What the Freedom Convoy Taught Us About The Freedom of Speech in Canada

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Executive Summary

During the Canadian suppression of freedom of speech during the Trucker Freedom Convoy, it made sense to investigate Canada’s freedom of speech.

Introduction

For Americans, it is tempting to think of Canada as very similar to us and tempting also to believe that Canadians have similar freedom of speech protections. However, there is no reason to believe this as Canada never aggressively broke out of the English Commonwealth. This article will review a bit about Canada’s freedom of speech protections.

Attempting to Shut Down Speech of the Trucker Convoy by Smearing Them as Racists

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had no interest in debating the evidence for the covid vaccine mandates for truckers (where are none). Therefore Trudeau decided instead to smear the truckers as racists.

The accusation was very odd. Trudeau also said that the truckers had “unacceptable views,” but he did not say which ones. However, the more I looked into Trudeau’s previous statements, the more a pattern emerged regarding accusing others of racism.

This gets into an important related topic, as it explains how Trudeau thinks and debates and is covered in the article Justin Trudeau’s Pattern of Calling Those Who Disagree With Him Racists

Trudeau’s Thought Control

Trudeau’s obsession with controlling the thoughts of others extends into making a terminology completely un-sexist. He needed to correct a woman who used “mankind,” and told her that “we use the term peoplekind.”

Trudeau Speaking Like a Programmed Robot on the Topic of Freedom of Speech

Prime Minister Trudeau has proven to be opposed to freedom of speech. Trudeau’s comments make it appear as if he supports freedom of speech; however that is not what the Canadian laws say. O’Toole very clearly does not believe that Trudeau supports freedom of speech. What is also amusing is that Trudeau could not identify his father’s words that were quoted to him. This supports the general idea that Trudeau does not read much.

Canada’s Most Prominent Intellectual Supporting Freedom of Speech

Peterson is one of Canada’s most aggressive supporters of freedom of speech. However, his views do not represent the Canadian government’s views and laws on freedom of speech.

Canada has passed laws that legally compelled people to address people by their selected gender pronouns.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom appears similar to the United States Bill of Rights. Its protection for speech is found in the 2nd item.

Everyone ha s the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association – Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom

That seems cut and dried, but Canada’s government does not allow freedom of speech as we think of it in the US.

Canadian Protection Against Hate Speech

Hate speech is a way of categorizing speech to be restricted. The Canadian government does not talk very assertively about protecting freedom of speech but does talk assertively about protecting people from hate speech. This is clear from the following quotations.

Canadians expect to be safe and free from hate speech and hate crimes, online and offline. The Government of Canada is committed to keeping all Canadians safe, while also protecting their rights and freedoms.

Too many people and communities in Canada are harmed and victimized by hate speech, which is often amplified and spread online.

This initiative will also help to ensure that individuals have access to appropriate tools and resources to seek recourse against purveyors of hate speech and perpetrators of hate crimes. The Government of Canada recognizes the importance of freedom of expression for all Canadians and is taking a balanced and targeted approach to tackle the most extreme and harmful speech. – Canadian Government

Hate speech protections are just a way of restricting speech. First, the hate speech legislation is passed based on some offensive speech, then the categorization of hate speech is simply enlarged. More on the specifics of this new and far-ranging program is explained in the following quotation.

The Trudeau government is set to increase government control of the Internet through three new bills to be introduced to Parliament before March 2022. The first measure will ban hate speech on all Internet platforms in Canada. If any article, comment or content is flagged as “hateful,” government bureaucrats will investigate and will have the power to remove that content and impose fines. – The Trumpet

Hate speech is always used to protect the speech of non-whites and to be used against whites. For example, according to Dr. Bill Warner, there is more anti-semitic writing in the Islamic documents of the Koran, Hadith, and Sira than in Mein Kampf. However, Islam is protected, while Nazism is considered the most heinous of philosophies.

Canada also does not allow freedom of speech for Holocaust denial, as is explained in the following quotation.

These include Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania. – Wikipedia.

One wonders how far the pushing against the mainstream explanation of the Holocaust could be pushed in these countries. For example, something little known is that close to 6 million non-Jews were also killed by Hitler. However, this group of people has not been emphasized by Jews because a great deal of the victim status of Jews is based upon the Holocaust. If you visit Jewish Holocaust museums, there is no discussion of non-Jewish victims of Nazis. Jews do not like discussions of other victims of the Nazis (or the fact that around 11 million Germans were killed at the end of WW2) as they see it as distracting from the important primary feature of the Nazis, which is that they killed 6 million Jews. The Soviet Union lost about 27 million people in WW2, another fact not discussed by Jews.

Now here is the question, how close did what I just wrote come to Holocaust denial? It does not deny the Holocaust, but it states there were many other victims of WW2. It is very odd to say some feature of history is censored, very strange indeed. Furthermore, it also means using the power of the government to prosecute people and potentially jail them for presenting a history that the state disagrees with.

Trudeau Does Not Support Freedom of Speech on Islam

Here is Justin Trudeau’s famous tweet on Islamophobia.

There is very little evidence that Muslim communities in the US or Canada suffer from a lack of safety. And what Trudeau calls Islamophobia is simply any critique of Islam. For example, no Muslim is allowed by their religion to condemn slavery because slavery is part of the Sunna, which Mohammed did in his life. This statement I just made cannot be contradicted; however, it is also Islamophobic.

Islamophobic speech is also selectively enforced. The most Islamophobic group in the world is the Jews. In Israel, the government has created an apartied system against the Palestinians, covered in the article Is Apartied Still Apartied If It’s Not Done by Whites?. So when Justin Trudeau speaks of Islamophobia, he is not speaking of Islamophobic statements by Jews. If Justin Trudeau were to call out an Islamophobic statement by a Jew in Canada, he knows he would immediately be called an antisemite. Therefore, Justin Trudeau is only speaking of Islamophobic statements by whites. All other groups are protected and can say what they like. As for Muslims, it is part of their teaching that all non-believers are to be hated and are lower than “dogs and pigs.” However, Justin Trudeau is not concerned with the writings and beliefs of Muslims that are codified in their documents and are impossible to deny.

The link included by Trudeau goes out the page at Canada.ca, from where I found the following quotation.

Today, the Honourable Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion, highlighted the federal government’s intention to appoint a special representative on combatting Islamophobia. This appointment will be part of a renewed Government of Canada Anti-Racism Strategy.

Confronting Islamophobia is an important part of this Strategy. It includes a whole-of-government approach to tackling systemic racism with dedicated knowledge and expertise through the Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat, as well as investments to empower communities to combat different forms of racism, including Islamophobia, and to advance digital and civic literacy initiatives that address online disinformation and hate speech. – Canadian Government

All of this means the freedom to critique Islam will be greatly curtailed in Canada in the future. Canada considers any information about Islam to be hate speech, regardless of how accurate.

What We Learned About The Actual Freedom of Speech of Canadians Protections from the Trucker Freedom Convoy

In the case of the Trucker Freedom Convoy, both the Prime Minister of Canada and a conspiring Canadian media made false claims around the supposed racist motivations of those in the convoy to distract from the stated objective of the convoy, which was to stop covid vaccine mandates. This seems to confuse several issues.

One is that even racists have the right to freedom of speech.
Second, that was not even the presentation of the Trucker Freedom Convoy except for a few flags (one being the Swastica and the other being a Confederate flag, — the second of which is used throughout the US South to the present day, without necessarily communication racist intent).
Third, this is Trudeau’s go-to strategy for dealing with those that disagree with him. I do not like Trudeau, I view him as a male underwear model who should be working as the matrie d’ at an upscale restaurant, and therefore I am about two steps away from being called a racist by Trudeau myself.

There was no legitimate reason to do this and was a smear campaign that most of the Canadian establishment media that I reviewed not only fell for but amplified. It would have taken minimal investigation to undermine the claims about the truckers made by the Prime Minister to conclude that they were false. Still, Canada’s establishment media decided not to do this.

This brings up a further question about the independence between the Canadian government and the establishment media in Canada.

Canadian Media Independence

Before writing this article, I knew nothing about the Canadian media’s independence from the Canadian government. However, upon reviewing the coverage by the establishment media, I decided to look into it. See the following quotation.

A September 2010 poll found that Canadians ranked cbc News farther to the left in bias than cnn, msnbc, bbc and many other news outlets. cbc is unique because it is funded by taxpayer dollars as a government corporation.

In fact, nearly every news organization in Canada is funded in some way by the Trudeau government. Independent media in Canada is almost extinct.

cbc-Radio Canada was created in 1936 through the Canadian Broadcasting Act. Modeled after the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc), it was created to ensure Canadian radio, and later television content, was not dominated by the United States. In the 1930s, there were few radio stations in Canada that had the bandwidth or popularity to compete with American-based stations. The cbc was created out of the fear that American culture would slowly consume Canadian culture unless action was taken.

Since that time, cbc has become a media conglomerate with a news service, streaming service, multiple radio channels and television stations. It receives over $1 billion per year of taxpayer funding, on top of the advertising revenue it generates, which has been in a free fall, with a 53 percent decline in 2019, and another 10 percent in 2021. In 2019, only 0.8 percent of Canadians tuned in to watch cbc News.

The cbc is the leading edge of the woke movement in Canada. “In a short period of time, the cbc went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press,” wrote Tara Henley, who recently quit working at cbc in protest. “It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda … that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the ‘woke’ worldview is near universal—even if it is far from popular with those you know and speak to and interview and read.”

Henley explained that cbc news editors are obsessed with race, micro-aggressions, pushing government policies, and not allowing any debate on important issues such as vaccine mandates, lockdowns and housing costs.

cbc has fully embraced the ultra-politically correct and woke policies of Trudeau and has used its powerful position to push that agenda, even if that means spreading misinformation.

Derek Fildebrant, publisher of the Western Standard, wrote in “How Trudeau Bought the Media”: “The overwhelming bulk of Canada’s media is bought, and paid for, by the federal government. … In its 2019 budget, the federal government rolled out nearly $600 million in subsidies for select media outlets that obtain the federal government’s approval.” This bailout came in the form of a wage subsidy.

Then there is the $50 million Local Journalism Initiative (lji), which allows news outlets to hire reporters on the government’s dime. Oftentimes these stories are run on multiple newspapers run by the same conglomerate. The initiative panel (created by the Trudeau government) decides who qualifies for these jobs, and the facts show they are left-leaning radicals, as Peter Mezies at C2C Journal explained:

Voices that the government wants amplified—the ones lji administrators refer to as “underserved”—will roll out across the country. Under the program, all stories produced by government-funded writers are amplified far beyond the often-modest reach of the original publication, for they receive distribution at government expense by the Canadian press. Any debate about whether the copy lives up to commonly accepted standards of journalism is moot, once a journalist has been preapproved by the lji judging panel.

According to the Western Standard and Canadaland, most all media in Canada is government-funded and government-supported. (For a full list of the organizations that accepted the government bailout, please visit the bottom of Canadaland’s page here.) The only independent news outlets remaining is the Western Standard, Blacklock’s Reporter, Canadaland, True North and Rebel News. – The Trumpet

Well, that answers the question regarding Canada’s media independence.

Opposing The Right to Assembly

The anti-freedom of speech sentiment illustrated by the Canadian government goes into anti-freedom of assembly. Freedom of assembly is included in the same paragraph as freedom of speech in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom. After the smear campaign against the convoy did not work, the Canadian police, at the direction of the Canadian government, then made false claims of violence to GoFundMe that froze the donations to the truckers. This happened again when the funders switched to the site GoSendFunds. This undermined the right to assembly, which is part of the 2nd protection provided by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom.

The Canadian government has repeatedly targeted online fundraising platforms in court actions to have the funds suspended and not distributed to truckers.

What is brought up in the video is that GoFundMe never suspended the funds for the BLM protests/riots, even though they led to over 2 billion dollars in property damage.

There was large-scale arson during the BLM protests, and 36 people were killed with countless assaults. There are not even reports of violent acts and no reports of arson. However, GoFundMe agreed with the BLM protests, so the violence and property damage did not matter to GoFundMe. However, Canada’s government just made up violent acts (which they did not specify), and GoFundMe agreed to freeze the donated funds because they did not agree with the protest. This is how restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly always work. The ones the powerful find useful are allowed, the ones the powerful do not are shut down based on the restrictions.

This is why there should be restrictions. First, restrictions have no basis in a free society. Second, the restrictions are always selectively enforced.

Since freezing funds at fundraising platforms the Canadian government has ratcheted up the punishment for those in the convory bringing into effect $100,000 fines, the loss of trucking licenses, criminal prosecution among a host of other items. This is explained in the following quotation.

After creating these punishments specifically targeted at protesters, Canada can no loner say that it supports the right of peaceful assembly.

Conclusion

Canada does not have freedom of speech like the US, and it seems like it is from Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom. However, in practice, Canada’s government does not provide the protections for speech as provided in the charter, and this is because Canada allows exceptions to freedom of speech.

Justin Trudeau, in particular, has a strong disdain for freedom of speech, and the longer he stays in office, the higher probability that Canada will pass more legislation that restricts freedom of speech. His administration has already eroded the legal freedom of speech in Canada. And as a natural behavioral pattern, Justin Trudeau undermines the freedom of speech of his opponents by repeatedly claiming those that disagree with him are racist.

During the Freedom Convoy, we also learned that the Canadian government will make false claims of violence and contact fundraising sites to have donations to those protesting frozen. This means that the Canadian government is also not very strong in supporting freedom of assembly.