Is Bill C-63 a Bark Collar for Canada?

(If you aren't a dog person, bark boxes or collars are worn on barky dogs, they spray or vibrate when Rover barks and are used to get Rover to simmer down.)

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Is freedom of speech in Canada waning? Is Trudeau’s Bill C-63 a forewarning of creeping authoritarianism? Should we assume that the most unserious politician can’t cause serious harm? Is C-63 a grab for power or an albatross that will hang around the Liberals' and NDP's necks in the next election? 

It is extraordinary that it has taken nine years worth of voter fatigue and a government lurching down a crumbling two-lane TransCanada—veering wildly from failure to scandal to economic decline—to motivate the somnambulant Canadian voter to the point where they look like they might finally say enough!

But are our problems deeper? Are our economic slippages and leadership deficiencies just a harbinger of a deeper cultural malaise? 

Has this malaise left us so bedridden and weak that we scarcely appreciate the importance of freedom of speech, leaving us lacking the strength to embrace its more substantial cousin, the freedom to offend? If you don’t have the latter, can you have the former?

Of course, the goal is never to offend deliberately, there is no nobility in playing the jackass, but we will no longer be a free country if the bar for permissible speech does not allow creating offence. We see the danger of surrendering to our squeaky wheels; our persistent ‘bump us on the sidewalk, and we will apologize Canadianness’ is more a curse than a quirky virtue. 

It wasn’t always that way. Years ago, people had more serious discussions, and courts and human rights tribunals didn’t require having a God or Messiah complex to get a job. 

Today, leaders think their slick little Bluetooth speaker will drown out the impossibility of legislating the heart's emotions, words, thoughts and conditions, even though subjectivity is cranked up to eleven.

My students often seem shocked that someone might disagree with them on big issues, and they’ve been well-trained. We offer secondary and post-secondary electives, classes that are not open discussions but merely soapboxes for propaganda delivery on the taxpayer dime. 

Professors rant, preach and moan, and students repackage their professor’s words and send their essays into the course dropbox in an implicit purchase agreement in which the price of their integrity is an A. 

It's no wonder many think there is only one correct perspective. When offended, many people's first reaction is not to counter the argument but to wonder why the person standing up to them has been allowed to speak.

Do many think the Chinese are on to something with their social credit system? Even if 99% of our population has not heard of it, would they think the Chinese are just being prudent, just making sure everything runs smoothly? After all, what’s the harm? If you are behaving, nothing will happen to you, right?

Is embracing bad ideas the only problem, or is it that most people don’t know how rare a bird democracy and free speech are in the long run of history?  

Even today, only 8.4% of the world’s population lives in a full democracy, and that number is falling. In recorded history, true democracies are a blip in the long hum of time, and the percentage of people who have lived in a society with true freedom of speech is tiny. 

Why do we act like free speech and democracy are bricks in a maintenance-free home? And will we continue living in the house, ignoring the decay and squalor, the rotting mortar and the tiles blowing off, until one day we are surprised when the roof falls in? Or are we just hoping for the best, like my mother-in-law, who leaves cooked meat dishes on the stovetop for everyone to eat and doesn’t have a problem with letting them remain there for 10 - 15 hours? I’ve mentioned food safety, so she puts a tea towel over the food, the Patriot missile defence against Masha the cat eating it, and a sure destroyer of food-borne pathogens.

So far, nobody has been hospitalized; perhaps our immune systems are stoked, but the practice is dangerous.

We need to stop this fetish of prosecuting thought and speech except for clear incitement to violence. It won’t improve society. It will hurt many people -  but if it only hurts one out of a thousand, the 999 might never know of it or say better you than me and get back to gaming and watching TikTok -  and empower those government and industry elites. 

Government and participating corporate elites think they are elite, as in, “Connor McDavid has elite skills,” but the noun travels in lower social circles than the adjective. Such elites are often arrogant mediocrities, causing many to mutter quietly: How did they get that job?

Such elites likely reached the top through a mix of circumstance, ambition, or accident of birth but have yet to receive the memo explaining why they climbed so high. This is the essence of chaos theory: We control our fate much less than we believe. 

And that magic word, ‘culture,’ the broad norm of individual thinking, attitudes and habits, is what we should discuss, not just carp about leaders. When our leaders are idiots, it is often because our culture is idiotic, and changing culture is like turning around a 400-metre, 60-meter-wide container ship in a shipping channel that is 125 metres across.

Today, our culture, due to apathy, habit, or new thinking, is allowing that weird new kid called censorship to come to our party. Right now, he is just hanging in the backyard, not having the courage to come into the house looking like that. He stands there, quietly sipping some insufferable alcopop and making new friends. 

Culture used to embrace free speech; the kids chose it first for the team. Free speech is the kid sitting on the bench; the coach keeps playing his favourite soft speech code players. We have a bad habit of treating it like we treat democracy. We take it for granted. We act like it’s brick and mortar, a cornerstone of a building that is ignored and will stand forever.  

We act like the only way we can lose free speech is if there is some cabal of government and industry, secret meetings all cloak and dagger, where brilliant Machiavellian rogues plot our demise. Some might say that is Bill C-63, but regardless, C-63 is not the only pathway for aspiring authoritarians. Cultural apathy, stupidity, ignorance and false virtue will always do the heavy lifting, and malice helps them across the finish line.

I’ve whined incessantly about being suspended from my university teaching position because of free speech restrictions, and I bang on about being on the wrong political team.  So many have said to me: 

“Gotta’ watch what you say these days.”

Sure. However, time has no reverse gear, and that principle cannot become the driving force of our speech. Speech codes are like a bark box/collar for humans. Except we don’t have to wear a collar and get shocks, vibrations or sprays of lemon water. But potentially a life sentence.

We have made silence and self-censorship a virtue, and the “don’t say anything on social media” rule has quietly become “don’t say anything.”

Such silence is not a virtue despite Grandma telling you silence was golden.  She just wanted quiet so she could read her newspaper. Believing her implies nobility in being a coward and staying silent in the face of wrong, sitting there like a fat stoned oaf, oblivious to the reality that you are now not compelled by virtue, unaware that you are confusing self-preservation with thinking and morality.

It is a dangerous, utterly false lie to believe that cowardice, selfishness, and ignorance can be put on the stove and made into a delicious soup that nourishes your soul. It will just make you sick, and I will restrain myself from using any vomit metaphors. 

Bill C-63 signals that someone is turning up the temperature on the frog soup pot. But what per cent of the population has heard of Bill C-63? Are those biting newspaper editorials or Substack posts being read? If the well-reasoned argument (let’s use the newspaper article or someone else’s Substack) falls in the empty forest, was it ever written?

Of course, government and well-meaning or delusional do-gooders who think they always know what’s best don’t announce the following:

“We have decided to take some of your freedom because we love the power. We were always better and smarter than you, and yes, we do know better.”

There is no better illustration of the idiotic sanctimony of virtue warriors than the Scottish National Party. They convicted some poor YouTuber of a hate crime because he thought it was funny (it was) to have his Pug do a Nazi salute. Maybe you didn’t think it was funny or in poor taste, but that’s a far cry from thinking it is okay to arrest and convict the poor guy. I’d rather arrest him for those enormous ear studs but let freedom reign.

On Bill C-63, they have made it about the children. It's always about the children. Is that just a manipulative way of playing on our sympathies? 

Opponents will always have the ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ type arguments:

“If you don’t like our new bill, is it because you like pedos and racists?”

That’s a classy, well-formed Twitter argument.

When infantile arguments like that are thrown at us, many buckle and crawl away because they lack the tools, energy, or courage to fight. When our culture doesn’t foster critical thinking, long-form reading, or deep discussions, we lack the resources to push back, so we might not engage, making acquiescence a form of virtue.

The focus is now on Bill C-63's dangers, but that bill didn’t suddenly appear out of the ether.

We've evolved in the golden age of information, where knowledge flows as freely as water (provided social media algorithms haven't dammed the river). We have evolved from our primitive state of enduring words we dislike to the advanced beings we are today, capable of demanding silence from those who disturb our peace with disagreeable opinions. Of course, digital vehicles are the authoritarian’s dream; algorithms can deliver what they want, and everything is recorded.

We weaponize a virtue, like the idea that we should be sensitive with our speech. This virtue of listening and sensitivity keeps a dialogue alive. It does not force people into corners where they hiss and spit, triggering their fight-or-flight mechanism. This is a good idea in debate because it facilitates further debate and moves us toward understanding, not because it protects feelings. Watch Douglas Murray dismantle some poor soul on YouTube, and I don’t think his opponent comes out feeling well.

But we have merged feelings with the protected categories covered under human rights legislation and made them one. When discussing a protected category, such as race, nationality, religion, sexuality, etc., feelings are paramount.

We are largely discussing social media on C-63, a digital playground that has significantly harmed human attention spans.

Remember the days when people could engage in long, thoughtful discussions?

Thanks to the rigorous training provided by 280-character limits and ephemeral Stories, asking someone to concentrate on a complex argument is a mighty reach.

The microblasts of social media content limit our ability to express complex ideas and condition us to expect all communication to be quick, simple, and inoffensive. And some arguments, actually a lot of them, can’t be pounded out in 50 words.

For example, what if someone argues that “government ownership of industry is superior because the profit goes back into the general pot, back to the people, as opposed to those evil profit-seeking owners?”

I don’t think too many of my business students could easily counter it, and the argument does have some superficial charm. It would take more than 280 characters to counter it. But if we don’t do substantial reading and research, we won’t counter it, and that means we aren’t building strong cultural homes with reason and understanding; we are camping out permanently in the flimsy tent-filled age of promotion and marketing. When marketing is the only tool in the politician’s toolbox, many people will be hurt, and society will fall into disrepair. Promotion is not often based on reason; it’s designed to persuade and often deliberately pushes every emotional and sensory button, not reason.

With critical thinking endangered, people are more susceptible than ever to being swayed not by facts or logic but by whatever feels right. And what feels right is often familiar, echoed in our self-selected digital echo chambers. Are we being marketed to or superficially persuaded? Does it matter? Ultimately, the result is the same: a populace that views challenging ideas not as opportunities for growth but as personal affronts.

Supporting this with evidence and stats would imply engaging in the rigorous, analytical thinking that social media has trained us to avoid. Why bother with evidence when we can declare that our “lived experience” is good enough? If someone says those two words, we all need to shut up because we are hurting feelings and moving into hate crime territory. 

So, let’s fail to celebrate our progress from the dark ages of free speech into the non-enlightened era of protected feelings. Let's not hone our skills in short-form content consumption, but be safe, knowing that as long as our opinions are popular, we'll never have to defend them. Let’s keep our critical thinking skills away, lest they offend someone. 

The old ditty about sticks, stones, and broken bones has some truth. Freedom to speak out, sometimes against tyranny, is more important than the freedom of our aspiring autocrats in industry and government to protect us from truth and reason, an effort they have packaged as protecting us against having our feelings hurt.

Let’s be bold, let’s read, and when in that conversation or in that meeting where that new-fangled idea or assumption is undeservedly put out there like it deserves to be democratic bedrock, and when we notice that voice in our head that says, “I disagree,” let’s raise our hand and say, “No, with all due respect I do not agree.” 

And if someone is offended or many are offended, let’s say, “I’m sorry you are offended, but I believe in free speech, including the freedom to offend.  We are stronger when contrary opinions are voiced, even if we don’t embrace them.  We are stronger in a society with the freedom to offend.”

Now is the time, not tomorrow. We need to stand our ground.  

If we continue to hope that others will do the heavy lifting and that they will risk their reputations, popularity, and even their careers to preserve our freedoms, it might turn out that there are not enough of them to win the day. And when we wake out of our selfish, convenient slumbers of conformity and comfort, we may find it too late; we may find that delicate, beautiful bird of freedom, free speech, and freedom to offend is lifeless on the ground. And in that case, may God save us.  He will be all that is left.