Online Harms Act – A LAW THAT WILL HARM FREEDOM

The liberals are never out of ideas to take away your freedom. First off, let’s understand that there are no provisions in the Online Harms Act (Bill 63) that don’t already exist in the Criminal Code of Canada. Publishing revenge porn, obscene material or child pornography, criminal harassment of a child or counselling a criminal offence are already covered under the Criminal Code of Canada. Even section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada provides that “hate speech” against an identifiable group is prohibited, although the section also provides for all sorts of possible defenses such as if the statement is true, in good faith, in the public interest or establishes a religious argument. Considering that you cannot be convicted of “hate speech” unless you can prove the subjective emotion of hate behind the speech and prove it beyond reasonable doubt, police and prosecutors very seldom bother charging anyone under this section of the Criminal Code of Canada.

The proposed Online Harms Act completely changes the parameters of “hate speech” in 2 major ways. Firstly, the prime Minister’s office through the federal cabinet will be allowed to regulate and define “hate speech” ad nauseam. In hypothetical situations, the federal cabinet could define de facto “hate speech” for making statement such as “There are only 2 genders”, “Muslims promote Jihads” and the defense of truth, good faith, discourse in the public interests or religious argument would no longer matter.

Secondly, the Online Harms Act will also add online “hate speech” definitions to the Canadian Human Rights Commission with a mechanism allowing anyone to file complains of online content. The process under the Canadian Human Rights Commission is much more threatening than the Criminal Code of Canada for many reasons. The Canadian Human Rights Commission isn’t bound by the standard rules of evidence of a criminal trial, and the threshold to be found guilty goes from “beyond reasonable doubt” (95%) to “on the balance of probabilities” (51%). Furthermore, the complainant can be anyone who believes that someone is engaging in “hate speech”. The Canadian complainant could live in Texas and file a complaint for an online statement unrelated to himself. The Canadian Human Rights Commission would then start an investigation and recommend the complaint to be heard before the Canadian Human Right Tribunal. The complainant doesn’t need a lawyer, while the accused must pay his legal fees and could be subject to paying damages up to 20K to the victim(s).

Advocate groups could systematically file dozens of complaints per day against political opponents simply to bleed them out of money. Lawfare at its worst!

Now if you think this isn’t bad enough, well… the Online Harms Act also provides that if a person fears that an individual might express “hate speech”, that person could file a complaint with a court and seek this individual’s arrest. Let this sink in for a minute. You have not done anything, you might never do anything wrong, but here you are under arrest because someone “fears” you might do something in the future! That reminds us of Tom Cruise’s fiction movie “Minority Report”.

I almost forgot. The liberal government also wants to amend the penalty for “hate speech” from a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment to life imprisonment. If you dare say the wrong words as defined by the federal cabinet, the liberals throw you in jail for life!

God save us!

Gabriel News