Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content(pluralistic.net) |
Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content(pluralistic.net) |
Bill C-10 and C-36 are horrific China emulating policies, loose definition of "hate speech", bypassing courts in favour of human rights tribunals with 100% conviction rates and no requirement of evidence, preventative enforcement by police.
With C-36, even saying something truthful, if causes perceived harm is a punishable offence.
People with money and skills will continue to move south.
I'll probably play twister and hope the direction it lands is a good one.
North American trends have not been great lately in general.
Maybe I'll finally get that European passport I've been putting off.
I'm looking at Northern Europe (good privacy laws) or Singapore (the rules are draconian, but very clear).
Several factors may accompany this phenomenon: polarization; perceived failures in education¹; sometimes anti-centrism in the government; political (the purpose of the party) and societal (the affiliation of the citizen with peers) crisis of identity...
--
¹and Canada is the Country which promotes the relevant OECD studies
It is much cheaper now to move to another country and you can stay in frequent online contact with your kin. Back then, only serious oppression or poverty would force people to emigrate. If the problems were more tractable, people stayed and attempted to solve them in situ
Didn't the current premier's father do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's for... dubious reasons to say the least? He was also the man who paved the way to normalize relations with China and Cuba, two nations known for their respect of human rights.
> and the brain drain to accelerate.
On the hiring side I can tell it's happening.
Yes, it was called the October Crisis.[1]
I don't think we should be judging Justin Trudeau for his father's actions, but we should judge him because when he was asked to apologize (on behalf of the government) for the October Crisis, he refused.
I expect Canada to become a police state (its already on the way)
looking at the globe I don't really see a strong correlation between the success of technology, even directly in social media and freedom of expression.
Nowhere on the globe do 'digital sovereignty' style politics seem to benefit American companies. Just seems like an ideological take. I think it's pretty likely that a Canadian or European firewall would actually just promote Canadian or European operated business, because natives tend to have an edge when local values are baked into the system.
There is also enough ambiguity in the proposal to worry about the continuing availability of commercial unfiltered VPNs in Canada, at least in the longer term.
1. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/rights-group-denounces-lack-of-c...
This can't be understated. Who are these bills benefiting at the end of the day? Because the most marginalized people in my life — and those who are most often the targets of hate speech — are being pushed even further to the margins by legislation like this.
Everyone’s future overlords.
Politically active people who want to feel good about themselves?
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/strengthening-substack-jour...
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful...
Some of us are "on the run" in the hope for a better society like nomads looking for natural resources, while civilization was meant to be engineering a solution space in a collective plan, building, not staying someplace until it is spoilt.
It is a huge failure if the terms and conditions of the social contract have come to include «[practically] intractable problems».
For example, within the EU, there is free movement of people and workforce, which sucks out the best and the most talented people from the peripheries like Andalusia or Bulgaria and lands them in the very prosperous regions of the north-west where they can find good and well-paying jobs.
This is a major problem that cannot be solved by spending extra money on building infrastructure in the peripheries. Infrastructure is fine, but a new highway won't heal anyone's cancer. Lack of doctors and engineers cannot be easily countered with development projects that tend to be mired in corruption.
Not even immigration can help that, because highly qualified immigrants won't stay in the periphery, and unqualified immigrants cannot provide the necessary work.
In Canada, most people applaud more government overreach. Just like everyone was more than happy to snitch on their neighbours during the pandemic.
This is what set me off the most in the start. Canada has an history of encouraging snitching (software piracy, zoning requirements, work permits, social gatherings). Hoe they think this is good for social cohesion is beyond me. I've only seen it fuel hatred between neighbors.
While no PM is perfect, when the Premier of Quebec phones the PM, and says (paraphrasing here) that "the separatists are everywhere, I don't know who to trust in the police, my own staff, they're all around me", while little girls are being killed by bombs, diplomats are being kidnapped and slaughtered, maybe declaring martial law isn't a completely bad response.
And when you see this at the start of the article:
The Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, and the Mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, supported Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act
Well, come on....
I personally find the current laws being passed to be highly dangerous, and very disturbing, but trying to compare it acts taken against domestic terrorists, and lunatics, is a little wonky.
Canada is not a police heavy state. And you get a premier, and mayor, saying the police cannot be trusted.
You cannot deploy troops domestically for police action in Canada, without the war measures act.
What would you do?
I find it best to ask such a question. What would you do?
You weren't there. You aren't even fully aware of the complete history, nor what the RCMP domestic terrorism unit said to the PM.
what do you do?
Not that, you may say. Well, arm chair quarterbacking seems all too easy, to me, and is often wrong.
I'm not Canadian, so perhaps I shouldn't arm chair quarterback Canadian history, but you asked what I would do.
I'll respond to a similar scenario that hits a lot closer to home for me: would I have supported the detention of hundreds of Muslims after 9/11, without any evidence they'd committed a crime?
Absolutely not.
And on that basis I feel perfectly comfortable saying that the detention of 500 people in Quebec, without any evidence they'd committed a crime, was wrong.
---
Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so I'll respond briefly here to the posts below:
> so democratic that we have allowed votes on separation over the years
Canada hadn't allowed such votes before the October Crisis. The first referendum on Quebec sovereignty was in 1980.
Holding a referendum in 1970 would have been preferable to the violence and the suspension of civil liberties, but only the [mostly anglophone] government could have called such a vote, and it wasn't done. Not then, and up to that time, not ever.
So when you say that the Quebecois were trying to separate "by force, without vote", remember that such a vote was not an option available to them.
On the opposite side of the political isle, you could observe the same thing, with a bunch of republicans loudly proclaiming on the internet their "plans" to move to Canada whenever Obama implemented Obamacare or tried to raise taxes on anything. Given that Canada has socialized healthcare and higher taxes, they looked just as ridiculous as people in this thread "planning" a move to Singapore due to Canada pushing anti-privacy laws. That's the taste of self-hating north americans for you.
A good quote in relation to this comes to mind: "There is no geographical solution to personal problems." Note: it doesn't mean that moving to another country due to your current one becoming unlivable is bad idea. But it seems weird to want to leave your country due to poor internet laws for a country with even worse internet laws and privacy. Which is what you can see with those mentions of Singapore, they didn't quite think it through at all. That's the taste of a group of self-hating north americans for you.
It was a very, very tumultuous time. It was the civil war that almost was.
And with many civil wars, 99.99% of the population did not want violence, but would have been caught bleeding, dead on the street.
Was it right? I don't know. But I know enough to restate this ... how can I judge?
Were the muslims trying to break 1/5th of the landmass of the US, and 40% of the population, by for force, without vote?
Was there evidence those muslims were part of the group which caused 9/11? And that group held political prisoners, were blowing up random things, and threatening even more violence and death?
It is hard to find parallels here.
EDIT
Heh, I hit that filter just now...
Anyhow...
The votes for separation were not federal, but provincial. Quebec chose when to hold such votes, not Ottawa.
The premier at the time was french.
Also note that more than half our Prime Ministers have been french.
Without the FLQ, and moderate Quebeckers seeing lunatics and murderers, trying to usurpe democratic process, with extreme acts of violence, maybe things may have indeed been different.
But when moderates recall the acts of violent radicals, maybe they think "I'm not sure I want to vote for anything associated...", or "If they thought violence was OK then, what laws may they pass when in power?"
The stigma of the FLQ rubbed off on peaceful separatists for a long time...
Also in Canada there is a certain level of maturity and compassion that most other societies do not have. This is well illustrated by the COVID vaccination figures and the whole response to this crisis as well as the previous ones.
No country is perfect but one would need to search long and hard to beat Canada.
Economically though things were way better 20 years ago. We're losing ground on every single economic metric. Almost all of my family has already left for the US or back to Europe. All of my classmates I kind of kept up with have left the country. A bunch of the immigrants I used to know left.
If you have a good job and a house I'm sure things are fine. You can live a good life here if you do have a good income stream and already own a home. You can live well anywhere. I'm currently in the rocky mountains and it is nice.
But just looking at things critically (since my partner and I are looking to settle down and have kids, she has an EU country passport, I have a Canadian one, we both have family everywhere, she just bought an investment property in Europe), our taxes are too high for the services we receive, wages are too low for the cost of living, and things are objectively worse than they were before.
Eastern Europe though is just the meaner, cruder version of Western Europe with the xenophobia dialed up from 8 to 11.
However, I'm also not sure which other first world country has lower taxes, more "freedoms", higher salaries and cheap housing though.
Take a look at housing affordability indexes, Canada is behind the EU average and certainly behind the top EU destinations. Also behind Australia, the UK, the US. Toronto and Vancouver are literally 2 of the most unaffordable places on the planet.
Also the US, UK and half the EU have lower taxes. The only places with comparable taxes have better healthcare and cheaper or free education.
Honestly, go to the US, UK, Australia, nearly any EU country and you'll find housing prices more in line with local salaries, better infrastructure, better services, more bang for your tax dollar, etc...
In what country can you give away 40% of your paycheck making less than 6 figures to then pay for dental work, prescriptions and education out of pocket while needing to make 3x the average salary to afford an average house?
House are out hand tho, but this is more related to older generation greed than gouvernement..
Yeah, I dunno... Maybe there's a little bit of the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" effect going on here, but as an American, if I hadn't read the rest of your post, I would have sworn you were giving a brutally accurate description of the US in that last sentence.
And the house prices absolutely can be pinned on governments, we're one of the few countries globally that allows non residents to buy property.
In Canada, Toronto and Vancouver are the only real 'destinations' and they're SF and NYC expensive but with jobs that pay less than half...