requires them to build technical capabilities facilitating government access to communications… Your communications, that would be.In plain English again, they have made it easy for themselves to read your e-mail if they want to.Now of course, if you’re afraid of terrorists or drug lords, you might want the government to have all these powers and more.However just know that it comes at the cost of your rights to privacy and free speech. With the passage in June of Bill C-22 and its companion Bill C-8, An Act Respecting Cybersecurity, your internet service provider must now do the following:a) Store your emails and web searches for six months andb) Tell the government you’re their customer if they ask andc) Let them have a look at your files.If anybody in Ottawa wants to read your email, they have just made it easier for themselves.Meanwhile, if the government really doesn’t like you and deems you a threat to national security or critical infrastructure – maybe your friends drive trucks – Section 15:2 of Bill C-8 lets them order your telecommunications service providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus etc) to suspend service to you, or as we say in the office, ‘kick you off the internet.’Bill C-8 Received Royal Assent 15 June 2026.Bill C-22 passed 18 June, 2026. Awaits Royal Assent..Bill C-9 The Combatting Hate Act – Pastors bewareBill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, makes it dangerous for pastors to preach the Bible.Bill C-9 received Royal Assent 18 June 2026. Bill C-34, The Digital Safety Act. Give your personal information to use social media, government defines hate speech administratively.This is the worst of the lot, a masterpiece of bait and switch. Introduced last month, the government of Canada says it is to prevent children under 16 years of age from accessing ‘harmful content’ on the Internet.How can anybody be against that? Not many people, and certainly not me.But wait a minute: At what cost?The bill contains two landmines.The first is the establishment of the Digital Safety Commission. Lawyer and industry expert Michael Geist says, “the most consequential element [of Bill C-34] may be the creation and powers of the government agency the bill establishes to oversee the entire system. The Digital Safety Commission of Canada will be a super-regulator of the Internet, with greater influence over the daily lives of Canadians than perhaps any other regulator in the country.”That would be your daily life.Yet, there are no details whatsoever about the Digital Safety Commission in the proposed legislation. Everything will be determined by the Cabinet after the bill is passed. It won’t be debated by members of parliament. In other words, the government is asking for a blank cheque to determine how this astonishingly powerful agency will be established and operate.Indeed, it falls to the Digital Safety Commission to set the rules by which all of us will prove we are over 16 to log on to social media services. As resourceful Australian teens have already demonstrated, anything less than facial technology recognition or submitting personal information is unlikely to work. You can see where this takes you..The government also gets to define hate speech. This is the second landmine in C-34. You may think you know what hate speech is. Virulent anti-Jewish propaganda perhaps, or somebody advocating violence against a marginalised minority. And you’d be right.But Bill C-34 gives the Digital Safety Commission the power to administratively declare anything the government doesn’t like, to be hate speech. Would it be to favour a constituency? To satisfy a ministerial whim? There are people in Parliament now, who want it to be illegal to question the narrative that priests and nuns murdered indigenous children at residential schools.Could that be defined as hate then? So far, no proof of that has been established. But should the Digital Safety Commissioner declare it to be hateful, the topic is moved off the internet, beyond discussion and whatever the truth, it becomes something you just don’t talk about.Bill C-34 received First Reading in the House of Commons on 10 June 2026..The Nudge UnitThis is a government that wants to lead, even control, public opinion. For that purpose, it has a department of the Privy Council Office, the Impact Unit (also known informally as the Nudge Unit,) dedicated to moving public opinion. Here, Toronto Star columnist Susan Delacourt approvingly describes how during the COVID era, the unit was used to persuade reluctant Canadians that the so-called vaccines were ‘safe and effective.’Here also is a current effort, in which the nudge unit determines exactly what we would expect the Liberal government wants to hear, that when it comes to the (assumed) negative effects of climate change, the unit’s “findings speak to an expectation that governments and businesses should take mitigation actions, alongside significant challenges for individuals. The results will inform policy and communications at NRCAN and ECCC.”.The Bottom LineSix bills, six squeezes on your free speech rights and your Internet privacy. This government likes diversity of faces, but not diversity of thought.It’s not Stalinist Russia either, but it wants you to think a certain way and doesn’t appreciate a different point of view becoming popular.The cumulative result so far is not a dramatic overnight seizure of the public square. It is a steady narrowing of the space in which dissenting, inconvenient, or simply unfashionable information and opinion can circulate freely. The burden of their legislation is that the tradition Canada shares with Great Britain and the US, that everybody is entitled to their own opinion, and that even poor men have the same right to their opinions as the rich and powerful, should no longer hold. As former prime minister Justin Trudeau said, some opinions are just unacceptable. The present incumbents have more delicacy than to say that, but their legislation suggests that this is exactly what they think.In terms of free speech rights then, most humans in most parts of the world, never had them through thousands of years of history. We are then, something of an island in history and geography.But to torture that metaphor a little, the waters are rising around us.Yes, Canadians still possess formal Charter protections for freedom of expression.But, what is being constructed, bill by bill, is a practical environment in which exercising those protections carries increasing friction and risk – not primarily from the state directly, but from its bureaucratic agencies and the platforms that have been made responsible for policing the categories the state has defined.I do not expect that the hammer will come down hard, soon. But it's an unusual power that a government creates, that it never use . If it doesn’t, it can only be that enough people drank the Liberal kool-aid…
