The Conservatives have announced plans to introduce legislation that directly challenges the Liberal government’s online censorship bill, currently in its second reading.
Justin Trudeau pictured (left)
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner announced the plan on Thursday to media, along with a detailed account of their counter-legislation in her Substack that aims to protect Canadians online without infringing on civil liberties.
Garner criticized the Liberals’ Bill C-63, which seeks to expand the definition of hate speech and grant authorities more power to enforce it, including retroactive punishments and penalties for individuals who haven’t committed an offense but are deemed likely to do so.
The Liberals’ couched their bill as merely protecting children, despite the other far-reaching elements that have been called authoritarian and dystopian.
As per her blog, part of the legislation that would “Implement privacy-preserving and trustworthy age verification methods (for example, computer algorithms that ensure reliable age verification) to detect when a user is a minor and to restrict access to any content that is inappropriate for minors to such users while expressly prohibiting the use of a Digital ID for these purposes.” [Emphasis added].
Garner further said the Conservatives’ new legislation will focus on three areas: updating criminal harassment laws to address online contexts, implementing specific protections for minors online, and criminalizing the non-consensual distribution of AI-generated intimate images.
She called for the Liberals to abandon Bill C-63 in favor of this new approach or face an election on the issue.
Assuming the Liberals (and likely NDP) vote against their proposed legislation, the Conservatives will have grounds for accusing the NDP-Liberals of being anti-free speech and pro-digital ID.
