Written by by Eric Gomez at americanthinker.com
Few would agree that the state of speech rights and civil liberties in Canada is in good shape.
On top of the ongoing over-prosecution of anti-lockdown protesters and the empowering of federal bureaucrats to regulate social media, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party gave away millions of taxpayer dollars to third-party ideologues to attack groups they don’t like, cordoning off huge sections of our debate space in the process.
The federally funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network (Canada’s version of the SPLC), for instance, initiated Trudeau’s smear campaign to label lockdown-skeptics as ‘white supremacists’ and bragged internally to their Heritage Department-funders that one of its top grant-funded achievements was doxxing a young man who threw pebbles at Trudeau during one of the latter’s many mixed post-COVID receptions.
Staggeringly, CAHN is now applying to obtain a giant $5 million (Canadian) grant to become an official internet watchdog, which, despite an Ontario court recently declaring them and their notorious board member Richard Warman to be ‘a part of’ and ‘provider of assistance to’ the ultra-violent Antifa movement, they will likely receive if the Liberals’ totalitarian trajectory is anything to go by.
Warman is almost a household name in Canada. On his weaponization of a since-repealed law allowing private citizens to sue individuals for allegedly uttering “contemptuous speech”, one outlet writes:
Section 13 was thrust into the public eye in 2002 with the arrival of Warman’s novel strategy to proactively use the legislation to shut down voices he disapproved of. While the law was intended for the protection of minority groups, Warman – a white male − was responsible for an impressive 16 complaints, the most of any individual.